I. Fray Fernando’s Mission.

“Cœlum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt.”

On a burning autumn afternoon,—in the Sixteenth Century, which had then passed its meridian by rather more than ten years,—Don Fray Tomas de San Martin, the stately prior of the great Franciscan monastery of Ciudad de los Reyes, now called Lima, was sitting alone in his private apartment. Meaner and idler men were dozing the sultry hours away; but it was not in the nature of Fray Tomas to seek repose while the duties of his calling, the interests of his Order, or the concerns of any of his numerous friends required his attention. In spite of physical languor and exhaustion, an expression of satisfaction lit up his countenance as he finished his second careful perusal of a letter he held in his hand. Then he laid the document on the table before him, pausing, however, to glance, with a slight smile, at the pompous armorial bearings inscribed on the seals with which the floss silk that bound it had been secured. The prior was not a man [10]given to soliloquy; but if we might translate his unspoken thoughts, they would run somewhat after this fashion: “Sixteen

quarterings for honest Marcio Serra de Leguisano, the tailor’s son! Where, in heaven’s name, have they all come from? Truly saith the Preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes, ‘I have seen servants riding upon horses.’ He might have added,—and there be none such headlong riders. Pues, every man to his taste. These little weaknesses of Marcio Serra’s may well be borne with, after all. For amongst the conquistadors there is many a worse man, and not one better. Would that all, like him, broke off their sins by righteousness, and their iniquities by showing mercy to the poor. Certainly, it behoves us to aid him to the utmost of our power.”—And, stretching out his hand, he rang a little silver bell that lay near him on the table.

But the attendant, whose duty it was to answer it, was lying on a mat in the ante-chamber, fast asleep,—and not until the prior had more than once raised his voice and called loudly, “Antonio!” did he make his appearance.

“Send me hither Fray Fernando immediately, and then go finish thy siesta,” said the prior, cutting short his apologies with contemptuous good-nature.

Fray Fernando, who was not asleep, came in a few moments; and having made the accustomed reverence, stood silently before the chair of his superior.

Fray Tomas was an able man and a good ruler. Both within the walls of his monastery and beyond them he was thoroughly respected. Yet few could have looked on the two who now stood face to face without the thought that they ought to have changed places,—that Fray Fernando ought to have commanded and Fray Tomas to have obeyed. Everything about the younger monk, from the broad white forehead to the nervous taper fingers, bespoke the refinement and sensitiveness of high breeding. Yet he did not look like a man of the schools and [11]the cloister. Power and determination gleamed from his dark, deep-set eye, and showed themselves in every movement of his vigorous though attenuated frame. You would have said that he ought to have worn the plumed casque instead of the tonsure, and have shouted, “St. Jago for Spain!” instead of telling Ave Marias on the rosary that hung from his belt.

The prior addressed him with great urbanity. “We do justice, brother,” he said, “to that singular zeal for our holy Faith which animates your breast.”

Fray Fernando bowed, but a look of pain passed over his face.

The prior blandly continued: “Therefore it is that, an opportunity being afforded to some brother of our honourable Order to undertake a work of peculiar toil and self-sacrifice for the glory of God and the salvation of souls, our thoughts turn to thee, as to one who will cheerfully, nay joyfully, embrace such a mission.”

“I am ready to go whithersoever my lord the prior shall command,” said Fray Fernando.

The prior laid his hand on the letter. “This have I just received from the most noble knight and conquistador, Don Marcio Serra de Leguisano. Doubtless he is known to you by reputation?”

“My lord remembers I am a comparative stranger here.”

