Martin Heidegger in Peru

Lima, Arequipa, Mollendo, Puno and Pomata, Trujillo (Huaca de la Luna, Chanchan) Huaca de la Cao Viejo), Chimbote (Caral and Cerro Sechin), Chiclayo (Chotuna, Tucume, and Huaca Rajada).

For a transcript, see
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784

For pictures, see greatmirror.com

Transcript

                               Martin Heidegger in Peru

The government of Peru stipulates that American tourists arrive with another six months on their passports.  Mine was short two, but I had a return ticket and would be home months before my passport expired.  Officials are reasonable, I told myself.

About a month before the trip, I decided they might not be, so I mailed my passport in and asked for a new one.  Silly boy.  When I realized that the little blue book would never arrive in time, I made a semi-desperate overnight trip to Atlanta.  There was no alternative.  Including airfare and hotel, I spent well over a thousand dollars.  

My fault, you say.  Fair enough, and I will say nothing bad about the overwhelmed state department employees on the phone and in person.  They were uniformly nice when I eventually got to talk to them.   I just curse the bigwigs who never worry about their own passports.  I’m not sure who they are, but they include red congressmen with tusks.

I learned that the Atlanta passport office is on Peachtree Avenue, a charming name as ridiculous as calling a Las Vegas hotel the Tropicana.   

Forget peaches.  Think infrastructure.  The Oxford English Dictionary traces that word back about 100 years to tunnels and culverts, but we like it so much that we apply it today to all the stuff that undergirds or supports something else: electrical grids and water mains, for example.  So, coming in from the airport, I got off the Atlanta subway.  That’s infrastructure, right?  I walked down a street for a few blocks.  More infrastructure.  I passed multi-story garages, which as vertical streets should qualify.  But what about office towers?  I don’t see why elevators aren’t infrastructure.  Ditto the steel frames of the buildings, or the plumbing, or the window glass.

I was left wondering what isn’t infrastructure.  What about the ropes that channelled me back and forth in zigzag lines through various rooms?  What about the ballistic-grade polycarbonate sheets protecting the clerks from potentially ballistic supplicants?  I imagine an actor, say Bill Murray, making a hell of a scene, but everyone (and there were hundreds of us) was well behaved, even the guards.  Yes, despite the polycarbonate sheets there were guards.  Which reminds me of a hotel clerk in Australia who once asked me, “What wrong with you guys?”  He meant Americans.  He was asking because the television had another of our mass shootings.  I told him deadpan that we were crazy.  No point sarcastically thanking him for his thoughts and prayers.

With my new passport, I walked back to the hotel to collect my stuff and get out of town. It occurred to me that the only things along the way that didn’t qualify as infrastructure, apart from people–mostly Black and often distressed–were the occasional pieces of so-called public art.  That stuff doesn’t exist to support or undergird some other activity.  

Well, maybe I was getting in definitional knots, and I don’t want to fight about it.  I got back home and soon flew to Lima via Dallas and Miami.  The flight out of Dallas was late.  Blame you-know-what.  Fortunately, the flight out of Miami was also late, so I made the connection and rolled into Lima about midnight. 

I had never been to Lima before, unless you count transiting at the airport, and I know about ten words of Spanish.  My ignorance is somewhere between pathetic and ludicrous, but the airport turned out to have well-organized prepaid taxis, and the roads into town were quiet.  

Midnight was definitely the time to arrive, because I was heading to a hotel close to the city’s historic center, where, I can tell you now, the streets are often jammed.  The jams are so bad that, as in some Chinese cities, traffic lights are mounted next to digital displays showing how many seconds you have to wait before the light changes.  I find this countdown strangely calming.  Others must too.  Otherwise, governments would skip the hardware and save the money.  Instead, motorists more or less sing along, like prisoners putting check marks on their cell walls.

Oddly, I enjoyed the ride to the hotel.  I say oddly because the view was mostly of two-story buildings of brick or raw concrete, along with cruelly spiked fencing. There were a few unhappy trees and there was lots of trash.  I’ve never seen a Russian labor camp, thank God, but I imagine them too as places where there is never enough water to wash off the dust.

Why, then, was I enjoying myself?  Maybe I had had the right idea when, somewhere between Dallas and Lima, I thought about turning around and going home.  After all, I like my house, and I had been unable to explain even to sympathetic listeners why I wanted to go to Peru.  

I wanted to go because I was a bit like a hyena circling a dying wildebeest, the wildebeest in my case being the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.  I was stuck on the idea, drawn strictly from secondary discussions of his work and that of his teacher Edmund Husserl, that places without people have no meaning because meaning is something people create.  As my favorite book reviewer for The New Yorker once wrote, “There is no meaning on Mars.  There would be no meaning on Earth, either, if there were no human beings on the planet.”  

Yes, it’s confusing, or at least for me it’s confusing because if you ask me “What’s the meaning of Dallas,” I’ll look at you as if you’re crazy.  Dallas doesn’t mean anything, I’ll say.  Neither does Paris, France, or your underpants.  Meaning implies intention, and inanimate objects don’t have them.  

But there is another meaning to the word meaning.  If I’m driving along a quiet road, and a family of giraffes drifts across my path, I’ll stop and ask something like “What’s this?  What does this mean?  What should we do”  The situation has a meaning all right, but I’m the one who decides what the meaning is.  The person next to me may have a different answer, and my own answer may change if every Tuesday I have to stop for the same giraffes.  The meaning of a place is, in this sense, whatever I think about a place. The meaning of those giraffes, by the way, is that life can be delightfully peaceful, and that’s true even if the giraffes have no idea what I’m talking about.

My wife doesn’t have a lot of tolerance for, oh, let’s give this a modest name and call it Philosophical Investigations, and maybe I was just getting tangled up in words again. Still, I was consciously happy driving along Lima’s beat-to-hell streets.  That’s because I had done very little traveling for several years, and now I was remembering how good it feels to see new places, whether or not guidebooks like them.  Liking new places just seems human to me, like grousing at traffic lights.  It takes a while to learn this.  I remember my father telling me perhaps seventy-five years ago that prisons are terrible.  I didn’t understand, and I decided that prisons must have scary sculptures on the walls, like Tragedy at the side of a proscenium arch. 

I surprised the airport taxi driver with the equivalent of a five dollar tip for a fifteen dollar ride.  He looked genuinely surprised and happy, and I don’t think he was faking it.  This of course made me happy.  It also says a lot about incomes in Peru, where school teachers earn about a thousand dollars a month.  

The hotel was as boring as the 1950s could make it, but its infrastructure was good enough for airline crews, and I slept for five or six hours, which I rarely manage to do.    

I woke up a few blocks from the city’s colonial core, a nearly chessboard-perfect grid measuring eight small, square blocks one way and eight small, square blocks the other.  The form goes back thousands of years, but in Lima’s case it’s a little unusual, because instead of putting the town’s major plaza at the center of the grid, the plaza is the second block in from the middle of the north edge.  That way, Pizarro in his palace could face both the plaza and the Rimac, the river bordering the city on the north.  Don’t hurry: the Rimac today is black as ink and as foul with sewage as the stream I once saw flowing from Jerusalem down to the Dead Sea. The Rimac burbled, but it prompted no Schubert song.

Believe it or not, Pizarro is still on site.  Pay a dollar or two and you can enter the city’s cathedral, which also fronts the plaza and is kitty-corner from what is now Peru’s presidential palace. Just to your right there’s a chapel with a glass case holding an approximately full set of human bones laid out the way a valet might lay out clothes on a bed.  Next to the skull, there’s an old metal box that held the great man’s head after it had been chopped off by his own men.   Karma, karma, karma.  

As for the rest of the cathedral, it’s a 19th century thing, replacing a cathedral destroyed in an earthquake.  Would I like it more if it was 500 years old?  Probably not.  Churches generally bring to my mind Ronald Reagan’s crack about seeing one redwood and seeing them all.  I hated him when he said it, and I can certainly hear experts calling me a fool, but, with a few exceptions, like the stave churches of Norway, the thing I like most in churches is the sight of people praying by themselves, by which I mean genuinely praying. I give them the benefit of the doubt and trust that they are seeking peace, not a nephew’s college admission. 

Next door to the cathedral and sharing the same view of the plaza, there’s the immense bulk of the archbishop’s palace.  It looks old but was built about 1930 to a design by Ricardo Malachowsky, a Polish-Peruvian architect who could sing in whatever key clients wanted.  In this case, they wanted something that would scare the hell out of people.  The result is a huge and profusely ornamented building, but the crowning touch is the two door knockers placed on the building’s heavy front doors and shaped like snarling dogs or, possibly, pumas.  How’s that for a loving God?  Come to think of it, for a long time the Spanish Inquisition had a branch in Lima. 

Those knockers lead me to the archbishop’s fine robes and then to a 10-year-old boy sitting on a nearby curb, playing a guitar, singing loudly,  and hoping for a few coins.  Or to a girl of the same age who, chaperoned by a woman, sang to a recorded accompaniment.  Or to the many living statues, adults dressed as soldiers, or as characters from science-fiction movies, or in one case as a female saint.  

