Across the Andes
by Charles Johnson Post · English · Gutenberg #48613 · 398,862 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Across the Andes
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Across the Andes
A tale of wandering days among the mountains of Bolivia and the jungles of the upper Amazon
Author: Charles Johnson Post
Release date: March 31, 2015 [eBook #48613]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48613
Credits: Produced by Donald Cummings, Adrian Mastronardi, Stephen
Hutcheson, Carol Spears, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ACROSS THE ANDES ***
Produced by Donald Cummings, Adrian Mastronardi, Stephen
Hutcheson, Carol Spears, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
[Illustration: Running the Rapids of the Ratama
PAGE 217]
ACROSS THE
ANDES
BY
CHARLES JOHNSON POST
A Tale of Wandering Days Among the Mountains of Bolivia and the Jungles
of the Upper Amazon
_Illustrated by the Author_
NEW YORK
OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY
MCMXII
Copyright, 1912, by
OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY
All rights reserved
_Thanks are due to Harper and Brothers and to the Century Company for
permission to incorporate as chapters in this volume, articles appearing
in Harper's Magazine and The Century, and to the latter for the drawings
and paintings accompanying such articles._
THE TROPICS
"The legion that never was listed,"
The soft-lilting rhythm and song,
The starlight, and shadowy tropics,
The palms--and all that belong;
The unknown that ever persisted
In dreams that were epics of bliss,
Of glory and gain without effort--
And the visions have faded, like this.
From dusk to dawn, when the heat is gone,
The home thoughts nestle and throb,
And the drifting breeze through the dim, gray trees
Stirs up the fancies wan
Of the old, cool life and a white man's wife
With a white man's babes on a lawn,
Where the soft greens please--yet each morrow sees
The flame that follows the dawn.
From dawn till eve the hot hours leave
Their mark like a slow-burned scar;
And a dull, red hate 'gainst the grilling fate,
Impulse and fevers weave;
While the days to come--in years their sum--
The helpless thoughts perceive
As an endless state, sans time or date,
That only gods relieve.
Rubber or gold--the game is old,
The lust and lure and venture;
And the trails gleam white in the tropic night
Where the restless spirits mould;
A vine-tied cross 'neath the festooned moss,
Bones in a matting rolled;
No wrong or right, the loss is slight,
The world-old fooled of gold.
"The legion that never was listed"--
The glamor of words in a song,
The lure of the strange and exotic,
The drift of the few from the throng;
The past that was never resisted
In the ebb or the flow of desire,
The foolish, the sordid, ambitious,
Now pay what the gods require.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Old Panama, Agamemnon, and The Genial Picaroon 13
II. The Fighting Whale, and Chinamen in the Chicken Coop 27
III. Through a Tropical Quarantine 46
IV. A Forced March Across the Desert Of Atacama 62
V. Arequipa, the City of Churches 76
VI. Through the Inca Country 88
VII. Out of La Paz by Pack Train 103
VIII. The Back Trail Among the Aymarás 118
IX. Over the First Great Pass 131
X. The Toll Gate and Mapiri 145
XI. Waiting for the Leccos 159
XII. Off on the Long Drift 172
XIII. The Lecco Tribe 184
XIV. Drifting Down the Rio Mapiri 200
XV. Shooting the Ratama 214
XVI. Opening up the Jungle 224
XVII. Twenty-Three Days Against the Current 238
XVIII. By Pack Mule Through the Jungle 252
XIX. The Indian Uprising 266
XX. Ambushed by Ladrones 280
XXI. The Music of the Aymarás 289
XXII. Back Home 299
XXIII. Off Across the Continent in a Batalon 309
XXIV. Through the Rubber Country 321
XXV. A New Crew and Another Batalon 337
XXVI. The Falls of the Madeira and Home 350
ILLUSTRATIONS
Running the Rapids of the Ratama _Frontispiece_
PAGE
Announced that a person, a somebody, was awaiting me below 13
Pointed scornfully to the outside 15
Agamemnon 18
Those who refused to pay were thrown into the chicken coop 35
When the end lid was taken off the bodies of eight dead Chinamen were
taken out 37
A deserted brigantine at anchor dipped slowly with the long Pacific
swells 42
What the diplomat said was direct and voluble 49
A wide dusty canal which in the intervals between showers serves as a
market (_facing page_) 50
Close resemblance to an army of drunken bugs 52
Every day our winches whirred and clattered off some dusty, sand-blown
port (_facing page_) 54
Lima, a delightful city of contrasts 58
An Arequipa carrier 78
In Arequipa, the city of churches (_facing page_) 80
Hardly a day without its Saint's _fiesta_ 83
An Andean touring car 85
In Pizarro's day it was probably the same--costume, craft, and barter
(_facing page_) 100
Haggled with arrieros over pack mules 104
Prisoners along the trail up from La Paz (_facing page_) 106
Aymará driver of pack llamas 111
Members of a gang of prisoners 112
The guard for the road menders 114
Rodriguez and his Cholo helpers tightened the rawhide cinches and
replaced the packs 116
Aymará herders played their weird flutes 123
A few streets were still plainly marked, though the village has been
dead these many centuries (_facing page_) 128
Blizzards blowing from the Andean passes 133
Soldering the food in tin cans 138
Scattered in hysterical flight up and down the precipitous slope 141
Skirted the base of an unbroken cliff 142
Toll gate in Mapiri 145
An Andean mountaineer 146
There loomed the big mound of stones with a twig cross on top
(_facing page_) 148
Slowly the rafts sank under the weight 172
The shrewish, leather-skinned Indian wife 174
There were, according to the Lecco standards, no "bad places" yet 179
Leccos lowering the callapo through shallows 181
Lecco of the twig raft 182
These Leccos are among the finest Indians 184
Napoleon, a Lecco chief 188
A Lecco type 189
We seemed to move with intolerable slowness 203
But it is those parts of the river that the Leccos fairly love 209
A rubber picker 211
On a rope a trolley worked back and forth from which was suspended a
tiny platform 258
Never was there such a ride--not even in the Rapids of the Ratama
(_facing page_) 264
The Tacana brides, adjusted for themselves comfortable niches in the
cargo 314
At the tiller presided a huge Tacana 316
Never was such an exhibition in the history of firearms 319
But it was monkey that furnished them with the greatest delicacy 323
Often we pass a little shelter of palm leaves 326
Night camp on the Rio Beni on the way out (_facing page_) 328
It was only the shack of a lonely rubber picker 330
In the thin blue smoke, it at once turned a pale yellow 332
Justice is administered according to the standards of his submissive
domain 333
The bolachas of rubber are threaded on long ropes 348
Dragging a batalon around the portage of the Madeira Falls 351
ACROSS THE ANDES
CHAPTER I
OLD PANAMA, AGAMEMNON, AND THE GENIAL PICAROON
[Illustration: ANNOUNCED THAT A PERSON, A SOMEBODY, WAS AWAITING ME
BELOW.]
It was in Panama--the old Panama--and in front of the faded and
blistered hotel that I met him again. A bare-footed, soft-voiced mozo
had announced that a person, a somebody, was awaiting me below. Down in
the broken-tiled lobby a soured, saffron clerk pointed scornfully to the
outside. Silhouetted against the hot shimmer that boiled up from the
street was a jaunty figure in a native, flapping muslin jacket, native
rope-soled shoes, and dungaree breeches, carefully rolling a cigarette
from a little bag of army Durham. It turned and, from beneath the frayed
brim of a native hat, there beamed upon me the genial assurance of Bert,
one time of the Fifth Army Corps, Santiago de Cuba, and occasionally of
New York; and within my heart I rejoiced. Without, I made a signal that
secured a bottle of green, bilious, luke-warm native beer and settled
myself placidly for entertainment.
A panicky quarantine stretched up and down some few thousand miles of
the West Coast that left the steamer schedules a straggling chaos. For
fifteen dull, broiling days I had swapped hopes and rumors with the
polyglot steamship clerk or hung idly over the balcony of the Hotel
Marina watching the buzzards hopping about the mud flats or grouped
hopefully under the quarter of a slimy smack. Once I had inspected the
Colombian navy that happened to be lying off the Boca and observed a
bran-new pair of white flannels go to their ruin as a drunken Scotch
engineer teetered down an iron ladder with a lidless coal-oil lamp
waving in discursive gestures; once I had met a mild, dull, person who
had just come up Magdalena River way with a chunk of gold that he
assured me--without detail--had been hacked off by a machete, but here
his feeble imagination flickered out and he wrapped the rest in a poorly
wrought mystery until finally he fluttered over to Colon for the next
steamer of innocent possibilities.