The prior had too much good sense to retail idle stories: such as that the good knight’s parentage was said to be of the humblest; that on the division of the spoils of Cuzco the massive golden sun of the great temple had fallen to his share; and that, with the recklessness of a parvenu, he had gambled most of it away at primero in a single night, complaining pathetically, the next morning, that he had “lost a good piece of the sun.” He merely explained: “Don Marcio Serra hath received, in encomienda from our lord the king, a noble estate, rich in gold and silver, as well as in the ordinary productions of the soil. [12]It embraces a very fertile valley, called Nasca; and stretches upwards, even to the land of mist and snow, where the mighty Andes raise their giant heads. High up, in that rarely-trodden region, at the summit of a bleak mountain, called Cerro Blanco, gold was discovered a few years since. A shaft was sunk, and the mine was worked, as usual, by the forced labour of the Indians. But these unhappy people died so quickly, that at last Don

Marcio, having the fear of God before his eyes, and being mindful of his soul’s salvation, began to take thought of their miserable case. Possibly he was the more disposed to compassionate them, because he hath taken to wife an Indian princess, one of the Children of the Sun, as they call them, after their vain heathenish fashion. Therefore he hath purchased a sufficient band of negro slaves, both men and women, which he hath been at great charges to transport from the coast to the heights of Cerro Blanco. And there he hath set them to work under competent Spanish overseers.”

Both the churchmen accepted this substitution of black labourers for copper-coloured ones as an effort of the most sincere and enlightened philanthropy. Nor were they, perhaps, as much mistaken as might be supposed.

“But,” continued Fray Tomas, “as the good knight’s piety is fully equal to his humanity, he is now desirous to extend to these benighted savages the inestimable blessings of our holy Faith. He therefore entreats me to send him some brother of our Order, who may be found willing, for the love of God and the good of souls, to banish himself to a dreary inhospitable region, where the frozen earth brings forth little more than a few blades of stunted grass; and where, from one year’s end to the other, scarce a face will greet the exile’s eyes save those of the negro slaves.”

Had the picture he was limning been intended for any other eye than that of Fray Fernando, Fray Tomas might have softened its lines, and have interspersed here and there a few [13]lighter touches. But now he did just the contrary; because he had taken the measurement of the man he was addressing. When he ceased speaking, there was a moment’s silence; then Fray Fernando said quietly, “I willingly undertake the mission.”

“May God and our Lady recompense thy zeal and piety!” was the prior’s benign reply. He then proceeded, with equal affability and good sense, to discuss the details of the lengthened journey which it would be necessary for Fray Fernando to undertake.

The younger monk seemed not only willing, but actually eager to occupy the post assigned to him. Not during his whole novitiate (which had but recently terminated) had he appeared so cheerful, not to say so animated. It was currently reported that nothing gave Fray Fernando pleasure except self-mortifications and austerities; which he carried to a greater length than any monk who had been in the monastery since its foundation.

“I have found the very man for your excellency’s affair,” wrote the prior that evening to Don Marcio. “He is a brother of our house; exceeding pious; and so consumed with zeal for the Faith, that he desires nothing so much as martyrdom. The more difficult and painful an enterprise, the less of worldly honour or profit it is like to bring, the more attractions it hath in the eyes of our holy Fray Fernando.”

Such were the reflections of good Fray Tomas de San Martin; who was as much, and as little, able to penetrate the mystery that veils every human soul as any other shrewd man who fondly imagines that he can read the hearts of his neighbours at a glance.

[14]

II. Cerro Blanco.

Fray Fernando has been nearly a year in his new home. But it seems a mockery to call it by that sacred name: since not to any living thing was Cerro Blanco a home in the true sense of the word. Yet between forty and fifty miners, with their families, ate, drank, and slept in the cluster of cabins that nestled, almost literally, in a cleft of the rock, for protection against the stormy winds of the Andes. These cabins were built of adobes, or mud-bricks dried in the sun; and were thatched, very neatly and carefully, with the strong grass called ychu. All this work had been done, before the arrival of the negroes, by the Indians of the valley, as part of the labour required from them by way of tribute to their lord. They were also obliged to provide the little colony with the necessaries of life. At stated intervals they might be seen treading the steep and winding mountain-paths in long procession, bearing on their heads or their shoulders large baskets of maize, of potatoes, or of quinoa—the rice of the country—as food for the negroes. Nor would they fail to bring

[15]also a couple of alpacas, and a good supply of chica, or native beer, to suit the more luxurious tastes of the Spanish intendant of the mine, and his servants. For in that elevated situation few things would grow (at least, without very careful cultivation), except stunted grass and little mountain-flowers, mostly blue and yellow.

