"All of which," as a bluejacket who had been reading up the history of the place said, "he done good and proper."
Pizarro attracted the attention of thousands of the visitors. Not all were irreverent or flippant. Many of them paused a long time before the mortal remains of one the greatest men in history. You felt as if you were really at a shrine.
Then the explorers visited other churches which took one back to the Middle Ages. There was the Franciscan convent and church. There was the church where the remains of Santa Rosa, the only American woman saint, rest. Then there were numerous other edifices with old doors and heavy bolts and locks, and inside some of them were decorated with what seemed to be solid sheets of gold about their pillars; churches where there were beautiful old paintings of religious subjects, churches where the tiling was brought from Europe and is now almost priceless in value, churches where there were historic parchments.
The visitors then went to see the Senate Chamber, with its carved ceiling, one of the wonders of the world in that line; brought from Europe and paid for with Inca treasure in 1560. That room was used in the days of the Inquisition, which lasted longer in Peru than in Spain and was almost as terrible. In fact in this viceregal city, the second founded in the Americas by the Spanish, one could see religious emblems at every turn. Just outside the city on a hill overlooking the bullring is an enormous cross, probably fifty feet high. Every year the society that had it erected makes a pilgrimage up that hill after a parade in the city and holds services, wherein vows to uphold the faith and lead lives of purity and honor are retaken. On a dozen other hills crosses and shrines may be seen.
It is evident that Peru as a nation is still devout, but if one could have seen the crowd at the San Pedro Church on Sunday morning when the doors were opened and the beauty and high blood of Lima came out from their devotions he would have been convinced that Peru is really no exception to other Latin American countries, and indeed most other countries, in that the women are the mainstay of the church. That beauty parade is one of the sights of Lima, and the Americans, officers and men, were there, side by side with the men of the city to see the show.