[Illustration: POINTED SCORNFULLY TO THE OUTSIDE]
With these the respectable amusements were exhausted and I therefore
rejoiced as I confronted that cheerful, raconteuring adventurer under
the battered Panama. A ship's purser, a drummer of smoked hams, a Coney
Island barker, a soldier, a drifter, and always a teller of tales, he
had lain in the trenches on Misery Hill before Santiago in support of
Capron's Battery with a gaunt group around him as he wove the drifting
thread of adventure from the Bowery to the Barbary Coast in a series of
robust anecdotes. And they bore the earmarks of truth.
Now, in the genial silhouette framed against the tropic glare, I
realized that whatever days of waiting might be in store they would no
longer be dull. A true rumor had put him in a lone commercial venture
somewhere down these coasts and here at my elbow was to be placed all
the shift and coil of petty adventure, whimsical romance, and the
ultimate results of two years of adroit piracy in and out of the Spanish
Main that had ended, as I observed, in dungaree breeches, rope-soled
_alpargatas_, and a battered Panama hat.
Therefore through the ministrations of an occasional bottle of the
native bilious beer and other transactions that shall remain private,
the days sped themselves swiftly and unheeded guided by the adept hand
of Romance. Again, as in the trenches, I viewed the world under Asmodean
influences, but what I heard has no place in these pages; it is worth an
endeavor all its own. Then, one morning, the news spread that at last
the _Mapocho_ lay at the Boca and the hour of departure for the first
stage to the interior of South America was at hand; the night before was
the last I saw of my genial friend. In the morning he did not appear,
and it was strange, for I had expected to do the proper thing, as I saw
it, realizing that dungarees and _alpargatas_ are poor armor and that
our consulates offer but a desperate and prickly hospitality.
In the afternoon I went aboard, crawling down a gangway that dropped to
the deck like a ladder where, in the morning, it had reared itself with
equal steepness against the _Mapocho's_ sides. Such are the Pacific
tides at the Boca. Agamemnon, the shriveled little Barbadoes darky,
scuttled about importantly, stowing our baggage and giving an occasional
haughty order to some steward in a nondescript patois that passed mainly
as Spanish and that often served, as I learned, better than the purest
Ollendorfian Castilian. Later it appeared that Agamemnon had left one of
these same steamers under a cloud--a trifling matter of a few sheets and
pillow cases--and now to return clothed with trust and authority over
"de fixin's an de baggage of gent'mens" swelled him with an inarticulate
triumph.
[Illustration: AGAMEMNON]
In the long months that followed none could have given more faithful
service or loyalty than this skimpy Barbadoes darky. That is within his
limitations, for he could no more resist liquor than a bear can honey,
but nevertheless when he had transgressed, his uncertain legs would
bring him back to his duties, speechless perhaps, but with arms wavering
in gestures of extenuation.
Also to Agamemnon wages meant nothing; a shilling now and
again--sometimes even the equivalent of a whole dollar--advanced him
with the specific understanding that it was for gambling and not for
liquor. Once, in La Paz, he won a hundred and fifty dollars, Mex, and
became an impossible animal until it had been frittered away. In the
same city he went to the bull fight and joined in the play against the
final bull that is "dedicated to the people" and fought so cleverly that
we became prominent by reflection and gave a party at the _corrida_ the
following Sunday to see Agamemnon's promised performance.
By this time Agamemnon had become a character and a score of little boys
scrambled over the barrier eager to hold his hat, his coat, and his
cuffs. With a flourish he handed each to its eager guardian and then,
with a coat held as a _capa_, gave a flourish and advanced toward the
bull. The crowd applauded. Agamemnon made a bow and a flourish and
waggled the coat. The bull snuffed briskly and charged. Alas! The hand
had lost its cunning, for Agamemnon shot ten feet skyward, turned an
involuntary somersault at the apex of his flight, and then sprawled back
to earth. A half dozen of the _toreros_ drew off the bull; the small boy
custodians flung his garments at him scornfully, while the Bolivian
audience laughed itself hoarse as the dusty, dishevelled figure hobbled
out of the ring and away from the crowd.
For himself Agamemnon asked but little although where he felt that the
dignity of his position was involved he became a tower of strength. It
was in the same city that he felt the hotel people were not treating him
fairly, as they were not, and his remonstrance was met by a Cholo mozo
who hurled a sugar bowl at his head and followed it up with a knife.
Agamemnon dodged and beat down the Indian with a chair; on the instant a
half dozen Cholos poured at him and the kitchen was in a riot. Backing
away, he denuded the dining tables of service and used it as a light
artillery fire. By the aid of an earthenware jar, some handy crockery,
and a chair he was able to retreat safely across the patio and up the
stairway that led to our rooms. A water pitcher laid open a skull and a
wash-bowl stopped the rush long enough for him to grab a gun from the
pillow when we arrived, together with some stubby Bolivian police and
the bony Russian proprietor; order was restored, fortunately, for it
might have been serious.
Agamemnon explained satisfactorily and incidentally showed only a minor
bump or so, but his Cholo and Aymara antagonists bore most proper marks
of the conflict. That night in the midst of his shoe-polishing and
packing he remarked briefly: "If you gent'mens hadn't er-come jes' den I
cer'nly would have licked dem fellers, bahs!" Apparently no victory was
complete to his mind until he had accomplished a massacre.
At another time he waded into a crowd of Cholos in the interior and took
from them their machetes and shot-guns, acting on his own initiative,
because he knew that in that far interior laborers were too precious to
waste by their own fighting. From our tent we heard two shots and the
rising yells of a small riot and then, before there was time to grab a
gun or gather the few white men, the figure of Agamemnon staggered up
the crest of the river bank with his arms full of the commandeered
machetes and trade-guns.
There was the time when a balsa upset in a boiling eddy and Agamemnon
jumped in as a faithful rescuer only to still further complicate
matters; also when--but it is useless, Agamemnon is a story in himself.
Tireless, uncomplaining, honest, loyal, yet of the aimless tribe of
bandar-log, apparently only merely the mouse of a man in a wrinkled
black skin and yet the paragon of retainers. Peace be to him wherever he
has drifted.
At the table that evening on the _Mapocho_ the few passengers looked
each other over in the customary, stand-offish way,--a couple of fresh
faced young Englishmen adventuring to clerkships, a German commercial
traveler--an expert in those Latin countries who makes one blush for the
self-complacent, brusque, greaser-hating jingoes that are only too
typical of our export efforts--three mining engineers, a returning
Peruvian diplomat for whose presence we later blessed him and a couple
of native Ecuadorean families, wealthy _cacao haciendados_, who flocked
by themselves in a slatternly, noisy group.
But by the next evening, drawn together by the prospect of a tedious,
uncertain voyage through erratic quarantines, we were one large family.
We lay back in our canvas chairs under the galvanized iron roof of the
upper deck--so generally peaceful are those seas that the awning is
permanent--and watched the Southern Cross flickering dimly above the
southern horizon. The cigars glowed in silence for, though it was the
hour for yarning, each bashfully hung back. Then an engineer started.
The Philippines, Alaska, the boom camps, Mexico rose in successive
backgrounds and then the talk shifted round to our respective objectives
down this long coast. One was for the nitrate fields, one for the
Peruvian silver mines, and one for the rich placer banks of the far
interior. The one who was bound for an examination of Peruvian silver
mines--a mountain of a man--finally made a confidence:
"Gold," he remarked as an obvious preliminary, "gold--or silver, I'm a
Bryan man--is generally good enough for anyone, but if I had my choice I
don't mind saying that I'd rather have a coal mine down here in South
America than either or anything!"
The others sighed enviously. A coal mine in South America where there is
no coal except that from Australia and Wales and where a couple of
hundred miles from the coast it is worth twenty dollars, gold, a ton! A
coal mine--well--it is the stuff of which dreams are made in South
America.
"Yessir," he went on raptly, "coal is the thing. And I don't mind
admitting that I've got it."
He hauled a black object from his pocket and held it out. Eagerly it was
snatched from his hand. There it was, hard, shiny, black, varying in no
way from those in the kitchen scuttle at home--a splendid sample of
anthracite coal! It was too good. They laughed.
"Bring it from home?" they asked pleasantly.
The mountainous engineer chuckled contentedly. "That's anthracite and as
fine a specimen as I ever saw. I don't mind talking a little freely
since I've got it covered in an iron-clad contract.
"You see," he went on good-naturedly, "I'm always wide awake and the
morning we left the Boca a young chap came aboard--American, too, and
right pleasant spoken--where I was sort of loafing and we got
acquainted. To make a long story short, he'd been wandering around up in
the back country of Colombia and had located this coal. He didn't have
any special idea of what coal meant down these ways--he was from
Pennsylvania, son of a pit boss or something and coal was as common to
him as water to a duck--but when he pulled out a couple of these samples
you bet I froze fast. He tried to be mighty quiet and mysterious when he
saw I was interested--you know how such a chap is when he thinks he's
got a good thing, and he was sort of on the beach, down on his luck you
know--but I pumped him all right.
