P U N O

A  PORT  IN  THE  SKY

   Puno perches in the southeastern highlands or "altiplano". It is situated on the shores of lake Titicaca, highest navigable lake in the world. Legend has it that Manco Capac, the first Inca, and Mama Ocllo, his sister-consort, rose from the waters of Lake Titicaca to found Cuzco.

  Puno’s tile roofs, narrow streets, an iron grilled windows recall southern Spain. Metropolis of the lake, it is a town of about 70,000. People of the Altiplano divide themselves into two classes: pure Indians and mestizos, those have an admixture of European blood. Of the Indians, the Aymara seem to have been the original, or at least the older inhabitants of the lake region. The Quechua, who speak the languaje of the Incas, probably descent from peoples transferred to the lake by the Incas, after their conquest of the region early in the 12^th century.

INCA ORIGINS LOST IN TIME, Who were the Incas, and where did they come from ? No one knows. Until recently they were thought not to have had even a rudimentary written languaje, and thus their history can be traced over little more than 500 years. When Francisco Pizarro landed in 1532, the Inca Empire was embroiled in civil war, so that a handful of Spaniard adventurers were able to take over a realm that streched nearly 3,300 miles, from Colombia into Chile.

At that time the name Inca did no refer to a race or nation of people. "The Inca" meant king or ruler, and by extension one of his ancestors or relatives. 

Puno's Cathedral, - recall the Spanish churches - is the center of festivities, during the month of february, where Christianity and Indian religions melting together. Among the Indians, elements of Inca and pre-Inca rites have fused with Christian beliefs in a religious mosaic. Some Indians still worship the old gods, performing ancient rituals at dawn on sun-etched hilltops above Lake Titicaca.

Today's Indians, short, dark, and barrel chested, throng the open-air stalls of Puno's market. The men wear wool trousers and a long poncho, and the chu11o, a kind of crocheted or knitted wool bonnet with a pointed tasseled top and long ear flaps against the cold. The women wear short flaring woolen skirts, perhaps three or four, one over the other, and black, brown, or gray bowler hats. On special festive occasions they may put on as many as a dozen skirts, a sign of affluence.

When I walked through Puno market with a native-born friend, my heart thumped and my chest heaved in the thin mountain air. My friend looked at me speculatively. "You know," he said, "I am not a man like you."

He was right; the fact that he had been born on the shores of Lake Titicaca - Puno is situated at an altitude of 12,506 feet - had made his chest deeper and his heart and spleen larger. His hone marrow manufactured many more red blood corpuscles than mine.

The late Dr. Carlos Monge, a Peruvian physician who pioneered in Andean high-altitude medicine in the 1920's, believed that the dwellers on the Peruvian and Bolivian high plateau were a well-defined variety of man. He held that thousands of years of adaptation to the hostile climate of the AltipIano had made Andean man a kind of superman, one able to withstand the rigors of oxygen-poor air, temperature extremes, and strong solar radiation at high altitudes.

In 1928 Dr. Monge described a disease he called "chronic mountain sickness". " A victim of severe altitude sickness suffers acute cardio-respiratory distress. He is short of breath and lightheaded, feels nausea, and has headaches and a galloping heartbeat".

" Normally, lowlanders who move up here adapt over several months. The body produces more red blood corpuscles to capture the scarce oxygen molecules. We, for example probably have about five million red corpuscles per cubic millimeter in our blood, normal for a sea level man. If we stay here on the Altiplano long enough, we should acquire at least one million more ".

Fervor reaches a peak as costumed revelers gyrate past Puno's cathedral during an annual procession honoring the Virgin of Candelaria. Long-nosed masks with beards, mustaches and feathered head, spoke fun at Spanish churchmen and administrators who ruled here for nearly three centuries.

                  INDEX                                    LAKE TITICACA