1930 LIMA PERU magazine article, color photos, history, people etc

Description

Selling is a 1930 magazine article about:
Lima Peru
Title: THE LURE OF LIMA, CITY OF THE KINGS
Author: William Joseph Showalter
Quoting the first page “It was a dull midwinter morning that brought me into the busy harbor of Callao, the principal port of Peru. As our ship came to anchor and the port formalities got under way, Lima loomed upon the horizon-Lima, founded as the City of the Kings, developed into the viceregal capital of a continent, and latterly transformed into a modern Latin-American metropolis.
A pall of dense clouds hung low over the Rimac Valley, that floor-level and fertile plain which the Peruvian capital shares with imposing ruins of lost civilizations, with beautiful haciendas that form islands of green surrounded by seas of sand, and with occasional stumps of ancient mountains which the erosion of the ages has not yet conquered.
But the clouds were still high enough for the spires and towers of the city to rise out of the distance, with an air of welcome to the traveler.
A fine old
fietero
-he confessed to 82 years and clearly was a full-blooded descendant of the ancient people who dwelt there before the Old World even suspected the existence of a Western Hemisphere-took me ashore in his launch.
Tall and erect despite his years, with his face eroded by decades of hardship, and with his gnarled but sinewy hands still supple, he seemed a lone survivor of the heroic age of his race, when men were giants upon whose shoulders fourscore years rested lightly.
I had come to see the first-founded capital of South America in the process of modernization, and to catch something of the romance and lure of its nearly four centuries of dramatic history; and I hoped to gather inspiration for the undertaking by following further the footsteps of Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, those two baseborn lads of Old Spain whose path I had picked up at Panama and followed to Tumbez-a path that led to the glory of the conquest of Peru and the grave of ignominious death at the hands of the executioner and the assassin.
But in going from Callao to the capital over the splendid, eight-mile concrete boulevard, where late-model automobiles and heavy-duty trucks have taken the place of antiquated, high-wheeled carriages and snail-pacing bullock carts, even that romantic past for the moment became obscured by another looming historical horizon.
For, about halfway to Lima, a vast ridge rises from the valley floor, on which the iron heel of the Conqueror could leave no impress. The highway goes neither over nor around it, but cuts boldly through. If your eyes are sharp, you will discover that it is not a hill at all, but a huge manmade mound, perhaps the greatest pile of adobe brick in the world.
When the chief engineer of the biggest construction company in South America was asked what it would cost to reproduce that structure to-day, even with the cheap labor - compared to ours - of Peru, he calculated its cubical contents and found that there is not now a single engineering project under way, from the Rio Grande to the Strait of Magellan, that would call for such an expenditure as the replacement of this adobe hill would involve.
That huge structure-several city blocks long, half as wide, and perhaps 50 feet high-speaks of times so remote that the doings of Pizarro and Almagro seem but the events of yesterday; proclaims a race which was forgotten before they were born. It carries us back to a time of which only irresponsible Legend dares speak with assurance; to a time before which more trustworthy Tradition stands uncertain; to a time that was already far too remote for memory when History wrote her first halting passages. Beside the thoroughly modern boulevard which runs through that ancient edifice stands a pedestal surmounted by a wrecked automobile, with a legend of warning; and a little farther on, atop an adobe fence post, sits the grinning skull of some poor Yorick of the forgotten race which built that great ruin…"
7” x 10”, 58 pages, 41 B&W & 25 color photos
These are pages carefully removed from an actual 1930 magazine.
30F3
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