Callao was a low-lying port with' narrow cobbled streets where types.
all nationalities jostled each other. At the corners, on the pavements, squatted Indian women and girls, descendants of the Incas, ling fruit and vegetables. They looked not unlike the English gypsies, Their costumes were a contrast of violent hues. They wore blouses of bright magenta, crude blues or devastating pinks, over long full skirts of orange or purple. Their hair hung in two Jong braids, sormounted by a Panama hat or bla:! felt. Over their shoulders was sling triped manta, in which they would cary a baby or a couple of scrawny chickens. Men lounged at street corners wearing striped ponchos, the national grab of South America, These are blankets with hole in the centre for the head.
The country between Callao and Lima is a dusty arid plain with untidy crops of cotton, ragged banana palms, and eucalyptus, and fields of sugar and maize. Every now and again one passes a huaco, pre-Inca burial mound, with astonishing masonry of sun-dried bricks still to be seen, The huts of adobe, the mud walls, the dusty higghwa, along which patter donkeys and mules, remind one of North China,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.