Mr Squier found vast pyramidal buildings, rising stage upon stage, with broad flights of steps winding round them to the summits. While sketching amid a maze of these massive shattered adobe walls, our author was startled by seeing three men suddenly leap over a low wall into the vivid sunshine before him. 'God and peace be with you!' he said as calmly as he could, instinctively divining that his best cue was to appear as cool as possible. 'God and peace be with you!' responded the bandits, for such they were; and after a little bullying, an amicable parley ensued, which had for its object the acquisition of Mr Squier's breech-loading rifle, a weapon which kindled in the bosom of Rossi Arci, the robber chief, an ardent, but with all due deference to Mr Longfellow, a wasted affection, for he did not obtain it. Four weeks afterwards, Mr Squier saw the swollen disfigured corpse of this bandit captain exposed to public view in one of the principal streets of Lima.
At Truxillo our author came across a treasure-hunter, one Colonel La Rosa. This man spent his whole life in burrowing like a mole among the old ruins in search of buried gold, gems, silver goblets, or any other relic of antiquity which he could turn into money. Under his guidance, Mr Squier visited a great pyramid called the Temple of the Sun, and the extensive, interesting, and well preserved ruins of Grand Chimu. Here he found vast halls, the walls of which were covered with arabesques, and wide corridors from which spacious rooms diverged. The walls of these apartments were bright with vivid and delicate colours; and Colonel La Rosa shewed him where in the midst of them he had found a walled-up closet filled with vessels of gold and silver placed in regular layers one above the other, as if they had been hidden there in some dire emergency. Two vaults were also discovered filled with silver cups and goblets. The silver of which these vessels were composed was much alloyed with copper, and was so much oxidised that it had become exceedingly brittle. Mr Squier obtained possession of two of the cups. They have the appearance of being hammered out of a single piece of metal, are as thick as ordinary tin-plate, and are both adorned by the representation of a human face, with clearly cut features and a large aquiline nose.
About a hundred yards to the westward of the excavations which have revealed the half-buried palace of the ancient princes of Chimu, is a low broad mound, which has been found to be a necropolis, filled with bodies richly clad and covered with gold and silver ornaments. Many of the heads of the dead bodies found by Colonel La Rosa were gilt and encircled by bands of gold; and one body, that of a woman, was covered with thin sheets of gold, and wrapped in a robe spangled with silver fishes. Warlike weapons and agricultural implements, knives, war-clubs, lance-heads, and spear-points, with spades and mattocks of different shapes, all of bronze, are found abundantly in the vicinity of these ruins; as are also specimens of excellent pottery, on which are modelled with spirit and fidelity representations of birds, animals, fishes, shells, fruit, vegetables, and the human face and form.
Leaving Chimu reluctantly, Mr Squier travelled down to the coast, along which he sailed, examining the coast ruins at Calaveras and other places, till he reached Arica, the port of Tacna.
This is peculiarly an earthquake region; and some of these subterranean convulsions are terrible to a degree which we dwellers in a temperate clime can scarcely even imagine. A notably dreadful and destructive earthquake was that of 1868, which shook to its base all the adjacent country. It was first noted in Arica about five o'clock in the morning, its premonitory symptoms being immense clouds of dust, which were seen slowly advancing across the plain in dusky columns at a distance of about ten miles.
Nearer and nearer they came; and in the awful pause of dread expectancy that ensued, the distant snowy peaks of the Cordilleras were observed to nod and reel, as if executing some horribly suggestive cyclopean dance. Gradually this impulse extended itself to the mountains nearer to the town, till the huge morro or headland, a little to the left of it, began to rock violently to and fro, heaving with sickening lurches, as if about to cast itself loose into space, and always bringing to again, like a hard bestead ship in a driving tempest. As it worked back and forward, huge fragments of stone detached themselves from its cave-worn surface, and fell with deafening crash into the surf below; while under and above all, like a subdued monotone of horror, was a prolonged incessant rumble, now like the roll of distant thunder, but ever and anon at irregular intervals swelling into a deafening crash, like the discharge of a whole park of artillery.
As far as could be seen, the usually solid earth was agitated by a slow wave-like motion, which became first tremulous, and then unspeakably violent, throwing half of the houses into heaps of ruins, and yawning into wide chasm-like fissures, from which mephitic sulphurous vapours issued. Shrieks and groans of anguish filled the air, a mournful interlude shrilly resounding at intervals above the subterranean thunder, as the terrified crowd rushed to the mole, to seek refuge on board the vessels in the harbour. Scarcely had they reached this hoped-for haven of safety, when the sea, treacherous as the heaving land, glided softly back, and then rushing forward with a terrific roar, submerged the mole with its panting terror-stricken occupants, and poured on in a foaming flood over the prostrate town, where it completed the havoc the earthquake had begun. It then rushed back almost more suddenly than it had advanced, the whole fearful deluge occupying only about five minutes. Again and again the earth quivered and shook, as if about to rend asunder and drop into some unfathomable abyss below, and again the sea dashed forward as if in frantic fury, and then as suddenly recoiled, the last time shewing a perpendicular wall of water forty-five feet high, capped by an angry crest of foam. This tremendous wave swept miles inshore, where it stranded the largest ships then lying in the harbour, one of them a United States frigate.
In Arica Mr Squier equipped himself for a journey over the Cordilleras. Nothing can exceed the savage wildness of these mountains, or the difficulties and dangers of the long narrow passes that intersect them. Mr Squier says: 'I have crossed the Alps by the routes of the Simplon, the Grand St Bernard, and St Gothard; but at no point on any of them have I witnessed a scene so wild and utterly desolate as that which spreads out around La Portada.' It is the very acmé of desolation – treeless, shrubless, bare of grass, with scarcely a lichen clinging to the rugged sides of the huge cliffs. Pile upon pile towering to the sullen skies, rise ridges of dark-brown hills bristling with snowy peaks, from several of which long trails of smoke stream lazily out upon the air, shewing where the pent volcano surges in ominous life beneath the wintry wastes of snow.
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