The forest, too, became more open,
and the trees smaller and less encumbered with vines, and between them
we could catch occasional glimpses of the bay, with its waters golden
under the slant rays of the declining sun. Finally we came to a kind of
terrace or shelf of the mountain, with here and there little patches of
ground, newly cleared, and black from the recent burning of the
undergrowth,--the only preparation made by the Indian cultivator for
planting his annual maize-crop. He has never heard of a plough; a staff
shod with iron, with which he pries a hole in the earth for the
reception of the seed, is the only agricultural implement with which he
is acquainted. When the young blade appears, he may possibly lop away
the tree-sprouts and rank weeds with his _machete_: but all the rest he
leaves to Nature, and the care of those unseen protectors of the harvest
whom he propitiates in the little church of Conehagua by the offering of a
candle, and in the depth of the forest, in some secluded spot of
ancient sanctity, by libations of _chicha_, poured out, with strange
dances, at the feet of some rudely sculptured idol which his fathers
venerated before him, and which he inwardly believes will come out "all
right" in the end, notwithstanding its present disgrace and the Padre's
denunciations.
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