1. The Hostile Environment

To understand the attraction of a place where Nature is so nig gardly, one must have seen this part of South America, so distant and so little known. It is a region that the traveler hesitates to traverse, but where he discovers such marvelous horizons that he :)I: [In the present translation, the chapter which appeared first in the original French edition has been placed in the Appendix, under the title "The Historical Sources."-EDITOR.] 2 A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru cannot tear himself without regret from their contemplation and remains haunted by the memory of them long after he has left them behind. Briefly, Peru is made up of three strips of land running from north to south and separated from one another by the two parallel chains of the Andes. They are known as the littoral (costa), which skirts the Pacific Ocean; the plateau (sierra), between the two Cordilleras; and the virgin forest (montana), which stretches over present-day Brazil. Accordingly, the traveler making his way from the Pacific toward the Atlantic. must cross the two Andean chains, the passes ofwhich are rarely less than 13,000 feet above sea level and whose highest peaks rise to almost 23,000 feet. He will journey, in consequence, through all degrees of altitude and meet with an astonishing variation in landscape, climate, flora, and fauna. On the other hand, if he were to set out from what is now Colombia and proceed southward down the length of the inter Andean plateau, he could continue for months to enjoy the same temperature, contemplate the same scenery, and eat the same food.

Thus, in the first case, the predominant impression would be one of diversity; in the second, of monotony.2 Let us examine each one of these three zones. The Peruvian coast is entirely without rain. The cold ocean current from the polar regions of the Pacific, known as the Hum boldt Current, flows along the shore from south to north. It makes the sea colder than the land and removes the humidity from the ocean breezes, allowing the aqueous vapors to condense into fog.s On the other hand, the winds that come from the east, freighted with moisture, dissolve into rain in· the region of the Amazon and strike against the Cordilleras, where they lose their humidity under the influence of the glacial temperature and thus give rise to those immense rivers that return to the Atlantic across Brazil. It is only at certain times, and hardly even then, that the Peruvian hillsides adjacent to the sea are bathed in a dew that makes some growth of vegetation possible; but this comes to an end very quickly, the plants die, and the sun effaces the last vestiges of that ephemeral springtime from the arid soil. Farther north, on the contrary, the Humboldt Current veers westward toward the Galapagos Islands, The Hostile Environment 3 the sea becomes warmer than the land, rain falls on the coast, and a lush tropical vegetation springs up in the maritime provinces of the present Republic of Ecuador. Thus, the lengthy seaboard of Peru offers centers of habitation only along the watercourses that descend from the Cordillera. The littoral consists of a series of fertile transverse valleys, separated at their beginning by the spurs and foothills of the Andes and then by deserts that are sometimes more than sixty-two miles long. That is why, in our day, no rail road like the one in Chile has yet been built down the length of Peru. At some points, however, as at Trujillo (Chimu), there are several valleys adjacent to one another, thus offering greater possi bilities for human habitation. In spite of the latitude, the climate is temperate because of the southwest winds that constantly cool the air.

The Incas conquered the seaboar9 only after they had estab lished themselves in the interior. Their empire came into being on the inter-Andean plateau, at an altitude of from 5,000 to 13,000 feet. It did not blossom in the gentle warmth of the tropics, as Spencer has mistakenly supposed, but in the icy blasts that blow down from the Cordilleras. At first sight, this plateau appears like a corridor laid out be tween the two ramparts of the Andes, but it is a corridor through which passage is not always practicable, for it is cut across by the ramifications that, at wide intervals, join the two mountain chains. These "knots," to use the local expression, appear on the map like the rungs of a gigantic ladder of which the two Cordilleras form the sides, and they divide Peru into clearly distinct geo logical basins. 4 The rivers themselves, none of which is navigable, have very precipitous banks and constitute further barriers be tween the habitable regions. They do not flow to the coast, but toward the north or the east in the direction of the forests, thus isolating the interior completely. Only one, the Santa, traverses the western Cordillera, while six of the principal rivers cut through the eastern range. Contrary to what we might think, the Peruvian plateau faces the Atlantic.

The forests of the eastern slope of the Andes form the third zone, and on the east of the Inca empire they constituted a barrier as 4 A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru impassable as the deserts and the snow-capped peaks, as mysterious as the ocean. Their great luxuriance and alluvial soil extend to distances that the Indians of the plateau in earlier days could per haps not even imagine. The Spaniards, though they shrank from nothing, could not make their way through these dense South American "rain forests" for a long time. Gonzalo Pizarro, who, in search of cinnamon, was the first to venture into these inhospitable areas, wandered around for two and a half years and lost more than half his men; and when at last he returned to the plateau, he was so changed that people did not recognize him at all.5 To be sure, there is no fixed line of demarcation between the zones: the sierra begins at the place where the rain falls, and the montafia where the forest grows. For all practical purposes, the transition from the coast to the sierra can be noted by the dif ference in the roofs of the houses: they are flat in the first region, and sloping in the second. 6 As can be seen, the characteristic feature of all this part of South America is what may be called its cellular structure (cloison nement). The habitable regions are far apart and often separated by obstacles difficult to surmount. Conditions such as these are prejudicial to the establishment of a unified state and favorable to the growth of regionalism and social conservatism. One can well imagine how centers of civilization may have sprung up in the different basins, how migrations from one to another may have occurred, or how influences may have made their way through the notches in the mountains; but it is hard to understand how an em pire could have been built up under such unlikely circumstances.