"He had a fool idea of going home as best he could and then taking the
family sock and combining it with other family socks and coming back and
opening up his coal mine." The big engineer chuckled again. "Why there's
a king's fortune in that mine, so your Uncle Jim stepped right in and
tied him up close. I cabled my principals and I'll get a cable when we
reach Callao. This coal makes their silver look like thirty cents. Of
course, I wasn't going to take any chances at this stage--it might be
phony--but that fellow is on the level. Said he wouldn't take any money
down--not that I'd have given it by a long shot--but after I got back
he'd join me and come back into Colombia. He gave me a map of the
location in case of accident."
"Gave him no money--poor fellow, art for art's sake?" asked one.
"Well, yes," the big man nodded good-humoredly, "thirty dollars--enough
to take him back to the States steerage--I felt almost ashamed. Said he
didn't need any more to get home with--that sounded on the level, didn't
it? He'd had a tough time all right--fever, grub and etcetery back in
the country--and was down to dungaree breeches, rope-soled shoes, and
one of these slimpsey native calico jackets."
"And he could roll a cigarette with one hand better than most can with
two?" I asked.
The big engineer paused for an instant's thought and then suddenly sat
up. No wonder my friend of the Fifth Army Corps and the dungaree
breeches, alpargatas, and battered Panama and muslin jacket had suddenly
disappeared. Thirty large, golden dollars of real money, good at par in
the States or for three pecks of local paper collateral anywhere on the
Mosquito Coast! And all that for one paltry little yarn.
CHAPTER II
THE FIGHTING WHALE AND CHINAMEN IN THE CHICKEN COOP
The hot days drifted by in easy sociability, dividing themselves into a
pliant routine. The morning was devoted to golf on the canvas covered
deck over a nine-hole course chalked around ventilators, chicken-coops
and deck-houses. Crook-handled canes furnished the clubs and three sets
of checkers were lost overboard before we reached the Guayas River, the
little round men skidding flatly over the deck with a pleasing accuracy
only at the end to rise up maliciously on one ear and roll, plop, into
the sea. In the white-hot afternoon, when the scant breeze would quite
as likely drift with us, the hours were sacred to the siesta, and the
evenings were devoted to standardizing an international, polyglot poker.
A rope stretched across the after-deck marked off the steerage. There
was no second class as a thrifty French tailor, a fine young man, and
his soft-voiced Mediterranean bride found out. They had bought second
class through to Lima and at the Boca were flung in aft among the
half-breeds, a squabbling lot of steerage scum, together with a gang of
Chinamen. A line of piled baggage ran lengthwise, on one side of which
were supposed to be the bachelors' quarters, though somewhere between
decks were hutches where, if one really insisted on privacy, the
tropical night could be passed in a fetid broil.
Through a surreptitious connivance this couple were allowed quarters
forward and evening after evening the little bride would bring her
guitar out and play--and such playing! She had been on the stage, it
seemed, and from opera to opera she drifted and then off into odd,
unheard folk songs, or the vibrant German or Russian songs. Never before
or since have I heard such playing of a guitar or felt its
possibilities. For us the guitar is an instrument lazily plunked by the
end man against two mandolins. Yet there was a time when Paganini deemed
it worthy of mastery.
She was playing late one afternoon and we were all gathered around in
the dining hall. There came a rush of feet overhead and a shrill,
excited chattering. We broke for the deck, expecting a mutiny among the
Chinamen at the very least, and there in full view, not five hundred
yards away, was a battle between a whale and three thrasher sharks. In a
great circle the sea was churned to a foam, boiling with the stroke of
fin and fluke as the sharks outflanked and harried the whale.
In a steady succession the sharks would shoot high out of the water in a
graceful, deadly curve and, as they fell back, suddenly stiffen in a
whip-lash bend that instantly straightened at the moment of impact,
sending a flying mass of spray like that when a solid shot ricochets in
gun practice. A few such blows and even a bulky, blubber-coated whale
would feel it. Sometimes a shark would strike fair, though more often he
would waste his energy on the empty water as the whale dove.
But the steadiness of the battering attack, sometimes all three sharks
in the air as though by a signal, sometimes a steady procession pouring
up from the sea in a wicked arc as regular as a clock's ticking, and
sometimes the frantic whirling of the whale showed the submarine
strategists at work, while only a single shark shot up in a well-aimed,
whip-lash stroke. In desperation the whale would stand on its head and
beat the air in terrific blows with its flukes while the sharks would
merely wait till the flurry was over and then renew their steady,
wearing, pounding battle.
Off at one side of the circle of beaten foam was a little dark patch
that paddled nervously about and that we had overlooked--a whale-calf.
And now it was apparent why the fight was fought in the diameter of a
ship's length; always the bulk of the grim old mother was between the
attack and her clumsy baby; there was the reason why she did not make a
running fight of it that would have given her a more even break--for the
speed of a squadron is that of its slowest ship. All the advantage lay
with the sharks; it was easy to see they were wearing the whale down.
Less often she stood on her head to batter the foam hopefully with her
ponderous flukes; the sharks redoubled their efforts until they curved
in a steady, leaping line.
Along the rail of the _Mapocho_ the passengers, deck and cabin, cheered
the battle as their tense sympathies dictated or drew whistling breaths
as some crashing whip-lash went home. The deep sapphire of the sea
rippling under the brisk evening breeze, the turquoise heaven that swept
down to the horizon softly shifting against the sapphire contrast to a
mystery of fragile green, the field of battle boiling and eddying in the
mellow orange glow of the long rays of the setting sun and bursting into
masses of iridescent spray made a noble setting worthy of the cause, and
in it eighty tons of mother-love and devotion measuring itself in
horse-power and foot-tons was slowly drooping under the hail from a
slim, glittering, iridescent arc.
Smaller grew the fight in the distance--a mile--a mile and a half--then
two-thirds of the whale's bulk shot clear of the surface and she fell
back heavily. Once more the head went down and the flukes raised
themselves, lashing the air in frantic desperation. The curving,
confident line of sharks shot upward in a graceful curve, but this time,
overconfident, they had miscalculated. The great tail caught one shark
and he hurtled through the flying spray with a broken back; the flukes
crashed down on a second as he struck the water. Once only the surviving
shark leaped and missed. Alone he could do no more; the whale in one
lucky stroke had won. Through the glasses we could make out its low mass
slowly swimming off, every now and then spouting a feather of spray from
her blow-hole as though saluting her own victorious progress with a
steam-whistle.
Five days out from Panama and we awoke to find the _Mapocho_ swinging to
her anchor in the Guayas River and awaiting the pleasure of the
port-doctor. On one side a distant shore loomed through the heated,
humid haze, on the other a sluggish tide-water creek disappeared in the
jungle of the bank an easy rifle-shot away. A ramshackle church with a
huge crucifix showed at one side of the port-doctor's house and here and
there a few houses and thatched roofs appeared above a stretch of white
beach. A few black pigs wandered about, showing the only signs of life.
Somewhere beyond this dismal outpost was Guayaquil. Already in the
captain's quarters was a conference of the skipper, the young Chilean
ship's doctor fresh from school and on his first trip, and the port
doctor.
Presently they emerged, the captain feebly expostulating. We were to be
held "under observation" for forty-eight hours as yellow fever and
bubonic suspects. That Guayaquil should quarantine against anything
is--at the least to an ordinary sense of humor--funny, for Guayaquil has
never seen the time that it was likely to catch anything it did not
already have, except a clean bill of health.
We learned for the first time that there were three Chileans abroad who
were being returned to Chile by their consul. They were anemic,
destitute and sick with malarial fever; although the whole coast was in
a panic over yellow fever and the bubonic, yet this time had been chosen
to ship them home some two thousand miles to a Chilean hospital! They
had been stowed between decks and the young ship's doctor had made the
mistake of attempting to gloss over their existence, or at any rate to
split the difference between truth and expediency, and had succeeded
only in exciting a peevish suspicion in a marooned gentleman who had
some power. He did not even look at the cases--quarantine forty-eight
hours, and then he would return with advices from the government.
A few of us went down to take a look at the _Chilenos_ whose appearance
had held us up. There was no formal hospital on board so a little
compartment had been hastily thrown up between decks. It was built of
the loose planks on which the cattle stand during the voyage; it was
closed on all four sides, windowless, and with but a single opening for
a doorway curtained by a filthy piece of canvas. This black hole,
reeking with filth, was the hospital; a couple of figures lay on the
floor and looked up dully at the sudden flare of a match while, from an
open cargo port, the third was tottering, a shrunken wreck with the
ghastly teeth of a skull and socketed eyes.