I happened to be here on a weekend, which may explain the hundreds of people strolling the pedestrianized street that flanks the west side of the plaza and continues south.  This was the street where wealthy Limenos shopped in the 19th century.  Their descendants have moved south several miles, largely to the district called Miraflores.  Crime is said to have driven this migration, and though I saw nothing criminal I did pass the Gran Hotel Bolivar, which opened in 1924 as what we today would call Lima’s first 5-star hotel. One side of it had a lounge or restaurant overlooking the street.  Electrified wires kept guests safe from the rabble.   I’ve never seen that before.

The old buildings that once sold luxury goods now carried stuff like fabric remnants. Pedestrianizing the street, however, had been a good idea.  How could any sensible person not agree, even if pedestrianizing one street intensifies traffic on the next?  Pedestrianized or not, the streets of Lima’s historic center were lined by buildings in almost every European style. The most unusual were the old two-story houses whose upper floors had almost entirely enclosed balconies, a design going back to the idea–perhaps I should call it the universally acknowledged principle–that women are property.  One of these houses, the Casa de Aliaga, is reputedly still in the hands of the family to whom Pizarro gave the underlying land.  It’s next to the presidential palace and is in poor shape today, but a passerby can still imagine a woman sitting unseen in her lookout.  Damned generous of her husband, I say.  He didn’t have to let her see outside.  

Come Monday, I flew south 90 minutes to Arequipa.  Along the way, I learned where Lima had got its ten million people.  I’m half serious.  Millions of Peruvian villagers have in fact moved to Peru’s cities, but no large population has ever lived in this bit of Peru, so intricately eroded that everything slopes at 45 degrees.  There were occasional earth-colored villages, but no roads that I could see.  There must have been unpaved tracks or trails.  The landscape was so empty that if Pizarro had been seated next to me, he would have kept going to Chile.  We could make it a party and bring Heidegger along to ask what meaning there could be in this emptiness.

Well, Heidegger would sniff and say that understanding his philosophy requires a mastery of the German language.  I wouldn’t know, but I do know that we’re supposed to love the natural world.  All of it.  Deserts may look dead, but they are chock full of bugs and spiders and lizards and mice–lots of mice– along with prodigiously adapted plants.  It’s marvelous, we’re told, and I actually agree, so long as I’m physically comfortable.   

I also think, however, that Daniel Defoe led us seriously astray when he spun that tale about Robinson Crusoe.  I’m sorry.  Shipwrecked mariners find other people or they die.  As Barbra says, people need people. They actually don’t just need people.  They need the knowledge that people have accumulated by living in a place and–I’m anticipating–finding meaning in it.

Looking down from my seat in premium class–come on, you can’t expect me to fly economy–I recalled a book from the 1970s by John McPhee.  It’s the one built around several dialogues between David Brower of the Sierra Club and Floyd Dominy of the Bureau of Reclamation. 

Fifty years ago, I was with Brower all the way.  I remember once telling a senior Canadian politician to leave the Arctic’s oil in the ground.  He smiled and moved on.  Industry pawn, I thought, but looking down on this desert now, I found myself thinking that a modest dam and some canals and crops might not be a bad idea.  

You might conclude that with age I’ve grown tusks, but it’s not that simple.  I once boarded an empty PamAm 747 at Delhi.  I had spent the previous eight months sweating my guts out, and now I felt the cool air of the plane and saw at my seat a cellophane-wrapped croissant and a sealed cup of pasteurized orange juice.  Ugh, you think, and I would normally agree, but at that moment I thought I had died and gone to heaven.  We often hear the phrase “location, location, location.”  I think it’s time for “context, context, context.”

I try not to fill my head with information about the places I’m going to visit–I like to look around on my own–and I was surprised to learn that Arequipa has a million people.  That’s a rounding error for Lima but enough for hellish traffic on the narrow streets of an old colonial town.  I know whereof I speak, because I rented a car at the airport and had lots of fun getting to a hotel on the edge of the old center.

Once again, a colonial grid was marooned in a big city.  The point was personalized for me by a very useful book published in 1949 by an American architectural historian.  He was Harold Wethey of the University of Michigan, and in Colonial Architecture and Sculpture in Peru, Wethy mentions a church in the Arequipa suburb of Cayma.  

Suburb, ha!  I discovered–once again, the hard way–that Cayma has become Arequipa’s commercial center.  Meanwhile, UNESCO has designated colonial Arequipa as a world heritage site, which means of course that it’s brimming with visitors.  Arequipa isn’t overwhelmed, like Cusco, but tourism here is still big business, supporting lots of hotels and restaurants and craft vendors.  

Tours begin at the central plaza and its cathedral, again built not by the conquistadors but, like the cathedral in Lima, in the 19th century.  The facade is plastered with Corinthian columns and arches straight out of Piranesi, but it’s an untrained tourist who would say anything unkind.  Instead, after at least trying to appear interested in a guide’s lecture, the well-trained tourist enjoys a leisurely meal, followed by leisurely drinks someplace awash with–what do we call it? Oh, yes–ambience.  Ahmbiance.  And I mustn’t forget shopping.  An alpaca sweater, perhaps.  A few lucky visitors might even be engulfed in a love affair.  More power to them.  Sounds good to me.

At which point you’re going to say that nobody made me come to Peru. Don’t worry; it’s not the first time I’ve been called names, and I hadn’t come just so I could play the superior son of a bitch.  I came largely for a church on the other side of the plaza. Not for the inside of the church but for the facade, and specifically for the part of the facade over the main door, on top of which and rising almost to the roof there is a mass of decoration. While Arequipa’s cathedral, like Lima’s, goes about browbeating everybody with Europe’s cultural supremacy, the entrance to this, the Compania church, built in the 1600s by the Jesuits, is decorated in the so-called mestizo style.  You might say that with this style the Andean peoples struck back at the Spanish Empire.

Harold Wethey, the same who beguiled me into visiting once-upon-a-time suburban Cayma, writes of this church that, quote, “the native element is so strong that it all but submerges the European frame in a carpet of exotic mestizo ornamentation.”  He continues, quote, “fantasy is given free rein in a flat tapestry of stylized ornament: vines and bunches of grapes, pomegranates, ccantu flowers, heraldically disposed birds, a cherub whose body consists of swirling leaves, and long volutes.” 

Time marches on, and an even more exhaustive description appears in Gauvin Alexander Bailey’s 2010 brick of a book, The Andean Hybrid Baroque.  (That phrase–Andean Hybrid Baroque–is what Bailey calls the “mestizo style.”  Don’t ask why: life’s too short.)  Like Wethey, Bailey points out things that I failed to see for myself.  Things like, quote, “cactus flowers, pomegranates, tobacco-like leaves, cantuta scrolls, and mustachioed monster masks with vines emerging from their mouths.”  Bailey adds the easily overlooked point that one would like more than an inventory.  One would like to understand the choice of subjects and the rules, if any, governing their arrangement.  Alas, the answers to these questions are, as a professor I knew long ago liked to say, exiguous.  The sculptors were Andean, not Spanish, and they left no notes, letters, or memoirs.

Bailey speculates that the Jesuits who paid for this church may have been attempting to destroy indigenous Andean religion by forcing it into the service of Christianity.  He  also writes, however, that the craftsmen, quote, “celebrated a here and now, a world of bounty attainable by labor and through faith in very different gods and worldviews.”  Unquote.  Bailey means Andean gods and an Andean worldview, not those of the Jesuits. Bailey even wonders if the Jesuits figured out that they were inadvertently perpetuating heresy.

This is interesting stuff, but what neither Wethey nor Bailey talk about–and what architectural historians in general avoid talking about–is what I want to know most of all, which is what they think about or how they feel about the things they’re writing about.  They wouldn’t be caught dead doing this.  Maybe they can’t do it.  It’s like Mark Twain writing in Life on the Mississippi that once he had mastered the river as a riverboat pilot he no longer loved it.  Call it the curse of knowledge or the curse of the professional.  It’s a helluva of a tradeoff.

For me, the newcomer, the virgin, the amateur, the Compania church was like a legendarily over-the-top Roman banquet, minus the slaves and the vomitorium.  Here, not only in a desert but on the facade of a Jesuit church, for God’s sake, was the fecundity of life.   I overlooked the details precisely because I was preoccupied with this one idea, which I suppose is what the craftsmen hoped for.  There’s a wonderful B natural tucked into Chopin’s Barcarolle, but audiences really are better off ignoring it.  It’s just for the pianist.

The mestizo style may have emerged right here, in the Compania church.  The evidence is over a side entrance.  Executed about 1650, say 50 years earlier than the main entrance, this western doorway has bits of mestizo decoration but is dominated by a very literal depiction of a horseback Saint James slaying Moors, whose heads lie at his horse’s feet.  Santiago Matamoros.  Call it a reminder that today’s Muslim extremists have sanctified Christian predecessors.

Arequipa has a half-dozen buildings displaying the mestizo style, including the church in Cayma, that once-upon-a-time suburb, but the one I liked best after the Compania was the Tristan del Pozo house, a one-story courtyard house on a street lined with courtyard houses that usually present to the street a blank wall.  Not the Pozo House, whose main entrance is topped by an extraordinary half disc of mestizo elements.  Stupidly but honestly, I stood and stared. “Wow!”   

