Various - Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 23, February, 1873

The travelers immediately threw themselves into marching order and took up their line of route. The savages followed. At the first obstacle, a mass of matted trees, they easily rejoined the party of whites.

Then, for the first time, the idea of their power seemed to strike them, and they precipitated themselves upon the porters, who took to flight, rolling from under their packs like animals of burden. In a moment every article of baggage, every knife and weapon, was seized, and the red-skins, singing and howling, were making off through the woods. Among them was now seen the Siriniri with orioles' feathers, who must have guided them to their prey.

The expedition was pillaged, and pillaged as a joke. The thieves were heard laughing as they scampered off like deer through the woods.

It was hard to realize at once the gravity of the misfortune. No one was hurt, no one was insulted. But provisions, clothing, articles of exchange and weapons were all gone, except such arms and ammunition as the travelers carried on their persons. A collection of cinchonas was in possession of one of the Bolivians, though it represented but a fraction of the species discovered. The besiegers, however, had disappeared, and a westerly march was taken up. Good time was made that day, and a heavy night's sleep was the consequence. With the morning light came the well-remembered and hateful cry, and the little army found itself surrounded by a throng of merry naked demons, among whom were some who had not profited by the distribution of the spoils. At the magic word siruta all these new-comers rushed in a mass upon the white men. Marcoy managed to slip his fine ivory-handled machete within his trowser leg, but every other cutting tool disappeared as if by magic from the possession of the explorers. The shooting-utensils the savages, believing them haunted, would not touch. Then, half irritated at the exhaustion of the booty, the amiable children of Nature burst out into open derision. The artists of the tribe, filling their palms with rocoa, and moistening the same with saliva, went up to their late patrons and began to decorate their faces. The latter, judging patience their best policy, sat in silence while the delicate fancy of the savages expended itself in arabesques and flourishes. Perez and Aragon had their eyes surrounded with red spectacles. The face of Marcoy, covered with a heavy beard, only allowed room for a "W" on the forehead, and Pepe Garcia was quit for a set of interfacings like a checkerboard. Having thus signed their marks upon their visitors, the aborigines retired, catching up here and there a stray ball of cord or a strip of beef, saluting with the hand, and vanishing into the woods with the repeated compliment, Eminiki —"I am off."

The victims rested motionless for fifteen minutes: then pellmell, through the thickest of the brush and down the steepest of the hill, blotted out under gigantic ferns and covered by umbrageous vines, stealing along water-courses and skirting the sides of the mountains, they rushed precipitately westward.

Two months after the priest of Marcapata had dismissed with his benediction the party of confident and enthusiastic explorers, he received again his strayed flock, but this time in rags, armed with ammunitionless guns and one poor knife, wasted by hunger, baked by the sun, and tattooed like Polynesians by the briers and insects. The good man could not repress a tear. "Ah, my son," said he as he clasped Marcoy's hand, "see what it costs to go hunting the cascarilla in the land of the infidels!"

The explorations started by Don Juan Sanz de Santo Domingo came to profitable result, but not to his advantage. Three weeks after the pioneers arrived again in Cuzco, Don Juan started another expedition, on a much larger scale, to accomplish the working of the cinchona valleys, under charge of the same Bolivians, who could make like a bee for every tree they had discovered. A detachment of soldiers was to protect the party, and the working force was more than double. Finally, the night before the intended start, the Bolivian cascarilleros, with their examinador, disappeared together. It is probable that Don Juan's scheme, nursed, according to custom, with too much publicity, had attracted the attention of the merchants of Cuzco, who had found it profitable to buy off the bark-searchers for their own interest.

The crash of this immense enterprise was too much for Don Juan. Threatened with creditors, Jews, escribanos and the police, he retired to a silver-mine he was opening in the province of Abancay. This mine, in successful operation, he depended on for satisfying his creditors. He found it choked up, destroyed with a blast of powder by some enemy. Unable to bear the disappointment, Don Juan blew out his brains in the office belonging to his mine. A month afterward, Don Eugenic Mendoza y Jara, the bishop of Cuzco, sent a couple of Indians for the body, with instructions to throw it into a ditch: the men attached a rope to the feet and dragged it to a ravine, where dogs and vultures disposed of the unhallowed remains.