Still higher than the village—indeed, on the very summit of the mountain—was the mine, which was worked in rude and primitive fashion. The ore extracted from the earth by the labour of the negroes was smelted, after the manner of the Indians, in a large oven made of clay, and placed in such a situation that the strong mountain-winds seldom failed effectually to fan the furnace. The gold thus obtained was transmitted twice a year to the intendant of Nasca, who accounted for it to his lord, Don Marcio Serra de Leguisano.

Some strong motive was certainly necessary to make a lengthened residence in such a spot tolerable to a free man, who could go elsewhere if he would. The intendant, Diego Rascar, his four Spanish and two Creole servants, were bound to their post by the strong cords of avarice. But Fray Fernando had no such tie. His life was very empty; there was neither the love of gold, nor, to speak truth, the love of souls, to fill it. He did his duty, so far as he understood it, to his dusky flock. He baptized the infants; he married the young men and maidens; he buried the dead. He even tried to repress gross crimes amongst the negroes, and to prevent gross cruelties on the part of the Spaniards: he sought to keep the latter from lapsing into utter heathenism, and he taught the former to hasten to the little chapel at the sound of the bell, and to fall on their knees at the elevation of the host. It did not occur to him that he ought to teach them anything more, or that it would be possible to do so. The negro slaves were savages, but one grade removed from the lowest type; a type

differing very greatly and very sadly from the imaginary picture [16]of the “noble and virtuous savage” which a sickly and sentimental civilization has amused itself by delineating.

With these degraded beings—whom, in his pride, he accounted scarcely human—Fray Fernando had nothing in common; and he felt nothing towards them save contempt and disgust, sometimes mingled with pity, stirred by their sufferings. How could it have been otherwise? With deep truth has it been said, “There is but one Mediator between man and man, as well as between God and man—the man Christ Jesus.” But Fray Fernando knew the man Christ Jesus not at all as Mediator; he only knew him as Judge. He could not therefore say, with the noble Las Casas, “I have left in the Indies Jesus Christ our Lord, suffering stripes and afflictions and crucifixions, not once, but thousands of times, at the hands of the Spaniards.” The love that embraces all men for the sake of Him who took man’s nature upon Him, and delighted to call Himself the Son of man, was as far above Fray Fernando’s comprehension as the brilliant stars of the Southern Cross were above his head. And thus it was that in that barren lonely place no love, human

or divine, came to soothe and soften his heart, and to efface the deep, jagged characters graven there by the iron pen of pain.

Could the beauties of Nature have taken the place of human interests, Fray Fernando need not have felt forlorn, even on the summit of Cerro Blanco. He had but to ascend the height where the miners’ shaft had been sunk, to command a view sublime and glorious as the imagination could conceive. Far above, the magnificent snow-clad peaks of the Andes pierced the cloudless sky; while as far beneath, the rich and cultivated vale of Nasca wound like a variegated thread from the mountain’s base through the sandy desert to the distant ocean. It is true that often, while the mountain-peaks glistened in sunshine, a thick veil of mist obscured all that lay beneath; yet even then the scene had a wild, weird grandeur of its own.

[17]

Will it be believed that Fray Fernando’s steps but seldom led him to the spot that commanded such a prospect? Not that he was unimpressed by its sublimity; rather otherwise,—he felt it too keenly. The everlasting hills shadowed and oppressed his spirit with the sense of a Power and Presence too awful and too near for his peace. “Surely God is in this place!” was the language of his heart; and, unhappily, God was a terror to him. He desired nothing so much as to forget Him; or, if that had been possible, to hide himself in secret places where He could not see him.

From part of the pathway between the mine and the galpon, or square—as the miners’ village was called—might be seen the mountain-pass by which travellers sometimes made their way from the valleys of the coast into the interior of the country. Such travellers, if Spaniards, were usually glad to accept shelter and hospitality from the little mining colony; and it need not be said that the intelligence they brought with them from the civilized world was considered ample payment by the exiles. But if the wayfarers were of Indian race, their fleet footsteps only grew all the fleeter until the lair of the hated and dreaded Spaniards was well out of sight.