For the last 50 years or so the Pozo House has belonged to a bank.  Half the house actually is a bank, while the other half is a museum reviewing the house’s history from its commissioning about 1740.  After all, banks have the money to renovate old houses, and bank bosses know that wealthy customers often appreciate impeccable taste.  Arequipa has a grand theater, too, and a massive bank building, both from about 1930 and both with new mestizo facades.  Perhaps I should appreciate that the owners wanted to participate in a tradition, but the effect is imitative, like computer-generated Mozart.

One more thing about Arequipa.  The city’s climate has been celebrated for a long time, with sunshine year round at a cooling elevation of about 7,500 feet above sea level.  I still wonder why the city exists.  Yes, historians trace its origin to a stopping point on the 400-mile journey between the sea and the Inca capital at Cusco.  Who took the journey, you ask?  The answer is runners carrying fish for Inca aristocrats not content with freshwater fish from Lake Titicaca, which is about 100 miles east of Arequipa and 5,000 feet higher.  I’m not sure about the logistics of this journey, let alone the infrastructure, but it seems to me that runners carrying fresh fish uphill for hundreds of miles put the Pony Express to shame.

Pizarro’s men tacked a grid onto the Inca hamlet, whose curvilinear street plan survives in the San Lazaro neighborhood.  But why did they do this?  Yes, Arequipa sits in a bit of an oasis, with fields irrigated by the Rio Chili, but what was the economic logic of building a city so far from anything?  Arequipa may have been a way-station for pack trains of mules or llamas between the highlands to the east and the coast, but how much freight can there have been?  I suspect the colonial city was mostly an assertion of Spanish rule, maintained at considerable cost.  

I say considerable cost because I’m thinking of Clements Markham, an Englishman who in his early 20s found himself part of a group traveling from Cuzco to Lima.  Google Maps calls this is 700-mile drive, and, because there are lots of mountains, the trip takes about 24 hours.  That’s today, but Markham was here in 1853.  Instead of heading northwesterly, as drivers today would, Markham’s group went south from Cuzco to Arequipa and from there west to the Pacific, where they boarded a steamship heading north to Lima.  Getting to that steamer took a month to go 400 miles on muleback. 

On my second or third day in Arequipa I drove the last part of Markham’s journey, the 80 miles west to the ocean. Basically you’re descending two steps, the first dropping to 5,000 feet and the second dropping from 5,000 feet to sea level, but these are bumpy steps, with uphill sections as well as down.  The road is fine, especially on the intervening desert between the two steps, but on the steps it’s twisty and busy with mining trucks loaded with ore from the Cerro Verde copper mine on the step near Arequipa.  There is no green mountain at Cerro Verde, which ranks these days as the fourth most productive copper mine in the world, but there is one of the most spectacular tailing piles I’ve ever seen.  The second step has bragging rights, too, with persistent fog, like the coast of Northern California.  At first I didn’t understand the road signs reading No adelantar  but after seeing them emerge from the drifting mist as I approached tight curves, I figured it out.  

There are no towns between Arequipa and the coast, unless you count the businesses that have grown up midway, where the highway doubles up for a few miles with the Pan-American highway on its way south to Chile.  

I have an atlas from 1930 showing no such road.  By 1938, however, the Peruvian section of the Pan-American highway was said to be 20 percent complete, and by 1949 Peru was said to have 2,000 kilometers of paved roads.  The Pan-American highway itself stretches 3,000 kilometers in Peru, and of course there are other highways in the country, so paving the whole length must have taken a while longer.  Arguably, it’s still not finished, because in many towns the road is dead slow with congestion and traffic lights, frequently broken pavement, and demonic speed bumps. 

Also, the road to the coast passed several abortive communities once intended, I suspect, to support tiny, irrigated farms.  Talk about bleak: dozens of one-room concrete-block shacks were scattered over absolutely barren desert.  Land developers in the United States are gifted at naming streets and subdivisions, but they should take a seminar with the genius who here created the Gardens of Joy. Maybe it’s closer to Jewel Gardens. Either way, the nomenclature is inspired.

Finally I got to the coast at a town called Mollendo.  It’s about five miles south of the point where Markham boarded that steamer to Lima.  Some 10,000 people live in Mollendo, a quiet place and a great relief after the congestion of Arequipa.  Mollendo’s streets are gridded but lack the geometric perfection of Peru’s colonial towns.  There’s no central plaza, either, and though there’s been some new construction–a shiny Mitsubishi dealership, for example–there are streets close to the water where the buildings are wood, have peaked roofs and are painted colors like forest green.  I could show you pictures that you would plausibly guess were taken in New England.

Of course there’s an explanation, best approached with the contract signed in 1868 by the government of Peru and one Henry Meiggs, a fugitive Bostonian.  San Franciscans interested in their own city’s history may remember that Henry Meiggs came to California in the Gold Rush and built a long wharf into San Francisco Bay.  It was good, solid infrastructure, but Meiggs played games with money and had to leave in a hurry.  He never dared return to the United States.  Instead, he went to Chile and then settled for good in Peru, where he became Don Enrique Meiggs, the country’s eminent railway financier.  

Once again, he got in hot water.  He took the government of Peru with him, because it had issued bonds to pay for the railroads Meiggs built.  Eventually, the government defaulted on those bonds, and the railroads became the property of British bondholders.

By then, Meiggs was dead, but give him credit: he actually left Peru not just with debt but with railroads.  One of them was the Southern Peru Railroad, which replaced replace mules–and llamas–with a railroad from the coast through Arequipa to Puno, a town on the western shore of Lake Titicaca.  Rail cars rolled there onto a ship for the 150-mile lake crossing to Guaqui, in Bolivia, where they rolled onto another line for the short trip to La Paz.  

Twenty years had passed since Clements Markham’s journey by mule.  Now, in 1874, Markham was Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society. In that capacity he wrote that the Southern Peru Railroad was a  “stupendous undertaking.”  It was also prodigiously expensive with the government agreeing to pay the extraordinary sum of 29,500 pounds sterling for every mile of track east of Arequipa. 

The Chileans in 1913 spoiled the party by opening a line of their own from their port at Arica straight to La Paz.  It was half the length of the Peruvian line and had no lake crossing. Still, I saw several trains running on the old Peruvian line.  With one exception, they were carrying ores down to the coast.  The exception was a luxury passenger train carrying people, as my wife likes to say, with more money than brains.  That’s what I told a young Britisher–perhaps he was 20– sitting on the train’s observation platform at Puno.  He got my drift and said sheepishly that he guessed tickets were expensive.  Yeah, I said.  He added that his parents were paying.  Nothing too good for junior.  I should add that in 1908 an extension was opened north from the lake to Cuzco and, later still, to Machu Picchu.  That’s where he was headed, of course.  The Grand Tour, 2023 model.  

Of course Meiggs was a money guy who may not known the difference between a tie plate and a crossing frog, but while in Chile he had met John Larkin Thorndike, a young but experienced railway surveyor from upstate New York.  Meiggs hired him as chief engineer for the Southern Peru Railroad, and Thorndike moved to Arequipa. He determined the railroad’s precise route, including the choice of a coastal terminus at a spot about five miles south of where Markham had boarded the steamer to Lima.  From this new terminus, which became Mollendo, the track ran south along the coast for ten miles to a spot where the coastal-mountain step could most easily be climbed.  

There’s a photo of Mollendo in a book published in 1893 by Ernst Middendorf.   There’s no harbor.  Instead, a bit of the coast has been trimmed, creating a straight wall for a hundred yards or so.  Hugging the wall there’s a small rail yard, and a one-story warehouse.  It’s made of wood, just like the scattering of buildings on the bluff above.  Well, what do you expect?  Thorndike imported lumber the same way he imported rails and spikes and crossties.  He couldn’t feasibly import fresh water, so he imported 85 miles of iron pipe and built a pipeline.  

This all happened 150 years ago, more or less, but things haven’t changed much.  A fancy railway station was built, I’m guessing, about 1900.  It  had and has two stories, with an upper-floor balcony and fan-lighted windows.  I saw it painted in an adobe color, trimmed in green.  Perhaps it’s always been that way. I thought the station could easily pass for one in California.  The main waiting room was now filled with perhaps sixty or seventy new chairs accommodating an audience for local government meetings.  The walls were hung with portraits of notables, but the cleaner who let me in wasn’t happy, and I wasn’t comfortable poking around for too long.  

Outside, in the rail yard, there were two ranks of identical tank cars, each one labelled “peligro.”  This was a little odd, because I had seen and would soon see many more tanker trucks similarly labelled and carrying fuel to Arequipa and the highlands to its east.  The only rail cars I ever saw were gondolas, plus that luxury train.  Perhaps these tanker cars at Mollendo had been parked here for years.  It wouldn’t surprise me, because Mollendo is now the end of a spur, not the end of the mainline.

It had always been an inadequate port.  I recall the eminent scholar and statesman James Bryce, who in 1911 took a four-month break while serving as British ambassador to the United States.  He found himself at Mollendo, where he wrote, quote, “Unfortunately there is at Mollendo no harbour, only an open roadstead, where vessels lie rolling and pitching in the ocean swell, which is sometimes heavy enough to make landing in boats difficult or even dangerous.  A sort of breakwater has been made enclosing a tiny port, but even in its shelter, the sweep of the great billow round the rocky semicircle forces the disembarking passenger to jump hastily ashore and scurry up before the next billow overtakes him.”  Bryce got ashore and got to Arequipa.  Not bad for a guy in his seventies.