The day is a happy one to the student-traveler from the Western World in which he first looks upon the lovely plain of Athens. Rounding the point where Hymettus thrusts his huge length into the sea, the long, featureless mountain-wall of Southern Attica suddenly breaks down, and gives place to a broad expanse of fertile, and well-cultivated soil, sloping gently back with ever-narrowing bounds until it reaches the foot-hills of lofty Pentelicus. The wooded heights of Parnes enclose it on the north, while bald Hymettus rears an impassable barrier along the south. In front of the gently recurved shore stretch the smooth waters of the Gulf of Salamis, while beyond rises range upon range of lofty mountain-peaks with strikingly varied outline, terminating on the one hand in the towering cone of Egina, and on the other in the pyramidal, fir-clad summit of Cithaeron. Upon the plain, at the distance of three or four miles from the sea, are several small rocky hills of picturesque appearance, isolated and seemingly independent, but really parts of a low range parallel to Hymettus. Upon one of the most considerable of these, whose precipitous sides make it a natural fortress, stood the Acropolis, and upon the group of lesser heights around and in the valleys between clustered the dwellings of ancient Athens.

It was a fitting site for the capital of a people keenly sensitive to beauty, and destined to become the leaders of the world in matters of taste, especially in the important department of the Fine Arts. Nowhere are there more charming contrasts of mountain, sea and plain—nowhere a more perfect harmony of picturesque effect. The sea is not a dreary waste of waters without bounds, but a smiling gulf mirroring its mountain-walls and winding about embosomed isles, yet ever broadening as it recedes, and suggesting the mighty flood beyond from which it springs. The plain is not an illimitable expanse over which the weary eye ranges in vain in quest of some resting-place, but is so small as to be embraced in its whole contour in a single view, while its separate features—the broad, dense belt of olives which marks the bed of its principal stream, the ancient Cephissus, the vineyards, the grain-fields and the sunny hillside pastures—are made to produce their full impression. The mountains are not near enough to be obtrusive, much less oppressive; neither are they so distant as to be indistinct or to seem insignificant. Seen through the clear air, their naked summits are so sharply defined and so individual in appearance as to seem almost like sculptured forms chiseled out of the hard rock.

The city which rose upon this favored spot was worthy of its surroundings. The home of a free and enterprising race endowed with rare gifts of intellect and sensibility, and ever on the alert for improvement, it became the nurse of letters and of arts, while the luxury begotten of prosperity awakened a taste for adornment, and the wealth acquired by an extended commerce furnished the means of gratifying it. The age of Pericles was the period of the highest national development. At that time were reared the celebrated structures in honor of the virgin-goddess who was the patron of Athens—the Parthenon, the Propylaea, the Erechtheum—which crowned the Acropolis, and were the glory of the city as they were the masterpieces of Grecian architecture. During the preceding half century many works of utility and of splendor had been constructed, and the city now became renowned not only in Greece, but throughout the ancient world, for the magnificence of its public buildings. Thucydides, writing about this time, says that should Athens be destroyed, posterity would infer from its ruins that the city had been twice as populous as it actually was. Demosthenes speaks of the strangers who came to visit its attractions. But the changes of twenty-three centuries have passed upon this splendor—a sad story of violence and neglect—and the queenly city has long been in the condition of ruin imagined by Thucydides. Still, the spell of her influence is not broken, and the charm which once drew so many visitors to her shrines still acts powerfully on the hearts of scholars in all lands, who, having looked up to her poets, orators and philosophers as teachers and loved them as friends, long to visit their haunts, to stand where they stood, to behold the scenes which they were wont to view, and to gaze upon what may remain of the great works of art upon which their admiration was bestowed.