It became a habit with Fray Fernando to walk to the spot whence the pass could be seen. Why he did this it is not easy to say. Perhaps, in spite of himself, he clung to the shadow of the social life now shut out from him; or perhaps he dreaded visitors rather than hoped for them. However this may have been, a restless impulse seemed to drive him thither two or three times in the day, and sometimes even late at night. But this might have been because he slept little.

One bright, cold, moonlight night he was taking this walk as usual, when the sound of a wild, peculiar chant, somewhat mellowed by distance, broke upon his ear. Startled, but not greatly surprised, he paused and listened. “Yes,” thought he, “it must be so!—Those five civilized Spaniards, who are lords [18]and masters here, and bound to show these negroes an example of Christian living, have made themselves drunk with new chica,—and the most active and daring of the slaves have managed to elude their vigilance, and to steal out of their quarters for the purpose of enacting some forbidden and detestable heathen rite.”

Guided by his ear, Fray Fernando bent his steps towards the spot whence the sounds proceeded. On a little grassy plateau amongst the rocks, some dozen negroes were engaged in performing a wild mystic dance. Hand in hand they moved; now keeping time to some barbarous tune led by one of their number—now setting time and tune at defiance, and leaping, shouting, screaming like hideous maniacs. But the unexpected appearance of the monk’s gray cowl and mantle brought the weird ceremony to a hasty close.

“Shame, shame on you!” he cried, as the dusky group scattered in all directions. “Shame on you!” he repeated once again, advancing to the centre, and raising his arm in a threatening attitude. “You—Christian men, neofitos, reducidos!—you to return to these vile heathen abominations—to worship the devil!—you who have been taught to know the one living and true God, who made heaven and earth, and all that in them is! Are you not afraid lest He strike you dead, and cast you into the fire that burneth for ever and ever?”

The negroes were far from comprehending every word in this address, yet they well understood its general import, and were duly impressed by the solemn tone and threatening gestures of the speaker. They were thoroughly cognisant also of the fact that the Spaniards were the masters and they the slaves. They fled in all directions with the activity of fear; some clambering up the rocks, some running down them, and others hiding in their crevices. Few stayed to hear the cogent and thoroughly intelligible peroration with which the friar concluded his harangue:—

[19]

“If there be a man among you not found within his quarters ere the moon has passed from beneath yonder cloud, Señor Diego shall reckon with him in the morning.”

One only of the negroes—a stalwart ebony giant, recently brought from the wilds of Africa, where he had been a petty chieftain—stood his ground fearlessly, and looked Fray Fernando boldly in the face.

“You, Pepe!” said the monk. “I expected better things from you.”

The African threw out his great bare arms with a gesture of despairing sorrow.

“What would you?” said he, in broken Spanish.—“If we worship the Zombi, the Spaniards scourge us, and we die;—if we worship not the Zombi, he sends the small-pox, and we die.—Either way, we die.”

“Not so, Pepe,” the monk answered more gently. “The Zombi is an evil spirit, a devil: he cannot harm you if you trust in God, for God is stronger than he. Put your confidence in God and in our Lady, and no evil can befall you.”

“Look, padre,” said the negro: “I said to our Lady the prayer you taught me; yet all the same, Señor Diego—”

But, not waiting to finish his sentence, he turned quickly, first his head, then his whole body—and bounding or scrambling over whatever rocky impediments lay before him, he began a headlong career down the hill towards the pass that wound beneath it. His senses, sharpened by the exigencies of his previous savage life, told him correctly that a party of travellers halted there, and were calling for guidance or help of some kind, aware that the mining village was at hand. He knew well that his services in bringing them safely thither would be rewarded with a holiday, plenty of sora, or spirits, and certain other indulgences which he highly valued.

Soon as Fray Fernando understood the matter, he too hastened to the nearest point whence the pass could be seen. In [20]the struggling moonlight he discerned a little band of Spaniards on horseback, with glittering casques, and a long file of attendant Indians with burdens on their shoulders. He saw the leader engaged in an earnest parley with Pepe; and soon became aware that the party had put themselves under his guidance, and would reach the galpon in a few minutes.