About 1940 a new port was developed about five miles north of Mollendo and adjoining the old port where Markham had boarded the steamer.  Fencing kept me from seeing the docks at this new port, which is called Matarani, but I did see a huge shed where, I suppose, trucks build stockpiles for eventual loading onto ships.  I was also able to see a fleet of tiny fishing boats.  Talk about a connection with the Andean past.  

It’s a jump from the Compania church, isn’t it?  I mean from a profoundly organic Andean style to, well, our world.  Nobody has described our world more acerbically than Henry Adams.  He had lived in London for seven years and in The Education of Henry Adams he writes that the English–he means of course the educated, cultured English–judged Americans to be, quote, “superficial, narrow, and ignorant.”  The English view was that the American mind–was, quote, “a mere cutting instrument, practical, economical, sharp, and direct.”  

Do you want to quibble?  So do I.  After all,  Pizarro wasn’t half bad as a cutting instrument, and the railroad technology that Meiggs and Thorndike brought to Peru had mostly been invented in Britain.  But let’s be real.  

The business of America is business, right?  And if Henry Meiggs were young today, he’d be jogging around Lima with the Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm.  He’d be wearing an expensive track suit.  Across his chest would be the words: “Mere Cutting Instrument.”    

He had lots of company.  You probably don’t remember the prolific Frank G. Carpenter, a peripatetic travel writer who visited Cerro de Pasco in 1914.  The mine, a hundred miles northeast of Lima and a chilly 15,000 feet above sea level, had long ago been abandoned.  Now it was back in production, thanks to millions of dollars invested with no guarantee of success by J. P. Morgan, George Hearst, Henry Clay Frick, and others.   Carpenter wrote that the smelter had, quote, “three mighty smokestacks, each so big around that you could run a Pullman car through it without touching the walls.” Here’s the best bit.  Carpenter writes:  I spent the better part of a day in the smelter, and it made me feel proud that I was an American born.” 

In 1938 FORTUNE magazine, at that time an important part of Henry Luce’s magazine empire, ran a long article on Peru.   The anonymous author disparaged Old Peru, with its, quote, “sterile aristocracy, satisfied to draw their incomes from distant haciendas, which they rarely visit.”  Then there was the New Peru, represented by Standard Oil, the Cerro De Pasco mine, and the W.R. Grace Company, which dominated Peru’s shipping and its new airline business.  These companies  amounted to, quote, “the second conquest of Peru.”  

I like old issues of Fortune, with their thick, soft paper, their sophisticated artwork, and their advertisements for the finer things in life: the Pierce-Arrow, Hennessy Cognac, Brooks Brothers.  There are lots of travel ads, too.  The French Line, Pan American.  Escape Winter’s Shadow in Florida.  India, Land of Fabled Luxury. Here, the magazine implied, was the justification, the payoff, the goodies made possible by generations of “cutting instruments,” known elsewhere of course as the running dogs of capitalism.

Clements Markham had seen it coming.  With the Southern Peru Railroad, he wrote in 1874, quote, “the face of the country will be entirely changed; the people, finding new wants, will become more civilized, and Puno, instead of a town with empty, silent streets and half-a-dozen reed balsas at its anchorage, will soon be a flourishing and busy port.” 

It’s easy to dismiss those words as promotional guff, but I drove the 200 miles east from Arequipa to Lake Titicaca.  It took me about five hours to get to the lake on a mostly fine road.  The biggest impediment was the convoys of tanker trucks ferrying fuel up the long and twisting climb.  “No Adelantar.”  Up top, road signs warned of vicuna crossings.  

Aside from a couple of truck stops, the plateau was empty until I crossed into the Titicaca watershed.  Welcome to the Altiplano, the intermontane basin partly flooded by the lake.  Here the road threaded a slow path through villages with narrow streets organized in the old Spanish grid. Old people sat around the village plazas.  

Where were the young people?  Try Lima, or Arequipa, or any other Peruvian city.  The sleepy villages on the road to Titicaca were sleepy because young Peruvians want to be part of the New Peru.    

I had expected Puno to be a sleepy place, maybe like Mollendo.  Nope.  150,000 people had spread out from the flat land at the lake shore and were now living in thousands of houses on the vertiginously steep surrounding hills. Think of Italian or Sicilian hill towns, with crazy flights of steps.  Minibuses ran up contoured streets on the hills, probably saving a lot of people from heart attacks.  

Puno wasn’t pretty: the buildings were mostly of brick carried on concrete frames.  Few owners bothered with plaster, so the buildings looked raw, incomplete, especially with rebar sticking up from the roof.  There weren’t many tourist attractions, either, unless you counted the plaza, with its cathedral, police station, and law courts.  The New Peru was here, too, with a coffee shop, a pizza restaurant, and of course a travel agency.  A wedding party emerged from the church, the couple enduring comical loads of confetti.  Husband and wife loosened up while dancing to live music on the cathedral plaza and then marching in a procession to a more festive square.  They seemed pretty happy, though a young man asked me how he could get to the United States, where he said he would do any kind of work.  

Puno’s pride and joys were the ultramodern stadium and the adjacent National University of the Altiplano. I happened by on a day when thousands of young people had just taken their entrance exams.  Pouring out into the street, they created a serious traffic jam and ignored drivers brought to a standstill.

I walked the few blocks from the plaza to the railroad station, built of heavy stone, one inscribed 1874.  The place was fenced and locked tight, but next door was Plaza Vea, a Peruvian Walmart.  I have no idea how the owners got such a prime location at the core of a very crowded city, but “cutting instruments” do remarkable things.  

I walked a few more blocks to the lake’s edge and found the old wharf where rail cars could be loaded onto a ship crossing to Bolivia.  It was all intact: the track, a ship, the hoist that could raise or lower the last bit of track so it matched the rails on board the ship.  The ship was the Manco Capac.  I couldn’t tell when it had last been used, but it looked seaworthy.  I took a few pictures before a guard spotted me and chased me away. He even dogged my steps until I was off the property.  Silly, really, because this dock falls not far short of a world heritage site, symbolic of the transformation wrought by those American “cutting instruments.”

There was one more thing I wanted to see.  Pomata is a small town about a two-hour drive south along the lakeshore.  Once again, here’s Harold Wethey.  I quoted him earlier praising Arequipa’s Compania church, but listen to him now.  Quote, “The masterpiece of the mestizo style in South America is the church of Santiago at Pomata, a small village on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca.  Built of rose-colored stone throughout, it is incomparable in its beauty of design and fine workmanship… The church at Pomata in its entirety is a complete and perfect jewel.”  

I walked inside and was captured within ten seconds. The capitals consisted of half a dozen horizontal slabs, each bigger than those below.  I can think of South Indian temples built that way, but for this part of the world it’s weird.  Weird isn’t always wonderful, but then I walked under the dome.

You can find pictures of the dome on the internet–including on my own website, greatmirror.com–but for my money the most striking thing about the church was the four spandrels or pendentives supporting the dome.  Nothing unusual about their shape: they were the standard triangular spherical segments.  Gauvin Alexander Bailey goes into inventory mode and writes, quote: “Some of the finest interior carving occurs on the four dome spandrels  Here, a fashionably dressed angel wearing a periwig supports a grandiose double-handled vase containing vines, cactus flowers, six-petal rosettes, and four large bunches of grapes that feed a quartet of thrushes.”

Once again, we’re missing the forest for the trees.  The decoration on these surfaces was as convoluted as fingerprints, but the curves weren’t languorous.  Forget Art Nouveau, think a sturdy Bach fugue.  That’s a rare combination, and it was displayed also on the splayed windows on either side of the altar.  The church walls were so thick that these windows were at the end of short tunnels, wider on the inside wall than on the outside, so profusely ornamented quadrilateral panels framed the windows.  I visited twice, once on a Sunday morning, and I thought that the mestizo energy twenty or thirty feet off the floor was far more alive than the interminable service below.  The priest was saving his breath, and his audience, except for a toddler, had learned patience.

Where was the energy of the mestizo style coming from?  In this matter, expert opinion is all over the map, with some authors dismissing the mestizo style as typically degenerate folk art, others tracing it to Italian roots, and still others all the way to India.   Bailey tells us to move on and not waste time on questions we can’t answer.

I guess I’m stubborn.  I was still bogged down with Heidegger and the meaning of places.   I’m still bogged down.  I get the meaning of those “cutting instruments.”  They’re the children of  Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon, and they’re telling us that the world is ours to command if only we can understand it.  There’s that wonderful thing, the mind, and then there’s the rest of creation, waiting to be manipulated.  I’m a little unclear how the brain can one moment be this miraculous thinking stuff–Descartes called it res cogitans–and, one bullet later, be as dumb as a bucket of sand, but it’s hard to argue with air conditioning and central heating and cars that whiz over tall mountains.  Descartes and Bacon would probably be appalled to see celebrity culture, professionally packaged and disseminated globally.  But that’s part of what they gave us, too.  What’s not to like?

I’m much, much less clear about the meaning of the Old Peru.  Lord knows, the conquistadors were as avaricious as anyone on Wall Street, but they also looked at the world, saw the passion of Christ, and believed that they either would or would be saved from damnation.  I don’t take that stuff seriously, but they apparently did.  When Pizarro was fatally stabbed in the neck–the indignity! in his Lima palace–he is said to have fallen on a cross and kissed it.  