At noon the purser presented each first cabin passenger with a little
bill for half a sovereign--two dollars and a half, gold--which amount we
were charged for as demurrage every day in any quarantine. The deck
steerage paid a shilling, gold, each day.
[Illustration: THOSE WHO REFUSED TO PAY WERE THROWN INTO THE CHICKEN
COOP.]
The purser, a pleasant young Chilean with an Irish name, yet who spoke
no word of English, was the one busy man on the idle ship. In
expectation of quarantine the occupants of the port chicken coop had
been transferred and now the purser appeared with the first officer, the
boatswain, and a few of the crew. They climbed the rope and the purser
jangled a chain and padlock suggestively. One by one the shillings came
out. He reached the Chinamen; some were dragged from below or hauled out
from the partition of baggage in which they had tried to hide, all
protesting sullenly. Those who refused to pay were thrown into the
chicken coop until about a dozen were jammed into its close quarters. It
was too low for even a small man to stand upright, while its condition
made it impossible to lie down so that the Chinamen squatted on the
floor or huddled up on the perches. Then as they decided to pay, if the
purser had nothing on hand more pressing he would come up and let them
out.
Of those who witnessed this wretched steamship extortion the German
really enjoyed it; he clucked and mimicked before the coop with great
gusto and then scuttled below for his camera. He had scarcely focussed
before the free Chinamen who knew a camera were chattering shrilly in
hostile groups, the caged Chinamen clacking angrily back, and the first
officer pounced upon the photographic outfit. This collecting of
shillings from the Chinamen and the method of enforcement is no
light-hearted morning's pleasure and is likely at any time to end
seriously. Also it could be noted that in the immediate background were
others of the officers and crew following operations, and the arms rack
aft of the chart-room was unlocked.
[Illustration: WHEN THE END-LID WAS TAKEN OFF, THE BODIES OF EIGHT DEAD
CHINAMEN WERE TAKEN OUT.]
Much may be said in favor of the chicken coop method for there was one
time, the purser related, that another purser in collecting the
shillings used the fumigating boiler of the upper deck. Eight obstinate
Chinamen were shoved in and the end-lid clamped on. An hour of a dark
dungeon would be better than the airy chicken coop, argued the astute
collector--for the chicken coop has been known to prove so alluring that
Chinamen have begun serving on their second day's shilling before they
had paid the first--and he was pleased at the frantic scrabbling that
sounded through the iron sides. Then it died down--ah, the sullen apathy
of the race--and when the end-lid was taken off the bodies of eight dead
Chinamen were taken out, suffocated. It was no end of trouble to that
purser for he had to juggle with his passenger sheet and the various
port officials so that the ship wouldn't be held in quarantine and make
the captain and owners peevish and thereby lose his job. _Caramba_, it
was lucky they were Chinamen!
Slowly the forty-eight hours on the broiling river passed away. In the
morning of its close we looked anxiously to the nearer shore for the
sign of official life. Except for the straggling black pigs, all was
lifeless beach and jungle. The hours passed. It was noon. We breakfasted
at that late Latin hour irritably. Presently the placid captain sent a
string of signals up the foremast. Still the creek, the strip of beach,
and the jungle gave forth no signs of life other than the black pigs.
More time passed and the captain had the whistle blown at intervals. No
result. As a desperate measure he had the capstan turned--a bluff for it
was free of the cable--but as the dismal clank of the pawls carried to
shore, half a dozen figures scuttled down to the creek and tumbled into
the official boat. A few minutes later it was at the companion ladder
and the port doctor was mounting haughtily.
Why this uproar? The sanitary junta had been notified of our
arrival--what could one more? A reply had been received this morning--or
was it the day before?--that the sanitary junta was very busy, but would
consider the quarantine of the _Mapocho_ at a meeting this very night.
In the meantime----! He spoke with a patient, restrained peevishness as
to an unreasonable child.
The august sanitary junta sat augustly at Guayaquil. From this port
doctor's station to Guayaquil was some distance. To telegraph one made
one's report, then it was paddled across the muddy tide-water creek in a
dugout; then it was carried on foot across the island--for this strip of
beach and home of the straggling black pigs was but a portion of an
island of some size--and then across more water in a dugout and _there_
was a telegraph station! Naturally all this took time. The port boat put
back and the captain returned to his quarters. From the stern again came
the sickening pop of firecrackers where the Chilean crew resumed their
fishing, hauling in a slender, stupid variety of catfish and then
tossing it back with a well-timed firecracker thrust in its gaping
throat.
We watched the shabby boat run on the beach and the port doctor
disappear in the jungle path. The crew gathered up the oars when
suddenly the doctor darted back, the crew tumbled into the boat, and in
a flurry of ragged rowing they came splashing toward us. Hope revived--a
release from the august sanitary junta! A biscuit toss off they stopped.
The doctor rose in the sternsheets and grandly ordered us out of
Ecuadorean waters; if we did not leave at once we would be fired
upon--by what there was no intimation, it might have been a black pig
from a bamboo catapult for there was nothing else in the way of
artillery--but it sounded formal and terrible. So we left. And with us
went five thousand packages of freight and ninety sacks of mail intended
for Guayaquil, and the furious Ecuadorean passengers.
The Peruvians were complacent. "It is better for us," they said, "than
to have to put into that wretched Guayaquil. Had we touched that
fever-infected port we would have had much trouble in the Peruvian
ports. Now we have our clean bill of health from Panama."
It was beautiful optimism. I took another look at the reeking hospital
between decks and wondered if we could ever get into any port and, as I
turned away, two wretched, tottering skeletons passed on their way to
the open cargo port. They were convalescing. I hoped for the third.
Some time during the night we passed over to the Peruvian coast and
anchored off Payta early the next morning. Two miles away a white thread
of slow surf broke on a thin line of blazing yellow beach; beyond rose a
low range of brown-and-yellow bluffs, the hot and arid fringe of the
long dessert that edges the west coast of South America. Back from the
edge of surf spraddled a shabby, sand-blown, flea-bitten town with only
here and there a patch of gay red-tiled roof; nowhere a strip of green
or frond of palm to relieve the arid deadliness of the brown-and-yellow
hills.
Off shore--there was neither bay nor bight in the even line of surf--a
deserted brigantine at anchor dipped slowly with the long Pacific
swells, its yards and decks whited like a leper from the unmolested
frigate-birds and sea fowl that made it home. Beyond, here and there, a
patched sail of no particular size or shape was barely filled by the
lightest of breezes; occasionally, as one crept past, the outfit
developed into a raft on the after part of which was a rough platform of
palm on which were housed the Indian fisherman and his crew or family. A
few abandoned square tins--the well known export tins of
Rockefeller--held the drinking water, an earthen pot their food, and on
this flimsy contraption they would put out miles to sea. In beating to
windward a loose board or piece from a packing case is poked through the
crevices to act as centerboard.
[Illustration: A DESERTED BRIGANTINE AT ANCHOR DIPPED SLOWLY WITH THE
LONG PACIFIC SWELLS.]
Slowly creeping over the ground swells was the port officer's boat; it
had a uniformed crew and rowed well. The Peruvians watched it
contentedly; _por Dios_, no such stupid work here as in that Guayas
River--_buenos dias, Señor Comandante, buenos dias, Señor Doctor_--and
they stood aside as the captain led the way into his quarters, the
procession closing with the nervous ship's surgeon and a steward with a
bottle of warm champagne--for there was no more ice.
Presently they emerged amiably and the port officers put back to shore.
We would be _incommunicado_ until that very afternoon and then we would
hear. The little boats that had clustered around the _Mapocho_ with
Panama hats, fruits, and suspicious looking native candy were waved
ashore in a cloud of disappointment. In the afternoon back came the boat
and the young surgeon prepared to meet them ceremoniously at the foot of
the companion ladder. He could have spared himself the trouble; the
little boat stopped fifty feet off while the port doctor handed out a
judgment of five days' quarantine. Twelve dollars and a half a head for
the first cabin and a dollar and a quarter, gold, for the steerage, and
all additional! Going into quarantine was not, from a purely business
standpoint, without its profits. And also the Ecuadorans and the
Peruvians once more met with a common bond of sympathy.
A barefooted Chileno sailor who had been already to haul down the big
yellow pest flag at the foremast belayed the halliards permanently to
the bridge pin rail and trotted off to help in putting over a small
boat. This boat flying a small yellow flag, was anchored a half-mile
away and during the days of quarantine was the only means of
communication with the shore. Each morning through the medium of this
anchored boat we did the ship's business with the shore and from it the
steward would return with watermelons, eggs, turkeys, ducks, and
vegetables and quinine for the doctor. Occasionally from day to day the
port doctor, the port captain, or a member of the sanitary junta would
be rowed out in the official boat to look us over and the tottering
wrecks between the decks would be mustered at an open cargo port for a
distant and sceptical inspection. The local steamship agents, through
the daily messages in the anchored boat, kept us interested with the
daily rumors--we were a plague ship, a floating charnel house plying our
way shamelessly from port to port, a leper of the high seas shunned even
by Guayaquil--and one vague and indefinite that seemed to suggest that a
port official contemplated a sea trip in a week or so and was
engineering this means of giving us the pleasure of his company when he
was ready. It was interesting.