Let us pause now on the plateau that was the center of that empire. Depending on the altitude, we shall find valleys with a temperate climate (bolsones) cabeceras} quebradas), and broad expanses of cold (the puna). Above a height of 15,000 feet the barren puna brava climbs to the eternal snows. Beyond the limits of the fertile valleys that are scattered here and there, the plateau presents the most striking spectacle of deso lation imaginable. An ocean of stunted grass stretches north and The Hostile Environment 5 south into infinity, cut by courses of solidified lava and strewn with stones spewed out by the volcanoes. To east and west, the two ranges of the Cordilleras reach out to touch the horizon with their ramparts of rock and snow. There is nothing here that can give life to these solitudes: no man; no tree, except for a few scant resinous shrubs; hardly any animals-only a few plovers and some ducks by the shores of the lagoons, some falcons, and the condor that soars in high circles in the icy air.

Sometimes a knot of mountains fissured by earthquakes rises up, blocking the horizon from view; sometimes there will be a long stretch of sandy desert with a deformed and nettlesome vegetation of giant torch cactus, spurge, and aloe-enormous and grotesque growths that brandish their needles and spearheads in the air and lift up cleft stumps adrip with blackish sap; occasionally one comes upon an array of undulating grass-covered hillocks watered by a fine drizzle of rain that soaks into the spongy soil and veils the mountains in a transparent mist; and then once more the gray immensities stretch away to the north as far as the eye can see, in the direction of Quito, between those colossi of the Andes that have created a triumphal approach, bordered by volcanoes, to the present capital of Ecuador. Everything here is monumental, awesome, and mysterious. The very rivers flow toward unknown horizons. The Egyptians could not discover the sources of the Nile; the Peruvians, on the contrary, saw rivers arising all around them without ever knowing what distant sea received their waters.

Nothing relieves the starkness of this landscape. The alterna tion of the seasons is scarcely noticeable, and day and night in these latitudes never vary their length. The dry grass, without disappearing, blends its faded drab tones with the green of the new shoots and carpets the soil with a gray uniformity. There is no winter or summer here, nor any spring; it is the land of eternal autumn. There is no word to express the intense poetic quality of these solitudes when the sudden tropic night falls upon the colorless landscape. Life and death seem to lose all significance in this tran6 A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru quil and silent immobility where nothing has been made for man, where the mountains are barriers, and the rivers torrential floods. Is it surprising that such a country should be poor? 7 Among the few fertile valleys that open out on the intermontane plateau, there is a narrow one, roughly from eighteen to twenty five miles long, situated between the canyons of the Apurimac and the Urubamba, at an altitude of 11,380 feet, surrounded by tree less limestone plains, and dominated by mountain peaks that rise to some 17,000 feet above sea level. This oasis of fertility is the site of Cuzco, ancient capital of the Incas, the "navel of the world." It is a place of salubrious climate, 'which can be compared to that of southern France; there is rainfall from December to March, and a dry season from May to November. Although isolated at the bot tom of this dip in the terrain, the city is really in the center of the plateau. Lima, the present capital of Peru, on the coast, is separated from the provinces of the interior by the barrier of the Andes, which is traversed by the railroad of the Oroya, the highest in the world. 8 The capital ought logically to be a plateau city like Quito in Ecuador. Pizarro chose Lima in order more easily to maintain direct relations with the mother country, but it is a metropolis that faces outward, and its situation makes it more international than Peruvian.

Farther to the south stretches another region that is equally celebrated, that of Lake Titicaca. It is hard to imagine it as the center of a great civilization that has since vanished. The vegeta tion is so scanty that the wild olive is the only shrub that can gain a .foothold there, the water of' the lake so cold that a man could not bathe in it in safety. Torrential rains, scorching sun, freezing nights succeed one another, although the presence of a body of water mitigates to some extent the extremes of tempera ture. As it is, this land exercises a singular fascination on those who have come to know it. Like the desert or the ocean, the puna holds the soul of its people captive. If the environment has not determined the social order here, it has nonetheless set its mark upon the inhabitants. Contemplation ) The Hostile Environment 7 of the imposing vistas of the plateau has made the Indian grave and pensive. Gray tones and infinite horizons have disposed his temperament to sadness and revery. If the Peruvian is mild and docile today, it is probably because of the political and social regime to which he submitted; if he is indolent, this may be due to his Amazonian origin, though the latter is still uncertain; but if he has no notion of time and if respect for the ancient nature-gods still has a place in his heart, it is beyond any doubt because genera tion after generation he has led his flocks of llamas in the gray silence across the Andean solitudes.

The social characteristics derived from this environment-at tachment to tradition and dispersion into isolated communities reappeared after the Spanish conquest. In the middle of the seven teenth century Father de Villagomes wrote a book on the Peruvian religion in which, in a curious chapter on local conditions as the "cause of idolatries," he explained that the Indians, on account of the mountains, the deserts, the puna) and the ravines, had hardly any contacts with one another, and the devil therefore found it easy to tempt them. 9 Even now these habits of isolation are a great obstacle in the way of the Lima government's efforts at unification. Today as in the past, merchants and officials are the only ones who really succeed in freeing themselves from the grip of these geo graphic impediments to communication. The various agricultural communities, living remote from one another, still remain sus picious and hostile and endeavor to perpetuate the country's state of anarchy.

But there was a time when all these Indians were closely united under a common dominion. Speaking of it as something already past, Cieza de Leon sadly declares: "Great wisdom was needed to govern nations so diverse in so rugged a terrain." 10 An empire existed in spite of the hostility of the environment; and this simple statement suffices in itself to suggest the measure of its power.