But now we come back to the mestizo style, infinitely more remote from us than railroads or the idea of salvation.  I don’t think it matters whether the style can be traced to Italy or India.  I actually think it can be traced to both–and to any place on earth that’s not dominated by the Mosaic religions.  The default orientation of our species is not to see the world as a kitchen where we stride around in tall white hats.  And it’s not to see the world as the place where we prove ourselves worthy of heaven.  It’s a place where we’re stones in a mosaic.  OK: living stones in a mostly living mosaic.  That’s what I saw at the Compania church and the Pozo House and here at the Pomata church.  You can find it in a million places, including Peru’s deeper past,  Not the short-lived Inca Empire but the really old stuff, the stuff that my elementary-school teachers, who knew all about Pizarro and the Incas, probably never heard of.

Being retired, in case you don’t know, can be great. I was free to explore all places, all the way from Caral to Sipan.  That’s about 400 miles of the coast north of Lima.  This part of the world was new for me, and though I would be buried under the information that archaeologists habitually shovel, I thought I might learn something more about the meaning of Peru, more about what this place meant to people back when.  It might even be useful to me.  How great is that?  I just had to get back to Lima and decide on an itinerary.

***

I had had a bad experience with my rental car in Arequipa–a flat tire in a remote location and lugnuts so tight that the wrench in the tool kit was useless–so I didn’t want to rent a car in Lima, drive it 500 miles north, then run into more trouble.  So, instead of renting a car in Lima and heading north, I flew to Trujillo, which is on the coast about 200 miles north of Lima.  I rented a car there, and explored three important nearby sites. Then I returned to Lima, rented a car and visited two places between Lima and Trujillo. I returned to Lima once again and this time flew north to Chiclayo, about 100 miles north of Trujillo, where I rented yet another car to visit three nearby sites. 

You want specifics.  Fine, but if, as I was, you’re a newcomer, hold on.  Near Trujillo, I visited the huacas or, very roughly, the temples of the sun and the moon, plus the Huaca El Brujo, alias the Huaca Cao Viejo.  Then, driving north from Lima, I visited Caral and Sechín.  Finally, at Chiclayo I visited Chotuna, Sipan, and Túcume.   

The itinerary could have been simpler, but it worked out ideally, because I was introduced up front to what became the theme of the whole trip.  I mean that I looked out of my Trujillo hotel window, which was in a rich neighborhood two miles south of the old, gridded colonial town, and every house and every apartment building was protected by gates or electric fences or both. (Maybe I should change that word “rich” to “upscale.”  It’s so much nicer, I suppose because it’s used only by people selling or buying or at least admiring stuff.)

Fears about security were nothing new in Trujillo.  I walked into an old colonial house, now a museum, and found a receding line of courtyards, each one bordered by rooms but even the rooms in the deepest courtyard heavily barred.  I found the bedrooms particularly claustrophobic, despite the elegant furniture.

Walking around the hotel neighborhood, I kept hearing the clank of metal gates, sometimes swung manually, sometimes electric.  I thought at one point that I might even get in trouble because I passed one property with a twenty-foot-high wall.  I’m not exaggerating.  I knew from my hotel window that the wall surrounded several houses that would have been at home in Palm Springs.  I took a picture of the wall as I walked past the main gate, then noticed that a guard behind heavy glass was watching me.  

Who needs this much security?  I’m not singling out this one compound, or Trujillo, or Peru, or even South America.  I understand that the rich everywhere fear the poor almost as much as they despise them.  I have heard of people in the United States who would not think of buying a house that wasn’t in a gated community, and I know people who feel safe only when they have a gun.

But fear does go back a long way in Trujillo.  The old part of town, established by Pizarro and named for his hometown in Spain, is easily spotted on a map because it’s surrounded by a road tracing an oval less than a mile across on its greater axis.  It’s the Avenue Espana, and it follows the line of the town’s now-demolished adobe wall, built in the 1600s to protect against pirates.  Well, pirates are scary, and they did cruise these waters.  (By the way, the ocean is three miles from the old city, and the shore today is a line of boulders placed to protect the shoreline from erosion.  It’s not photogenic, and the only people I saw near the water were lovers hungry for privacy.

Trujillo has a million people, up ten times from 1960.  The city now sprawls from the colonial oval both southwesterly to the rock-lined coast and northeasterly about five miles to mountains.   It sprawls northwesterly, too, about five miles, though land developers in that direction are frustrated by the government’s fencing off the 14 square miles of mostly lumpy desert that are the archaeological site of Chan Chan.  The fences aren’t there to keep developers out; they’re there to keep treasure hunters out.  The local name is huaquero.

The Moche River borders the city on the south.  There’s a bit of irrigated land here, then we’re back to desert.  Two stepped pyramids rise just beyond the irrigated fringe. Their original names are unknown–as is the language of the people who built them–but today they’re called the Temples of the Sun and Moon.  (They’re actually not called temples but huacas, a Quechua word signifying a sacred object or place.  So we have in Spanish the Huaca del Sol and the Huaca de la Luna.  And yes, it’s from that word huaca that we get huaquero, which is more polite than treasure hunter.  More polite than grave robber, too.

Both of the huacas, or temples, or stepped pyramids are built of adobe blocks, and the larger one, that of the Sun, was built with about 130 million of them.  The smaller one contains only about 50 million, a number equally incomprehensible to me, except to prove that somebody spent an insane amount of time molding, carrying, and stacking.  I should probably add “calculating.”  

Whether I intend the word “insane” to be taken literally depends on your definition of sanity.  I don’t mean that the builders were raving lunatics, only that they followed orders without question, even if the people giving the orders didn’t know or had forgotten why they were giving them.  It’s like someone who makes a billion dollars and doesn’t know what to do next except make a second billion.  The funny thing in this case is that the two stepped pyramids are at the foot of a naturally pyramidal mountain, Cerro Blanco, which at a thousand feet dwarfs both of them.  

To get to the pyramids you cross the Moche River, then drive a mile or so on a dirt road that passes at the southern foot of the Huaca del Sol.  Perhaps half of the pyramid is gone, thanks to huaceros.  Most of them have been amateurs, but at least one group was apparently clever enough to get a mining lease to the site, then divert the Moche River to run against the side of the pyramid, gnaw at it, and spare the miners the trouble of digging.  All they had to do was screen the debris.

I have no idea what treasures still lie within the Huaca del Sol, and anyway the site is closed to the public.  The best we can do is drive by the southern wall and look up at blocks stacked 40 feet high.  Parts present a finished face.  Other parts are crumbling.  

I was impressed, but I was also impressed as a child by toothpick castles made from thousands of glued-together toothpicks.  Yes, I saw them in a museum in San Francisco, but I never asked myself what was going on in the mind of the gluer, who I assume was solitary and compulsive.  And are toothpick castles fundamentally different from these stacks of adobe blocks?  Well, sure, these pyramids are the work of thousands of people, but does that make them more admirable?  I suppose we like to be told that we work well in groups, but so do social insects.  What’s that?  You don’t like the comparison?  I don’t either, but, as my wife says, get over it.

The Huaca de la Luna, 500 meters to the east, has been looted too, but not so thoroughly, and it welcomes visitors.  I thought I’d be clever and arrive before the gate opened at nine o’clock.  

Dream on.  At 8:30 there were a dozen or more school buses in the parking lot and the gate already had a long line of 10-year-olds.  Come nine o’clock, the line began to advance sporadically, and after a few minutes I realized that visitors were admitted in groups of perhaps 20, always under the supervision of a guide.  There was no alternative, so I submitted.  It could have been a lot worse.  The kids were fun, and the guide, realizing that I couldn’t understand a word she said, ignored me as I dawdled and drifted.  I wasn’t rude about it.  At the end I told her “gracias,” and I meant it.

Here’s the thing.  I’ll bet that the guide didn’t ask the kids why the builders of this pyramid–they were the Moche, to give them their name, same as the river–why the Moche stacked up so many adobe blocks.  I’ll bet the kids didn’t ask, either.  They were just looking around, having fun, and possibly absorbing a few of the facts offered by the guide.  “The Moche,” I’m imagining the guide’s speech, “were here from the first through the eighth centuries.  They built these pyramids in stages, younger ones burying older ones.”

Why didn’t the kids or the guide ask why the Moche stacked so many blocks?  OK, maybe the topic did come up and I just missed it because I’m a linguistic idiot, but people generally don’t ask that question.   

This gets tricky.  I mean that since the 1940s we’ve talked, sometimes passionately, about human rights.  They are supposed to be universal.  There is even a United Nations declaration on the subject. Yet if I say that the Moche ceremonially paraded young men naked and roped together at the neck, tortured them, cut their throats, drank their blood, and then tossed their bodies into a pit to feed millions of flies, I’ll be scolded.  Don’t be judgmental.  That’s just what people did back then.

And the Moche did do exactly that.   The tour groups walk around the base of the pyramid and then into a courtyard big enough to hold 10,000 people who once watched something.  I’m not sure what that something was, but the high walls of the courtyard carry a frieze showing lines of captives led by men carrying heavy clubs.  The prisoners are leashed together by a long rope that runs from one neck to the next, and their humiliation is highlighted by their being shown naked, with their penises and scrotums prominently displayed. The frieze is called the Frieze of the Prisoners or, more chillingly, the Frieze of the Presentation.