CHAPTER III
THROUGH A TROPICAL QUARANTINE
One morning when the official sanitary junta--the port doctor, the town
druggist, and three shopkeepers, all of whom except the first, were
contentedly selling us supplies--were making their inspection within
easy hailing distance the returning Peruvian diplomat dealt himself a
hand in the game. In a few pointed remarks he demanded that they send a
doctor on board to make an examination. The port captain returned an
indignant oration in which, after paying tribute to the ancestral deeds
of the diplomat's forebears, he hurled shame at the diplomat for his
selfish lack of patriotism in so distrusting the conclusions and acts of
his countrymen, obviously he had been so enervated by effete foreign
associations that--that--well, it sounded like good oratory anyway.
There was no doubt in their minds that we were concealing yellow fever.
Slowly the five days of quarantine passed with this solemn official
mockery. The Chinamen ceased from troubling and yielded the daily
shilling, the chicken coop was returned to the authority of the
steward--although once, for variety, a Chinaman shared it with a couple
of turkeys for some hours--and then the final day arrived.
Leisurely the official boat rowed out. The passengers for Ecuador, it
announced, were to be transferred to the leprous-looking brigantine
where they would remain in quarantine until they could be transfered to
a northbound steamer. Incidentally they were privileged to pay twelve
sols a day, each, for board. Then the official boat was rowed back; and
that was all.
Indignantly the passengers met and decided to pay no more daily
quarantine charges--it seemed as if the company needed a little
stimulating, perhaps; the purser chuckled sympathetically and then a
self-appointed committee looked over the chicken coop with a speculative
eye. It was heartening, for at least the monotony would be broken. That
night an unofficial boat stole out of the darkness alongside; confirmed
the rumor that the port captain was holding us for a week longer to suit
his convenience; then the messenger disappeared in the night. This was
interesting as pure news matter and that was all.
Came the morning of the sixth day without change. And then the
diplomat's cables to Lima had effect. A doctor had been appointed on a
cabled order from Lima to make a real examination; he came out
accompanied by a sanitary junta of very sour officials, climbed on
board, and began his work. They pulled away and returned in the
afternoon.
The young ship's surgeon and the new doctor shouted the report across
the water. Barring the three cases of malarial fever between decks we
had a clean bill of health. The official boat drew a trifle nearer; in
the stern sheets the port doctor scanned a formidable looking medical
volume that lay open on his knees and the druggist bent his head over
the same pages. Solemnly they accepted little test tubes that the ship's
surgeon passed across to them and examined them gravely. They turned a
few pages of the book and asked a question. The new doctor answered it
promptly. Again they shuffled the pages and came back with another;
another answer, and then more hasty poring.
[Illustration: WHAT THE DIPLOMAT SAID WAS DIRECT AND VOLUBLE.]
At length came their decision: it was true that the excellent doctors
had described no such symptoms as were standardized for either yellow
fever or the _peste bubonica_, but there was nothing to prevent those
doctors from stating and confirming that which was not true; therefore
be it resolved that we had yellow fever, but were concealing it! They
were the incorruptible guardians of a nation's health.
What the diplomat said was direct and voluble and carried perfectly
across the calm evening sea: Heaven was a sad witness of his unpatriotic
perfidy for he threatened them with a touch of patriotism direct from
Lima upon the hour of his arrival--however distant or uncertain that
might be. A little conference and they voted on our admission, two and
two--could anything be fairer! Their honest hearts thanked Heaven for
the thought of this simple and adroit deadlock that preserved their
official activities and at the same time kept us in a profitable
quarantine. Tersely it was pointed out by the diplomat that by virtue of
the cabled commission the new doctor was a member of the board--vote
again!
That evening we wandered through the dust and sand of Payta and rode
grandly, and briefly, to the out-skirts of the town in the single
mule-and-rope tram that skirted the beach. It is well in the troubled
times of quarantine on the West Coast always to travel with an
accredited diplomat on board.
[Illustration: A Wide, Dusty Canal Which in the Intervals Between
Showers Serves as a Market]
All next day the whirr and clatter of the steam-winches and the bang of
cargo kept up and again we visited the dusty port, wading through the
lines of Panama hat sellers that lined up to greet the landing of our
small boat. Of hotel runners there were none, this being due to the fact
that there was but one hotel to which the stray custom is bound to
drift. At the hotel we saw a few palms and tropical blooms in tubs and
in a carefully irrigated patio, for Payta is--like all that West
Coast--rainless. As a cold matter of meteorological fact it _does_ rain
sometimes; I accidentally started an acrimonious discussion by a merely
polite remark on the weather as to whether it had been nine, eleven, or
fourteen years since the last rain. In apparent proof of this there is a
wide, dusty canal bulkheaded with piling on either side which in these
intervals between showers serves as a native market. Little red flags
flutter from the _chicherias_ where the opaque, yellow, Indian corn beer
is sold, ranging in flavor and potency from warm buttermilk to the
wicked "stone-fence" of New Jersey.
Back of the town a trail wades through the sand to the crest of the long
bluffs; the feet of countless pack trains have worn a driveway through
the ridge until, stepping through, there are suddenly spread before the
view the endless stretches of a dried and dusty desert that has been an
ocean's prehistoric bed. The hot airs quiver and boil from the twisting
valleys or ridges of blistering sand and rock and through the pulsing
heat the occasional pack train in the distance turns to a wavering,
shimmering thread. To the imagination a desert rises as a dull, gray
expanse endless in its colorless monotony; here there was a riot of
color, every hue, raw and gorgeous--except green--from the soft purples
and cool sapphire of the shadows to the blazing yellows and reds and
white of the open spaces. And in the garish stretch of a dead ocean
there slowly rises like a parching thirst a longing for a sweep of
tender green.
[Illustration: CLOSE RESEMBLANCE TO AN ARMY OF DRUNKEN BUGS.]
The little governmental touch from Lima had cleared the path of
quarantine and we began a dot-and-carry-one course down the coast from
Payta; every day our winches whirred and clattered off some dusty,
sand-blown port. Before our anchor had touched bottom in the open
road-stead a fleet of _lanchas_, heavy, double-ended, open lighters of
from ten to twenty-five tons capacity were crawling over the water; the
dozen long oars that were their means of locomotion--and that were
manipulated on an independent competitive basis--spraddled on each side
gave the fleet a close resemblance to an army of drunken bugs struggling
forward on uncertain legs. There was always a race to the _Mapocho's_
side and the first to get there caught the heaving line.
Once a lancha defeated in a close finish came on and cut the heaving
line so that its rival was left with the useless section while it
hurriedly hauled in on the hawser. Instantly a fine naval engagement was
in progress as the lanchas locked like a couple of old Carthaginian
galleys. By the aid of force peace was established and the rightful and
original award of the hawser sustained; had it not been, as the first
officer explained, they would need a new heaving line at every port.
The bluffs of the coast gave way to hills and these in turn to higher
ones; the Andes were closing in on the Pacific. At times the great
mountain chain towered from the very water's edge in a succession of
steep cliffs, each receding tier softening in the distance and rising
through the slowly shifting strata of clouds until only the gashes of
white snow picked out the towering peaks. Here and there steep, rocky
islets fringed the coast line and we stood far out to save the chances,
and yet there was no appreciable change in the proportions of the
tremendous mountain range. The sense of proportion and distance was lost
in the comparison of these vast reaches. A rocky islet, a steep
sugar-loaf affair, rose from the ocean perhaps five feet--not much as an
island or a mountain peak. Through the binoculars a tiny unknown speck
at the base developed into a full-rigged bark with tapering masts above
which the sugar-loaf rock rose for thousands of feet in the clear air,
and on it was a wretched colony of guano workers.
Then the coast opened out into level reaches again with occasional lines
of irrigation ditches showing a thread of green. Occasionally--twice I
think--there was actually a landlocked harbor. It was one of these,
Chimbote, that James G. Blaine proposed to use or secure as a naval base
and coaling station. It is perfectly sheltered with a narrow,
bottle-neck entrance guarded by a rocky island in the middle which is
covered with a wriggling film of seals that are perfectly indifferent to
the close passage of ships or men.
