Flying over Incaland

PAUL MORAND

■ Every continent seems to have been consecrated to a particular element: Africa to fire, Oceania to water, Asia and Europe to earth. America has its principle in the air, the young open air, the pan-American air. Aeroplanes, wireless, skyscrapers, Manco Capac and Wilbur Wright, the Inca sun which guided Pizarro, and the moon which guided Lindbergh, the skies of Peru full of gods, the skies of New York full of Hertzian waves—all tend to dispense with the earth and live in the heavens. Above the party-wall quarrels in which Europe squandered its blood, above the desperate length of the caravan routes where Asia lost its time and its energy, the American man succeeded in passing from the paths of war to the tracks of the sky. All American civilizations have been sun-worshippers. Consequently, it was inevitable that they should revere what is nearest to the sun: the aeroplane. American planes are birds that sing all the year round: birds which come and perch, after their international circuits, beneath the eyes of the aero-stationmaster, like a hawk on the wrist of a falconer; novel birds, whose eggs are suitcases and mail bags, and which follow a lonely migratory route around South America, keeping exactly to the outlines of the coast and stopping nightly in their corrugated sheet-iron nests. Thus the distance of thousands and thousands of miles between Miami and Chile is covered in a few days. Thanks to aeroplanes, we have regained the time lost by horses and sailing ships, we recover the precious capital wasted by our ancestors in coaches and sedan chairs. Henceforward we are accustomed to long stops, and crossings of from two to three hours, like those in tiny Europe, will seem astonishing to one. London, Paris, Berlin, sub-prefectures which a Viceroy of Europe, representing the King of the World, will perhaps inspect later on. . . .

• The Andes, I thought, as I breathed the oxygen through a rubber tube placed at each passenger's disposal—the Andes had dis-joined. had divided everything in the geography of South America; drought and rain, nations, races: the aeroplane has rendered them powerless. When one goes from Argentine to Chile, over the Cumbre dominated by the Cross, over precipices narrower than Fifth Avenue seen from the top of the Empire State Building, one does not bother much, at an altitude of 7.000 meters, about national flags and poor little frontier stations. At Santiago, Chilean aviation officers, in very English uniforms, were present at my departure. They are important political personalities, these aviators. It is thanks to them, six months ago, that the revolt of the Chilean fleet was quelled by means of aerial bombs. . . . We fly off, the Andes and their thousand platinum points recede, and we enter the great desert of northern Chile, the Atacama Desert. The rivers which flow down from the mountains are immediately drunk, like alcohol in the thirsty throat of a drunkard. Nothing grows here, yet it is one of the most disputed pieces of territory in the world, the nitrate region: vegetable and animal decomposition which is never diluted by rain. From the Incas to our own day, people have always fought here for this precious commodity. A stop at Antofagasta, the nitrate export post, where the horses enter directly from the stables to the dining room of the hotel. Towns incessantly destroyed by tidal waves and earthquakes and incessantly rebuilt.

• Now we are on the frontier of Peru; in the distance is Bolivia, a country without windows overlooking the sea, like the Inca houses, the American Thibet, which gazes enviously at the Pacific to which it no longer has access. We are flying over a landscape of copper ore, veritable mountains of metal in which borax and mica glitter; the air currents are so hot that our heavy tri-motor Ford is puffed into the air like a ping-pong ball. . . . Poor Peru, a country supposed to be the richest in the world, where the Spaniards used to have themselves carried on the Indians' backs, which now seems so poor to us, and whose sole luxury is churches. But the Indian soul has been no more profoundly touched by Catholicism than has the soul of the Far East. Jesuitism is a cosmopolitan art, hasty, without roots, which does not influence the Indian. Looking at an Indian, one has that indefinable uneasiness of eternity which only China can give. The centuries are nothing to him. If he becomes a Bolshevist, it is certain that he will quickly lose all recollection of the four hundred years of Spanish domination. He sits on the yellow grass, plays his flute hollowed out of a human tibia, and makes one think of the old Inca legends, in which men were born of stones. ... He sleeps fully dressed, chews his coca leaves, cures himself with herbs, and when one speaks to him, he remains contemptuously silent. We begin to feel the first symptoms of soroche, or mountain sickness. At Titicaca, the favored lake, one feels sea and mountain sickness simultaneously. The Indians cut the nostrils of the llamas, so that they may more easily breathe the rarefied air. At times my companions seem uncomfortable, for lack of oxygen. This evening at La Paz, a lady tried too energetically to cut her very tough beef steak and had to stop, her heart was fluttering so. I also saw a pianist almost fainting over the keyboard because be had played De Falla too hard on the piano.

Bolivia is the most astounding country in the whole of South America, where a peasant will pick up a stone to throw it at his ass, and then drop it because it is so heavy . . . and it is an ingot of silver, a country of mines, where eight million men toiled beneath the lash of the Spaniards, and of whom many sleep in underground cemeteries. These are the mines which enriched Cuzco, a town of Don Quijote's period, the Inca capital, haunted by phantoms, llamas and Indians, with a black Christ in the middle of the Cathedral, with diamonds on his fingers, like a rastaquouère God; a city from which all the gold has disappeared, as well as the temples containing it. So many years have passed and gold is to this day master of the world. The Federal Reserve Bank and the Bank of France have now inherited the wealth of the Inca, for gold is a widely travelled metal. Two million, three hundred thousand kilograms sent from Peru to Madrid, yet this prodigious drain was not destined to enrich Spain. The wars against the Popes, the Moors, Louis XIV, and the Dutch quickly exhausted it, because all gold gained by arms has never served any purpose other than to support tin* arms destined to preserve it.

■ I take the aeroplane to Lima. The radio transmits me a message: a Peruvian paper asks me for a wireless interview.

"What do you think of Peruvian women?" I reply:

"At an altitude of nine thousand feet the sexes are indistinguishable."

At Lima I saw the skeleton of Pizarro, minus the head, which was lost and had another substituted for it. in the Eighteenth Century. I saw the convents, the churches and, at the Torre-Tagle Palace, 1 now the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the full-length portraits of the viceroys: the earliest, thin and dressed in somber black; the latest, fat and rosy, from the Archbishop Marcillo Rubio, who covered Philip V of Spain with gold, like a courtesan; from the Marquis de Caneto who built the bridge of San Luis Rey, to Don Manuel de Amat, the protector of Périchole, who compelled her lover to go garbed only in his shirt to get water for her at the public fountain. Today the rose-colored house of the celebrated dancer is lost in a working-class quarter, and on its abandoned walls I read:

VOTE FOR THE COMMUNISTS

Now my American plane is leaving Peru. It is flying over Pachacamac, with its cemetery of strangled women, over the ruins of the Chimu Empire, constructed of wood in such wise that all a robber had to do, if he wanted to pierce the walls, was to take a sponge with him. . . . Suddenly the landscape changes. Incaland and its arid deserts are no more. We approach Ecuador, with its fearful swamps where emerald mines sleep in the craters of extinct volcanoes. When the sun begins to shine between clouds and showers, we see muddy alligators warming themselves. They look like tree trunks, the young sprawling across their parents' backs, and they open one eve when our silvery-winged plane crosses the sky, its three motors in full song.

1A palace in the style of Granada, but built of the most precious woods of the tropics, the most beautiful and proudest colonial edifice in all South America, and the basis of that neo-Spanish style which has spread to Hollywood and Buenos Aires since the War.