The tour groups climb the pyramid.  Up here they can look south over the flat space that was once the Moche city.  Up here, also, there are more courtyards, but they are smaller and–as advertisers today would say–more exclusive.  Apparently only the elite got to watch what happened next, but we have a pretty good of what that was because in 1990 an archaeologist named Steve Bourget found about 100 skeletons near a natural outcrop at the top of the huaca.  Some have called it a natural altar.  

We read now that the builders of the Huaca de la Luna didn’t want to kill enemies on a battlefield.  They wanted to take them alive so they could kill them exquisitely.   Elizabeth Arkush, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, writes that, quote,  “The energy and focus lavished on the sacrifice of captives at the Huaca de la Luna are astonishing.”  Two other American anthropologists, John Verano and Sara Phillips, sound like the authors of a coroner’s report when they write, quote, “The location of the cut marks, limited in the majority of cases to the anterior surfaces of the vertebrae, indicates that the objective was to slit the throat….” unquote.  By the way, we know about the feasting flies because Bourget found, along with bones, ancient larval skins or puparia.  

Now 10-year-olds, if I remember rightly, are fascinated by torture.  They view it with the same, almost scientific detachment with which they might use a magnifying glass to roast bugs.  (I say “might,” but at ten or so I did just that, or at least tried to.)  Researchers today seem equally objective.  If in fact they’re appalled, they keep it to themselves.  This isn’t much help to visitors like me, who want to understand how people, or societies if you prefer, can get so royally fucked up.  

You can tell me that slashing throats is no worse than the young Julius Caesar crucifying some pirates who dared to kidnap him.  You might be right.  You can say that history is a pyramid of skulls so towering that talk of universal human rights is a sick joke, and you might be right again.  But even if you’re right, I’m still left asking why the Moche stacked gazillions of adobe blocks and ceremonially butchered young men.  

I’m also grateful that Trujillo has a McDonalds.  And, no, I’m not changing the subject.  The McDonalds makes me feel that the world today is better than the world in the past.  No, I didn’t go in, didn’t order anything.  It’s just that we don’t do ritual sacrifices any more.  Don’t crucify bad guys.  There really is such a thing as progress, in the moral as well as the technical sense.  

Go ahead, disagree. You might even persuade me that you’re right, but my question is still there.

A day later I drove about 30 miles north of Trujillo along a good section of the Pan-American Highway.  “Good” here means a four-lane divided highway where drivers only have to stop now and then to pay a toll.  I got stopped near one of the toll plazas by a policeman because I was driving without my headlights on.  He understood that I didn’t know the rules, but ignorance of the law, etc. etc.  He was very friendly, and seeing that I was alone, he told me, with the help of some translation software on his phone, that I should get a Peruvian girlfriend.  He shook my hand, told me I was a gentleman, gave me no citation, filled out no forms, but took about $50 of my money.  Reminds me of a day in Dar es Salaam, but never mind.

I left the highway at the head of the delta of the Chicama River.  Coastal Peru is amazing this way: time and again you’ll be driving through absolute desert, then bang, you’ll be in the valley or delta of one of the twenty or more short rivers flowing west from the Andes.  The desert is replaced by citrus groves, or by passionfruit vines, or by fields of blueberries or red peppers or the venerated staple, maize.  In the case of the Chicama delta, I drove a dozen miles through a sea of sugarcane, a crop that’s hard to like up close, even if you like sugar.  

And there, half a mile from another ocean, the Pacific, was El Brujo, “the Wizard,” or, as it’s become known recently, the Huaca Cao Viejo, the Temple of the Old Lady of Cao.  Cao is the nearest village, and the Old Lady is the mummy of a woman who died about 1,500 years ago.  Judging from her elaborate burial, she ruled this neighborhood, but being a queen didn’t save her from dying in her early 20s, we’re told perhaps in childbirth.  Her desiccated body is displayed in a fine museum at the foot of the huaca.  

Now the excavated parts of the Huaca de la Luna are covered with a clunky roof made of sheet metal supported by a forest of iron posts, but the eastern slope of El Brujo is covered by a white sail tightly stretched into a swooping parabolic curve.  Think of a Ford Model T next to a 1950s Jaguar.

It helps to be funded by a private foundation, but it’s also trust that archaeologists have worked at the Temple of the Moon for a long time, but nobody except huaqueros had ever dug at El Brujo until 1990, when a Peruvian archaeologist, Regulo Franco, came by.  He saw a landscape that, he said, “looked like the moon.”  He was talking about the holes left by huaqueros.  Still, he was encouraged by an outcropping frieze.  He went to work, and the mummified corpse of the Old Lady of Cao emerged 16 years later.  Work was still in progress when I came by. 

Apart from a guard, a work crew, and a ticket seller, I had the place to myself.  I walked up a gravel path straight to the white sail, which covered a courtyard with a wall portraying another line of naked and bound prisoners.  Yes, another Frieze of Presentation.  It’s terrible, but I’m reminded of Medinet Habu, west of Luxor, where a frieze shows baskets of penises dumped at the feet of Ramses III as proof of his army’s glorious victory.  As Russians say, things can always be worse.

The path continues to the top of the pyramid, where there’s a tremendous view of both the sugarcane ocean and the Pacific Ocean.  There are also several deep pits, with stairs descending into one of them.  The Lady of Cao was found up here, along with elegant clothing and jewelry now in the museum, but down these summit steps you can still see a long and colorful frieze.  It looks like a complex geometric pattern, but it’s called the Maritime Frieze because it portrays stylized images of sting rays and manta rays.  

There is also a repeated image of a god.   I had seen images of gods back at the Temple of the Moon, which has many nearly identical images of a face–just a face.  The eyes are wide-open, staring but lidless.  It’s amazing how the absence of eyelids creates the sense of a monster, but if that’s not enough, the skin is mostly bright red, the mouth has bared fangs, and locks of curly hair frame the head like black flames.  The figure is called Throatcutter or Decapitator.   Saint James, on horseback over the west entrance to the Compania church in Arequipa, is a gentleman in comparison.

El Brujo has a different god, or the same god in a different form.  Here he is full-length, still facing us.  He holds in one hand a staff with a condor’s head. In the other he holds a severed human head, which he grips by its long hair.  This god appears on pottery in several forms, including as a bird and a fish, but here at El Brujo, in addition to two arms and two legs he has a dozen unjointed legs.  He is a spider, the so-called Spider Decapitator.  It’s not as though birds and fish are models of empathy, but if you seek a metaphor for a creature without mercy, it’s hard to top spiders.    

I would like to believe that the Spider Decapitator was intended as entertainment, like some Marvel Comic figure, but I can’t square that with the probability that here, too, as at the Huaca de al Luna,  men were roped together, tortured, and slashed to death.  Which brings me back to my question.  What’s wrong with us, not just gun-crazy Americans but all of us?

My wife says that guys driving jacked-up trucks with oversized wheels are compensating.  She’s not joking, and there’s certainly something to the idea that guys want to be tough or at least appear tough.  The reason, as they will explain as though they’re talking to a child, is that the world is dangerous.  If you want to survive, you have to be tough, or at least look so tough that people leave you alone.  Failing that, men watch action movies that allow them to feel vicariously invincible.

It doesn’t take an Einstein to explain these stepped pyramids and these ritual sacrifices as a way of telling everybody, “Back off!  See how powerful we are.”  You could also argue that pyramids and sacrifices are a way for the rulers to convince themselves that they’re high and mighty.  Still, I should warn you that I’m heading in a different direction.  Meanwhile, I haven’t forgotten what set us off on this inspection tour.  Remember? I was looking for the roots of the mestizo style in the church at Pomata, on the shore of Lake Titicaca.  I’ll get back there.

I returned to Lima, rented a car at the airport, and headed north a bit over 100 miles to the Supe River.  Google calls it a bit over three hours, but she drives fast.  I did it in about four, which is fast for me, but I knew that once I got to the river I still had to continue upstream for another hour on a poor road and than on a worse onel.  It wasn’t until the next day that I appreciated the extreme contrast between the fantastically desolate, rugged mountains on both sides of the Supe Valley and the opulence of the valley floor.  I wound up staying at an old hacienda surrounded by groves of tangerines and avocados.  

Smallholders were juxtaposed in the valley with agribusiness operations that in peak periods bused in dozens of people to harvest and pack fruit for export.  Many of these workers came from Huacho, an hour away back on the Pan American highway.  

These people didn’t have to pick fruit, of course, but the most obvious alternative was moving to Lima.  I’ve walked through slums in Bombay and Buenos Aires and Lagos, but until I got to Lima I had never seen slums on mountainsides so steep that to make a flat floor you have to build up a wedge of rocks four feet high on the downhill side.  Stand back and look at the hills on the northern fringe of Lima’s suburbs, and you might think that the residents had learned their craft by working on a stepped pyramid, because the natural slope of the hill has been converted into half a dozen or more tiers, riser and step, riser and step.  Live here and you’re still a two-hour bus ride from a job in Lima.  I don’t suppose there’s a connection between life in these slums and the gates and locks I had seen in Trujillo or the spike-topped and electric fencing I had seen in Lima.  