[Illustration: Every Day our Winches Whirred and Clattered off some
Dusty, Sand-blown Port]
In this harbor rode the queerest of sea-going craft. In Mexico I had
once seen a Chinaman fit himself up a home from about eight feet of one
end of a hopelessly wrecked dugout, take in a partner, and then the two
of them paddle off up the river in the fishing business, sleeping and
eating aboard the flat-iron shaped thing. Here in this case was a bow
and stern bolted together without a midship section. And both the bow
and stern were those of a fairly full size tramp freighter. The bow was
the ram bow of a war ship and back of it there was barely room to
squeeze in a capstan and a tiny hatch; the foremast shared the bridge, a
funnel and whistle jammed themselves up against the bridge, while the
short distance to the stern rail gave room for a squat cabin out of
which rose the mainmast. A score of Chimbote lanchas were as
big--bigger--and where this telescoped liner would find room for cargo
or coal after providing for engines and a galley is a mystery. Yet it
does carry cargo and ambles along from port to port a tragic marvel of
compression.
The day before, off Huanchazo, where a storm far out had piled up a
heavy, oily groundswell, that even put the racks on the tables, a
wealthy old Peruvian lady had been hoisted abroad in a cask clinging to
her son. She was a garrulous old soul, powdered like a marshmallow, with
three chins and a little moustache, and her son was the very apple of
her eye. Therefore, son was what one might expect. His adolescent and
mature ambition was to be the amorous cut-up of the coast and so far he
had succeeded generously in making a smug, self-satisfied nuisance of
himself. He counted doting mother's allowance publicly, drank warm
champagne noisily when thrifty mother was not around, and dressed in the
Huanchazo idea of French fashions for men. In the morning he did not
appear. Mother explained fondly--but not the truth. She did not know it.
Passengers are warned not to go between decks after dark, the steerage
hutches and the crew have the freedom of that deck. Son prowled down on
some shifty little romantic project of his own. In the darkness he
suddenly felt two sharp little pricks in the skin of his back and one
sharp little prod in front; they felt very, very much like the points of
knives. Up went son's hands promptly and in the blackness he felt heavy
hands pulling out his maternal allowance--the beautiful money with which
he was to flaunt his fascinations in Lima. Hence no Limanean gay
life--mother it seemed was a thrifty Spartan in money matters--and son
was in his berth, weeping. A steward told us the latter, confidentially
of course.
Samancho, Chimbote, Salivari, Suppe, and then at last, in the daybreak
of the morning after the last named and in the midst of a soft, clouded
day, Callao. There was the usual customs search of the baggage--a
maddening process to an Englishman, mildly irritating to a Frenchman,
and accepted meekly and placidly by Americans as a matter of course from
a thorough training in our own home ports. I have never passed through
any country that could give as close an imitation of our own thorough
methods of dock robbery and tariff brigandage as Peru. A quarter of an
hour by train through a rich soil that can be worked only by irrigation
and Lima, the first halt on the continent, has been attained.
For two weeks there was nothing to do but to idle in Lima. A delightful
city full of the old contrasts of highly civilized, sybaritic pleasures
alongside of the squalid, aimless poverty of the survivors of a
devastated empire. There is the Bois where fashionable equipages with
cockaded, copper-colored lackeys--possibly in bare or sandaled feet--on
the box, silver-mounted harness and heavy, Chilean bred coach horses
jingle past in procession on Sunday afternoons while some gallant
Peruano lopes alongside with huge silver stirrups and a saddle almost
solid with bullion; the sodden side streets where the buzzard and the
scavenger pig are man's best friend; the cathedral where lies the
dessicated body of Pizarro in a marble casket like an aquarium, the one
open side covered with glass through which may be seen the remains of
that treacherous old buccaneer, with his head re-fastened by a silver
wire to guard against a repetition of the theft; the cathedral itself
with its murky interior smoked by the votive candles of millions of
conscript converts; its queer carvings where the ecclesiastical memories
of architecture have been freely rendered by the Indian stone-cutters;
the clubs, the cafés--and the ambrosial coffee--chapels with the bullion
covered walls, the wretched tobacco at high tariff--extorted prices--all
these and then the Hotel Maury.
[Illustration: Lima, a Delightful City of Contrasts]
Peace be to Savarin, to Delmonico, and to Chamberlain. They did well in
their way. But they never served a squid, or cuttlefish, floating like a
small hot-water bottle, tender and delicious in an inky sauce of their
own founding; nor a starfish sprawled in a five-pointed dream of savory,
lobster-like succulence; nor "_señoritas_"--a delicate species of
scallop--each with its tiny scarlet tongue draped across the pearl-white
bivalve bosom and that, steamed or not, melted in one supreme ecstatic
flavor; nor five inch _langostin_ fresh from the cold waters of the
Andean hills, nor compounded or invented a strawberry gin cocktail of
surpassing allurement--cooled by a piece of ice kept in a flannel-lined
drawer and returned thereto after stirring. None of these things had
they and so by just that much they fell short.
In the Hotel Maury there was a written bill of fare for those who could
merely read. But for the expert, the fastidious--or the
adventurous--there was a redoubt in the main room whose flanking
bastions and crest were a solid array of great joints and little joints,
steaks, chops, unnamed fish in platoons and señoritas in brigades,
fruits, vegetables and all of the foregoing--and more--laid out in tiers
and terraces whose foundations were of cool, inviting seaweeds and
mosses, and still further seductively embellished with a variety of
paper ribbons and crests and cockades until one almost lost sight of the
pagodas of gaudy, many-storied cakes and confections that rose like
watch towers at judicious intervals along the battlements. It was a
salon.
To the shuffling, woolen-capped, sandaled, or bare-footed Indian at
one's heels the directions were given, you chose what you would as they
thus reposed in the altogether and then repaired to await in a
sawdust-floored cavern at one side and in a state of serene and
expectant bliss the certain pleasures of the very immediate future. You
waited, it is true, at a warped table with a stained cloth on which a
bent cruet supplied the only note of elegance. And, lest any of the
precious viands be lost in transit or breakage, you knew that you would
be served with a substantial, hard-shell crockery only slightly more
vulnerable than reinforced concrete. Presently your Indian reappeared in
a shuffling trot scattering sawdust from the prow of each sandal like a
harbor pile-driver under full speed--the hard-shell crockery is white
hot, but he has the hands of a salamander--and then with a flourish he
drops an assorted collection of tableware somewhere within reach--you
are served. And what a repast! Peace be to Savarin, Delmonico
and--enough. Comparisons are invidious and the Maury can stand alone in
the continent of his choosing.
Very shortly the sailing day came for, since it was not possible to land
in Mollendo owing to that port being afflicted with a quarantine, it had
been necessary to catch a steamer that would put us through the surf at
Quilca, a hole in a cliff that has its only function in these times of
quarantine. A farewell inspection of the redoubt and bastions, a
recharging of the bottle of salicylic acid and alcohol, which while it
had in no way abated the fleas of the Hotel Maury, yet had mitigated
their consequences, and Lima and Callao drifted into the background with
the closing day. From Quilca in some way we would connect by muleback
and packtrain across the desert to the desert station of La Joya with
the railroad to Arequipa and thence to Lake Titicaca and across to La
Paz.
CHAPTER IV
A FORCED MARCH ACROSS THE DESERT OF ATACAMA
The stand-by bell of the _Limari_ tinkled from her engine-room, our
baggage and freight were safely stowed in the wallowing Peruvian lanchas
alongside, and the Bolivian mail followed. The Captain of the Port and
the Inspector of Customs balanced down the swaying gangway and dropped
into the gig alongside. We followed.
Before us stretched the long, barren line of rocky coast, fading away in
the soft mist of a Peruvian winter. For it is winter here, damp and
chill, in September. Directly ahead is a narrow, ragged break in the
cliffs. Inside is Quilca, the side door to La Paz in days of quarantine.
We cross the barrier of half-concealed rock before us, and soon we are
in the smooth waters of the cañon beyond. On either side the red
volcanic bluffs rise for perhaps two hundred feet, their faces scarred
and seamed or beaten into grotesque forms by the Pacific of ages past.
Up this defile we rowed for several hundred yards, then we rounded a
ragged promontory, and the full glories of the metropolis of Quilca
burst upon us. A broken flight of steps led from the water, and, back of
it all, two thin straggling lines of woven-cane huts bounded the
solitary street. Two houses, more dismally pretentious than the rest,
with mud walls and corrugated-iron roofs, marked the local seat of
government. In the distance rose the red volcanic hills, dull, flat, and
shadowless under the clouded sky of the tropical winter. This was all of
Quilca.
We had cabled from Lima for horses and a pack-train to meet us and bring
us over the desert of San José, where we could get the train to the
interior.
The morning after our arrival we were awakened by the clatter of the
pack-mules as they passed our quarters, and the "_Hola, hola! Huish,
huish!_" of their _arrieros_. It was our train.