I had came to the Supe Valley to see Caral.  Well, Caral actually is a tiny village that attracts nobody, but it’s also the shorthand name of a nearby archaeological site associated with Ruth Shady Solis, a Peruvian archaeologist who began working here in 1996. In 2004 she wrote that Caral was, quote, “bound to become one of the most important tourist centers in the continent.”  Twenty years later, more or less, that hasn’t happened.  Rough roads will do that.

The best-known fact about Caral is that it was built about 3,000 B.C., not only at least three thousand years older than the huacas at Trujillo but older than any other site in the Americas.  Caral is as old as Egypt’s Old Kingdom.  Unlike Egypt, Caral is also pristine, emerging without contact with any other civilization.

Caral has other striking characteristics.  On a site of about 160 acres, Caral has 32 public buildings, including half a dozen stepped pyramids, one of them about 100 high high.  Unlike the pyramids around Trujillo, these pyramids are made of stone, not adobe.  Three of them have a sunken circular plaza attached to one side of the pyramid, presumably as a gathering place or amphitheater.  

Solis stresses the fact that Caral apparently had no fortifications and no signs of violence.  The builders of Caral, in other words, formed and maintained their city through persuasion, not aggression.  Solis argues that the people of Caral had, quote, “a different world cosmo-vision,” unquote, than we do. 

No tough guys here, no Friezes of the Presentation, no images of Decapitator gods.  The most intriguing bit of Caral’s history for me is that in about 1000 B.C. the city was not merely abandoned but deliberately, methodically, carefully buried.  Solis has published photographs showing the pyramids as she had found them, when they looked like naturally rounded hills.  Where the residents had gone remains unknown.

Again, the only way in was with a group, but I was late in the day, and the guide had only me and a young couple with a boy perhaps three but amazingly tough.  He just kept walking, long after I thought he would have pleaded with his parents to carry him.  We walked from the parking lot and ticket office across the city to the edge of the terrace on which the city stood.  I should have made this clear earlier: I mean that the city stayed away from the precious valley floor and was built on a terrace about half a mile wide and standing perhaps seventy or eighty feet above the valley floor.  Solis points out that there were about 18 smaller settlements along a 20-mile section of the valley, and they all followed this sensible policy of not building on cropland.

Three comments.  It’s great that there’s no sign of armies and wars and humiliation and slaughter, but Caral is still, like all civilizations, an exercise in command and control.  You’re right, I’m not sure of the distinction between those two words.  Let me rephrase it: civilizations always have big people telling little people what to do–in this case, hauling rocks.

Second, the site miraculously contains bits of surviving cotton, which was a critical part of the local economy, critical because people depended for protein on anchovies from the ocean some fifteen miles downstream.  Yes, the fish were caught in cotton nets.  The surviving bits are not from fishnets but from netted bags to carry rocks.

Third, Caral is, as the archaeologists say, pre-ceramic, so there’s none of the painted pottery common in Peru’s later history.  There’s no artwork at all, with the exception of a petroglyph discovered in 2018.  It’s on the coast about 15 miles from Caral and near a village called Vichama. I haven’t been there, but photographs of the petroglyph show several human heads loosely framed by snakes.  A lower level shows another head under a protective frog with a human face.  I have no idea what the images represent, but they seem benign.

The petroglyph is commonly described as being in the Sechín style, which I find a puzzle.  The Secíin style takes its name from the Sechín River, about 130 miles north of Caral.  The river has given its name to the Cerro Sechín, a temple whose celebrated wall reminds me of Picasso’s Guernica.  All you’d have to do is separate the figures in that painting, multiply them, etch them one at a time into granite blocks, and then assemble the blocks to form the walls around a temple.  The wall a Cerro Sechin is full of pain, unlike the petroglyph near Caral.  That’s why I’m puzzled.

Hugh Thomson, a British travel writer with a lot of experience in Peru, writes of what he saw at the Cerro Sechin, quote, “Most of the bodies had been decapitated or mutilated in some way; there were intestines piling out of stomachs, blood pouring from cuts to the head in great viscous streams; neatly truncated and stripped human vertebrae; even a ‘skull rack’ stacked high with a neat pile of trophies.”  Cool, huh!  Thomson says a guide showed him a block with a warrior-priest who  had a long fingernail grown purposefully to gouge eyes.

Google calls it three hours from Caral to Cerro Sechin.  Parts of the road are a four-lane divided highway, and I think you could take pictures that make it look like a highway on the moon, provided the moon had rugged mountains and dunes bordering the Pacific Ocean.  

Cerro Sechin is also about 30 miles short of the town of Chimbote, which is where I was staying.  The town has about 400,000 people, way up from 50,000 in 1960.  You could call it a boom town, and the economy of ancient Caral may come to mind if I say that I walked out onto one of Chimbote’s many piers and saw hundreds if not thousands of pelicans and I’d guess hundreds of fishing boats.  Forget albacore and swordfish and dolphins: think anchovies.  The ones I saw were less than four inches long and were destined to become fishmeal for pets and fish farms.  How’s that for putting the philosophy of Francis Bacon to work?  Study nature to become her master.

But come back to Cerro Sechin.  It’s just a minute off the Pan-American Highway, which is here bogged down as it finds a path through the town of Casma.  I found a large parking lot at the site, but no cars.  There was a newly remodeled museum, but no visitors.  And there was a hill about 300 meters square and about 50 meters high.  It’s called Sechin Alto, and I swear I never realized it was an ancient pyramid.  My excuse is that it was entirely off limits, but that’s not a very good excuse, because I saw bits that did look artificial.  I just figured it was archaeologists doing their thing.  The truth is that I’m not very observant.

I did see what I had come to see, however, that temple wall composed of granite blocks inscribed with body parts.  The wall encloses a three-tiered temple at the foot of the mound that I thought was a hill.  The temple, too, was completely off limits, so all I could do was walk around its base, where a rope kept me at a respectful distance.

Serro Sechin was excavated in 1937 by Julio Tello, the first native Andean archaeologist.  Tello discovered the site only because one stone had been carted off and was now part of the decor of a nearby hacienda.  It turned out that the entire temple, built about 2,000 B.C., had been buried by a flood in about 1300 B.C.  

I was disappointed in the Cerro Sechin.  Perhaps I’m the only person in the world who is drawn to look at pictures of atrocities, but if I wanted gore I should have stuck to Tarantino or Scorsese.  If I hadn’t been told what I was looking at, I don’t think I would have understood what I was seeing here at Cerro Sechin.  Take the outline of a severed head, place it face up, and let several curved lines flow from the skull.  I think I’d interpret those lines as  hair, not gushing blood.  Many eyes are shown as lines, which I’d see as eyes closed, not eyes removed.  One stone shows two hands severed above the wrist, but they’re arranged gracefully.  Bummer.  I’m unsure if I should conclude that the artists here were very unimaginative or that my own culture is supremely perverse.

I had been in Peru now for about two weeks but had yet to see a beach.  I thought that while I was in Chimbote I should find one. 

I was staying at the southern edge of town, just a few blocks from a Plaza Vea hypermart and the Technological University of Peru.  If I drove south three or four miles along the Pan-American Highway, which here was dead straight, I’d get to a turnoff that in two miles reached the Playa Atahualpa, named for the Inca ruler garotted by Pizarro.  It didn’t seem a promising name for fun at the beach, but whatever.

I don’t know if there’s a sanitary landfill in Chimbote, but I do know that informal garbage dumps line up along this stretch of the  Pan-American highway.  People stop their car and toss bags of trash onto what is already a thousand feet of garbage.  What’s another carload?  The branch road to the beach was rimmed by another impromptu dump.  Well, I’m sorry, but you know that I have to warn you now: don’t be judgmental.  Good luck with that.  The only thing that limited the dump was that the road was fringed by a reedy marsh.  Somebody was harvesting reeds, too, though they weren’t around at the moment.  In fact nobody was around anywhere, including at the beach.  

It was a little spooky.  There was a sandy parking lot, where I was careful not to get stuck.  There was a sandy football field and a wall that once perhaps had been part of a hotel or restaurant. And there was about a mile of clean sand.  Twenty cormorants were standing on the beach and waiting for me to bother them.  Well, call me a scientist.  I wanted to know how close I could get.  One after another, the birds packed up and left.

Now I was really alone.  Maybe it was the rough surf. Maybe it was the cool though not cold breeze.  The place just felt lonely, and I remembered a day when I was walking along a deserted beach on the southwest coast of Sri Lanka and thinking how far it was to Africa and how dependent I was on the keys in my pocket.  And then I remembered that old Ingmar Bergman movie, The Seventh Seal, which I hadn’t seen since high school.  Perhaps you recall the scene where a young woman is being burned as a witch.  She’s tied to a ladder and is terrified.  She’s observed by a knight and his squire, who have just returned home from the Crusades.  The squire asks the knight what the girl sees but answers his own question by saying she now understands that there is neither a god nor a devil, just emptiness.  The knight replies in pain that it can’t be so, and the squire says that our fears and the girl’s are the same.  

Now I grew up in San Francisco and spent a lot of time on the beach there and on other beaches, some on rivers, others on lakes.  I’m reasonably sure that in a different context–there’s that word again–we could have a great time on the Playa Atahualpa.  But whether we bllame the roads lined with garbage or the dismembered bodies at the Cerro Sechin, but it seemed to me on the beach that day that, faced with an empty world without meaning, people will impose meaning, will force it onto what otherwise is a void. 