In the middle of the lone street the arrieros were busy lashing our
smaller packages in rawhide nets. Scattered about in the sand were the
larger cases of freight--prospecting machinery and mining
hardware--amounting to a little over a ton in weight; and still under
the guard of Agamemnon in our quarters of the night was the personal
equipment--trunks, instruments, rifles, shotguns, cartridges and powder
and shot--making nineteen hundred pounds more. And blocking the only
thoroughfare of Quilca were the twelve pack-mules--long-haired,
disconsolate animals, with pepper-and-salt complexions, save where
patches of bare hide showed the chafing of the pack-ropes. They looked
as though our own regulation army load of two hundred pounds per mule
would be far too great. And they were to divide four thousand pounds
among them.
It was eleven o'clock in the forenoon when the last diamond-hitch was
thrown and the last pack lashed in place. The arrieros swung their long,
knotted rawhide thongs, the saddle-galled bell-mare clanged as she led
the way, and we climbed into our saddles and fell in behind the
straggling mules as they led the way up the dismal street and out into
the desert.
The trail rose sharply as it left Quilca, and then wound around to the
right, where it joined the old desert road used by the Spaniards after
their conquest, and for centuries before that by the Incas in their
barter with the coast. On each side rose white walls of rotten rock,
higher than our heads as we rode by, the path between them worn down by
plodding hoofs for untold ages. Upon this path the rock was ground to a
fine white powder that rose in clouds and covered us until we looked
ahead as through the mists of a fog. Vaguely, over the walls, the ragged
volcanic hills silhouetted against the sky.
We kept on ascending between these winding walls, at length emerging on
a narrow table-land--the top of the cliffs we had seen from the decks of
the _Limari_. A short distance over the level ground, and then from the
farther edge we looked down on the flat, stony bottom of the Vitor
Valley--a ragged gorge that wound a tortuous course through the desert.
A narrow trail with short, sharp angles zigzagged down a steep gully to
the bottom. The mules carefully picked their way down among the loose
stones, halting inquiringly at times to choose perhaps a shorter cut. If
it seemed to their instinct feasible, they gathered their hind legs
under them, their front hoofs sticking stiffly out in front, and slid
down on their bellies, in a cloud of dust, carrying with them a small
avalanche of loose shale as they landed in a section of the trail below.
You sit back in your saddle--all saddles in these parts have cruppers
and breastplates to prevent your sliding over the animal's ears as you
go down or slipping off behind as you go up a mountain path--and as you
watch the tossing line of packs below, the speculation forces itself as
to the consequences of a mule's misstep. That it is not all idle
speculation is shown by the scattered skeletons below in the valley,
bleached to varying degrees of dull white.
We do not descend to the pavement of river-washed stones on the bed of
the valley. Twenty yards above, the trail leads abruptly off to the left
into a narrow ditch worn in the face of the cliff, which in places has
been scooped out to allow for the width of the packs, leaving an
insecure overhang of rock above.
For miles we followed the contour of the valley, clinging to the steep
slopes and the sides of the cliffs that hedged it in. Then down a clayey
bank the trail started diagonally across the bottom of the valley to the
farther side. Occasionally we would come suddenly on a little clearing
where two or three Indians, grisly through the ashen grime, were burning
charcoal--little twigs scarcely bigger than one's finger. We came out at
the farther side of the valley against the cliffs of the mesa beyond. On
the little stony flat before them, three straggling huts of woven cane
with thatched roofs of barley straw marked a lonely hacienda. A few
dirty Indians and their slatternly wives lounged about. A short distance
beyond, the trail led over the steep talus at the base of the cliffs;
then on up through a narrow, wedge-shaped crevice that wound back and
forth in short ascending turns, till it disappeared over the edge of the
mesa a thousand feet above. For miles on either side it was the only
break in the cliff; and as we looked at the stiff prospect ahead of us,
the rocky descent of a few hours before seemed like gentle morning
exercise in the park.
For a short distance the trail ran straight up over the loose shale;
then the real ascent began. Ten yards to the right, then ten to the
left, and steeper with each change. The mules humped their backs and
scratched along on the toe of the hoof, choosing their foothold with the
nice precision of a cat crossing a sprinkled street. Two turns to the
right, then two to the left; then a rest of half a minute, when without
urging they would recommence the ascent. Slowly and tediously we
climbed, and finally rode out on a broad, level plateau that stretched
away and merged with the desert hills of the distance. Below us toiled
our pack-train, tediously weaving back and forth on the zigzag trail. As
each section reached the level ground, the arriero dismounted and went
among his animals, talking mule-talk and easing loads to a better
balance or tightening the stretched cinches. All the unkempt, hairy
sides were heaving with heavy breaths. A few lay down--a bad sign in a
pack-animal. But in twenty minutes every mule was apparently as fresh as
ever, wandering about and foraging on the stiff, wiry bunch-grass of the
arid soil. And when we started they stepped off easily under their
loads, with their long ears briskly flapping. The two small arrieros
left us here and returned to Quilca, for the chief difficulties were
passed, and the rest was but persistent plodding over the desert to San
José.
The trail over the plateau had been worn in parallel furrows like the
thin strip of a newly ploughed field. Each mule chose his furrow and
insistently walked there, resenting the effort of any of the others to
get in ahead of him. When a collision occurred you could hear the rattle
of nail-kegs and the clatter of shovels, picks, and hardware a half-mile
off as they butted and shoved for the right of way. Our two remaining
arrieros rode in the rear, muffled in their gaudy woolen ponchos.
Occasionally a lean arm would shoot out from under its folds and the
knotted thong bite the flank of some lagging mule. These mule-drivers'
thongs are long, braided strips of rawhide spliced into the
curb-rein--they use no snaffle--ending in a heavy knot. Its twelve or
fourteen feet lie coiled in the bridle-hand until called into service.
Then with a twist of the wrist, it feeds rapidly out through the right
hand, humming like a sawmill as it circles round his head, and landing
with a thwack that generally corrects the indisposition for which it is
intended. Often the arrieros imitate its vicious hum, and it will
frequently prove sufficient.
The trail was distinct enough--there was no fear of wandering away from
it--a slender ditch worn in the bed of the arroyo. Here and there a
ragged little hole dug in the soft walls of white rock marked the lonely
home of some desert badger; and again we would ride past whole colonies
of them. In these badger villages the holes fairly honeycombed the sides
of the trail and the bluff walls of the arroyos, and the shuffling
claw-marks of the badger trails scarred the dust in all directions.
There were no other signs of life; not even the scaly windings of a
lizard were to be seen, and the sparse patches of bunch-grass had long
since disappeared.
Mile after mile we pushed up these narrow valleys. The badger-holes
disappeared, and strange desert growths began to appear from time to
time. As we had ascended, the clouds had seemed to lower, and now we
could see on either hand the light mists floating about us.
One more steep loomed ahead. We pushed through the damp strata of mists
clinging to its sides, and came out on the flat land above in the long
level rays of the setting sun. Below us, over the clouds, it cast its
cold, blue shadows and sparkling high lights, transforming those
shifting, unstable vapors into rippling waves of golden foam. To the
east the whole desert glowed with color. The long furrows of the trail
wove themselves in patterns of orange and purple. Rolling shadows, rich
in their changing violets, faded slowly and softly away to the left.
Gorgeous reds and scarlets, madders, oranges, crimsons--every brilliant
color of the palette--spread in glowing masses, changing with each
minute of the dying day. The saddle-stiffness, cracked lips, and parched
throat, dry with the alkaline dust, were forgotten--even the dismal
clank of the bell-mare slowly toiling in the lead mellowed to a far-off
chime--and in those few brief moments of the vanishing day we felt the
subtle desert spell.
The shadows grew colder and merged one into another; the desert dimmed,
a few stars glistened, and, as though a door had closed behind us, we
passed into the night. Twilight is short in the tropics. Down by the
horizon on our right the Southern Cross slowly lighted up--four
straggling points of light that feebly struggled with the blazing stars
about them. We closed in behind the swaying shadow of the mules, from
which came the subdued rattle of packs and creaking cinches, that were
the only sounds to disturb the dark stillness. It was but a little way
now; in another hour we would be in camp.
Out of the shadow ahead came the clash of picks and shovels, the rattle
of a load as it struck the sand, and the swaying shades of the mules
divided around a black mass stretched on the trail. It was the first
note of exhaustion. For twelve hours the mules had plodded at the same
steady gait, rested only by the halt on the cliff, miles back, and the
wonder of it was that, with their loads, none had dropped before. As we
rode up we could see against the faint starlit ground the sprawling
silhouette of the beast, lying as he fell, the long, expressive ears
limp on the desert sand. The arrieros dismounted and pried him on his
feet again, and patiently he hit the trail. In the next half-hour four
more went down. At one time half our mules were down, and we strung out
over the desert for two miles picking them up.