And now you’re asking for your money back.  You think that all I’m doing is rehashing Karl.   He said that religion was the opiate of the masses, and I’m saying that the masses in prehistoric Peru were oppressed not by millowners but by existential dread.  How original is that?  And to make matters worse: I’m not explaining why the meaning created to give Peruvians an answer involved the absurdity of building mountains and the violence of ceremonial human sacrifices.  

Fair enough, but I’m not asking for a Nobel Prize, I’m just telling you what I saw and what I was thinking about.  And, yes, I know, I still haven’t gotten to the energy of the mestizo style.  Well, you know how it is with old prospectors.  They just keep looking.

The day after my inspection of Chimbote’s dumps, I drove back to Lima.  It’s a 250-mile drive, and Google calculates it at six and a half hours.  I took longer because Google warned me of a traffic jam on Lima’s northern fringe and sent me on a splendid tour of the slums of greater Callao.  I got lost at several points but did get to admire the do-it-yourself terracing for homesites on black-diamond slopes. I think now of the terrific contrast of those crowded hillsides and coastal Peru’s default landscape, which is lunar desolation.

The next morning I flew to Chiclayo, population half a million.  I wasn’t sure I’d be able to rent a car, but I got one and got to enjoy the worst traffic I would see on this trip.  My hotel was downtown, and every time I arrived I had to drive up onto a sidewalk, disrupt the pedestrian flow, and honk while hoping somebody from the hotel would hear me and come out to open the padlocked gate. 

Chiclayo has two excellent museums.  The first is the flashy and very popular Royal Tombs of Sipan Museum, opened in 2002 to house some of what the Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva found when, in 1987, he excavated a tomb at the Huaca Rajada, about 20 miles east of Chiclayo.  The National Geographic Society, which has been interested in Peru at least since it reported Hiram Bingham’s discovery of Macchu Pichu in 1911, ran an article in October, 1988, called simply “Discovering the New World’s richest unlooted tomb.”

Among my shortcomings is a general lack of interest in pottery, but these museums got me to reconsider.  They actually made me an enthusiast.  I say “these museums,” plural, because the second museum is the comparatively neglected Bruning museum, named for Hans Heinrich Bruning, a private collector who died in 1928.  It’s laid out conventionally, unlike the Royal Tombs Museum where visitors enter on the top floor and work their way down just as the archaeologists did to find the tomb of the Lord of Sipan.

Both museums have spectacular pottery collections, where vessels are ornamented with reproductions of all the living things surrounding the people who made them.  I’m not waxing about production methods, of which I know nothing, but rather about the sensitivity of the potters to the things alive around them.  These were people who could hearan entire scale between C and C sharp. They were acutely aware of their environment, and I say that as someone who is often ridiculously unaware.  I should add that being unaware is a learned skill.  

Alas, there isn’t much left at the Huaca Rajada except a pyramid you can’t approach and a mound which you can climb to inspect the deep holes dug to reach the body of the Lord of Sipan, plus the bodies of the eight other people buried with him in about A.D. 350.  One other detail: Walter Alva and his crew needed police protection when they began digging.  Nearby villagers were angry not because they wanted the site kept intact but because they wanted to loot it themselves.  One group had already begun, and Alva arrived with his security detail only after the police alerted him to a spectacular mask about to be sold.

It’s a different story at Chituna and Tucume.  Both are from about the year 1200.  Both have pyramids.  More importantly, for me, both had friezes on walls.  The first time I saw one at Chituna, I very nearly said “yes” out loud to myself.  Maybe I did say it.  

I had followed Google’s directions and was convinced that she was crazy because I was on a one-lane dirt embankment that hugged a deep, unlined canal.  This cannot be the way to a major site, I said to myself.  But it was, or at least it was one of two ways, and the next day I had the same “you’ve got to be kidding” reaction to the road leading to Tucume.  Sure enough, I met an oncoming car.  There was no way to get by; somebody had to back up.  I was exceedingly reluctant to try, even though I had a much smaller vehicle.  The other driver saw my consternation and backed up several hundred yards without sliding into the water.  When he finally found a pullout, I got out of my car, shook his hand, and thanked him.

There were no other visitors at Chituna, which is about eight miles west of Chiclayo. I walked over to the pyramid and then up the ancient and grand earth ramp to the top.  I wasn’t able to make any sense of what I saw up there, where archaeologists say there are entrances to chambers within the pyramid, but I did see, down near the foot of the pyramid, a metal roof protecting what turned out to be a courtyard fronting the nearby and small Huaca Gloria.  It was the only time on this trip that I disregarded a fence, but I really wanted to approach one of the courtyard walls deeply incised with images.  There was a diving seabird about to attack a fish.  Others images seemed to me to be purely geometric fantasies.

The UCLA archaeologist who directed the excavation here, has written that what I saw as fantasy is actually a corruption of an arched, two-headed serpent.  Christopher Donnan writes that there is a very clear image of this creature at a site in Trujillo called Dragón.  He speculates that pictures of this serpent may have been painted on fabric and carried north to Chituna, where the craftsmen copied an image that they did not understand.  Hence, he writes, the image at Chituna is “amorphous” and “garbled.”  Those are his words.  

He may of course be right, but I’m thinking of popular singers who are asked to sing the “Star Spangled Banner” and who start out straight but depart from the written score.  It’s not ignorance; it’s artistic license.  You may like the result or not, but the artists are exercising their freedom.  That’s what I think is happening at Chituna, and although the lines are mostly straight, not curved like those of the mestizo style, the fundamental celebration is the same.  “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate,” as computer punch cards used to say. 

Ditto Tucume, which is about 20 miles north of Chiclayo.  It’s a big site, with dozens of pyramids, but by accident I looked most closely at one called the Huaca Las Balsas, excavated in 1992 by Alfredo Narvaez Vargas.  Again there’s a large metal roof now protecting the remains of a building, of which only the lower walls remain, but some of those walls are covered with images, here including balsas, or rafts.  Nothing amorphous and garbled here: there’s a raft with a sail; two sailors stand on the raft and hold two divers who are scouring the seafloor to find spiny oysters, used here as a decorative element for jewelry and clothing.  

Did I make these details out for myself?  No, I read about them on a sign.  Did the people who made these walls think it was important to understand the components of the image?  That’s like asking if Michelangelo wanted viewers of his David to realize that David’s hands are slightly oversized.  I don’t think he did; I think he  just wanted viewers to sense strength.  Similarly, here at Tucume I think the artists wanted me to understand that the world is alive or, if you’re going to get picky, is brimming with life.  That’s the Compania church all over again, and the church at Pomata.  We could run around the planet and see this from Bushmen cave paintings to the ballsticks used by Indians on the American Great Plains.  I remember being told that those pieces of wood are not beautiful.  Instead, I was told, they have a spirit.  I’m still processing that.  I guess I’m still skeptical.

On my fourth and final Saturday in Peru, I went down to the main plaza in Chiclayo. There were beggars on the surrounding streets, some singing to a recorded accompaniment, others selling penny candies.  I didn’t see any interesting building, but I couldn’t sit down either.  There was no special activity, no focus of attention, but the benches were all occupied, and so were the fairly uncomfortable rims of concrete planters.  I’m looking now at a dictionary discussion of the word “community,” and I find there the words: sharing, fellowship, shared nature, kinship, and obligingness.  

The next day I returned to Lima and this time stayed at Miraflores, the place modestly famous as the rich part of Lima.  OK: let’s replace “rich” once again with upscale.  I’m prepping for my real-estate broker’s license.  Anyway, I came in at night but a few minutes later went for a walk.   Miraflores felt strange because it felt normal.  The streets were wide.  The pavement was unbroken.  There were no speed bumps.  Traffic flowed normally, and nobody was honking.  Perhaps they didn’t have to, because the streets were wide enough that cars weren’t forced to pass within six inches of each other.  I didn’t see litter scattered or piled up.  There were lots of trees and lots of small parks.  

The next morning I realized that I was less than a mile from the ocean but couldn’t see it even from the coffee shop on the 13th floor of my hotel.  I thought I was in Sao Paulo.  I found some single-family residences, and although they were in good shape they also had electric fencing or at least tall iron fences with wicked spikes.  At eight o’clock on a weekday morning the streets were crowded, and people did honk more than they do where I live in Oklahoma.  

Still, there are degrees.  There was so little trash on the streets that street sweepers spent their time picking up leaves. I walked into a supermarket, part of a chain that would be high-end in Houston or Seattle, and I thought of the Russian women I had once read about who in Soviet times would enter an American supermarket for the first time and start screaming.   The main difference between this supermarket and a Whole Foods was that here people talked more and smiled more.  It’s weird, because Americans spend so much money on their teeth but don’t smile much, except for cameras.  This sociability shouldn’t have surprised me after the plaza in Chiclayo, but it did.

A day later I was gazing down at subdivision after subdivision in the suburbs around Miami and Dallas.  I could isolate single homes and could imagine happy families and unhappy families or, to use a more statistically precise word, households.  From 10,000 feet or more, what I really thought of, once again, was social insects.  Yes, that’s an affront to the mythology of the home of the brave and the land of the free, but be real.  From ten thousand feet, we’re grist for the data mill.  Not this person playing tennis or that person opening a mailbox, but the hive, working to stabilize prices, maximize employment, and keep inflation moderate.  No wonder we don’t smile much.