A few minutes later we swung off to the right, stumbling through a
series of broken ditches--the remains of the old Inca irrigation systems
that ran for miles back into the Andes. Then we dropped down steep
winding paths, our shoulders scraping against walls of sand as we turned
to the right or left around the corners. The mules apparently understood
that a camp was not far ahead, and seemed fresher. Soon we rode out on a
flat, sitting straight in our saddles once more, with the hard rattle of
stones underfoot and the cool wet sound of running water just ahead.
Then the noiseless, padded ground of a corral, and the mules lay down
and we climbed out of our saddles. It was the camp at last.
A dried old Indian appeared from somewhere, and by the light of his
tallow dip I made out the time--half past three in the morning. We had
come seventy-six miles without water or rest.
At a little after six we were awake. The sun was rising above the cliffs
that lined the valley, though the chill of the night air still lingered.
Coffee awaited us in the openwork cane hut of the Indian proprietor of
this hacienda, and as soon as we finished it we would start. In the
daylight we could see that we were in a broad level valley. Through the
center of the valley ran a brook--a portion of the same Vitor River of
the day before, but now dwindled to a tiny thread. About us clustered a
few buildings with low walls of broken stone from some Inca ruin. A
short distance off was the mission church of the desert, announced by a
cross of two twigs tied with a strip of rawhide and surmounting an
excrescence of broken stones evidently intended as a steeple. We drank
the thick, black coffee, for which the Indian refused both money and
presents, and at seven o'clock we started.
It was all white sand now, and everywhere the same hot, white glare
hedged us in. There was not a breath of air, and as the sun rose higher
it beat down with a constantly growing heat. Then once more out on the
flat desert above. For endless miles it stretched, quivering in the
heated air of the morning. Away down in the east the long line of the
ragged, snow-covered Andes loomed up, their summits thrust through the
low banks of clouds along the horizon. All signs of a trail had
disappeared. The little furrows left by the passing pack-trains were
filled in by the hot desert winds that blow always from the west. It is
the unvarying steadiness of these winds that causes the curious
crescent-shaped dunes of sand found on this desert. There were thousands
of these shimmering in the long distances of the heated glare, from
little ones just blown into existence and not six inches from tip to tip
up to great banks forty feet high and with two hundred feet between the
horns. Superheated puffs of air blew from them that struck like a breath
from the first run of molten slag. The heat crept between your closed
teeth and dried your tongue. When you spoke it was from the throat, and
the words seemed to shrivel in your mouth.
For twenty miles we plodded over the scorching glare, and then, far
ahead, a small dark patch appeared. Slowly it developed and became a
dull, dusty green--scraggly palms and a few peach-trees; then a railroad
station with a hot galvanized-iron roof. It was San José.
In the half-hour to train-time our saddles were off and stored, the
baggage and freight separated and shipped, and we ourselves stretched
comfortably in the shade of the agent's thatched porch. The Arequipa
train backed in, and the agent and conductor loaded the one box car, and
we followed our outfit in.
CHAPTER V
AREQUIPA THE CITY OF CHURCHES
The baking heat of the desert boiled in through the open doors of the
freight car, the blazing sun beat down upon the roof, and, inside, a
thousand essences from its variegated life simmered and blended.
Together with some half dozen of assorted native passengers we had
jammed ourselves in among a jumble of food-stuffs and mining hardware in
transit. The box car banged and groaned and occasionally halted on the
desert at the hail of some wayfarer whom we helped cordially up and
stirred into the odoriferous oven. Sociably we rode in this freight car
up from the desert oasis of San José because this freight car
constituted the whole of the train. Farther on at Vitor there was hope
of a real train.
In the scant space left by the cargo I had wedged myself against a stack
of dried fish while my feet reposed easily on the body of a newly dead
pig on his way to the market in Arequipa joggling in time to the
uncertain swaying of the car; Agamemnon fitted his saddle-stiff joints
into a niche in the freight and went peacefully to sleep, indifferent to
the broken barrel of lime that sifted its contents over him. And so it
was that we pulled in to Vitor, a town that hung on the edge of the
desert from which rose the foothills of the first Andean range to the
eastward. Stiffly we climbed down and out into the heated, but untainted
air and idled in the station shadow until the train should signify its
readiness to receive us.
I was passing through the patio of the station when I was briefly
conscious of a rush, a choked snarl, and in the same instant my whole
right leg seemed to have stepped into a vise clamped to a jig-saw; the
impact spun me half around and I found myself helpless in the grip of a
huge, flea-bitten mongrel that just lacked, by what appeared to be a
mere shadow of a margin, sufficient power to shake me rat fashion. I
judged that it was about eight years afterward when an Indian leisurely
appeared and clattered at the brute. Adroitly it let go and disappeared
before I could get a sufficiently able-bodied rock out of the pavement
for I was unarmed, having packed my gun when preparing to leave San
José.
[Illustration: AN AREQUIPA CARRIER]
But it turned out to have been purely illusion after all, as was
apparent on the assurances of the lean buccaneer who had the restaurant
privilege and acted as station master. There was not a dog about the
place no, señor! I pointed to the dorsal facade of my battle-scarred
person. _Caramba_--investigation, _prontissimo_! The lean buccaneer
called and an Indian responded. It was the same Indian who had driven
off the dog. He listened to the buccaneer. Then he replied at length and
with gestures. I listened, but it was in Quechua they spoke, a dialect
that sounds not unlike German interspersed with an occasional vocal
imitation of a brass band. The buccaneer again turned to me:
"Señor, it is as I said. There is no dog,--there has been no dog,--I
have no dog--it is a very great pity,--I sympathize!"
It revealed to me a power of imagination I had not suspected myself of
possessing, though Agamemnon who was pinning up the rents and counting
the punctures still regarded it as an actual occurrence.
The blistering hours on the trail across the desert had left us as
parched as a dried sponge, crackly and dusty and with brittle, peeling
skins ravenous for moisture. Outside the newly made-up train on either
side straggled a collection of grimy, sand-blown Indians--mainly
women--peddling queer, uncertain foods from earthen pots or battered tin
cans that were in great demand among the sophisticated natives while, on
a higher plane of dignity, a fat, placid Cholo sent the first native
urchin on whom his eye fell into the station presently to deliver to you
a bottle of unripe, bilious beer as warm as the hot shadow in which it
had been kept. Its color, foam, and the characteristic shape of the
bottles were means of identification, but, with the eyes closed, it did
not differ materially from catnip tea or any of the old home remedy
stand-bys. And never did an orange look more nobly luscious, for the
round, unripe, green skin of the native product enfolds a heart of
nectar.
From Vitor on we wound through twisting gorges or steep valleys, barren
of all save cactus and the desert shale and boulders. Steadily the train
climbed. Always on one side or the other were the traces of the old Inca
empire and its industrious dominion; here a fragmentary stretch of road
and a ruined gateway, now and again the almost obliterated ruins of some
old town or village, but always, running along the sides of the steep
hills or through the valleys, the dusty remains of a tremendous system
of irrigation ditches. Where once has been a busy land, soft with the
green of growing things, there are the cactus and the badger and the
occasional baked-mud hut of an Indian wringing a dull living from the
desert, Heaven knows how, where his ancestors once farmed and throve in
multitudes.
[Illustration: In Arequipa the City of Churches]
The contrast stirs the dullest fancy. And on the side of the spoilers
for their gains? Only the dessicated remains of a treacherous old pirate
that may be viewed--for a very moderate tip--through the side of a
marble aquarium back in Lima as a cathedral curio and, in Europe, an
asthmatic and toothless Spain drained to decrepitude by her own
remorseless greed and predaceous piety.
In the long rays of the sunset the train rolled across the level
stretches of the high valley in which lies the city of Arequipa. The
low, flat houses--more or less earthquake proof--and the red tile roofs
were radiant in the mellow glow. Beyond rose the dull, volcanic slopes
of Misti in an immense cone, while best of all, in the one story hotel
of rambling patios in that city of earthquakes we were once more able to
collect sufficient water at one time to accomplish a bath. In Arequipa
the first train stops exhausted; _mañana_, or at the worst only a few
days later, a second train leaves to climb the first high pass and leave
its passengers on the shores of Lake Titicaca.
Throughout the city there is scarcely a building that cannot show
patched cracks or gaping cornices that are the scars of earthquakes;
here and there a heap of rock and plaster or fragmentary walls abandoned
to the Indian beggars mark the years of great _temblors_. Rarely does a
private house attempt a second story and the marvel is how the churches
or the cathedral, with their high walls and towers, have been able to
survive at all! Though often cracked and battered, yet in some way they
have weathered the subterranean gales.
And what a city for churches! On every street, on all but every turn,
there rises an ecclesiastical edifice with its grim walls of faded,
peeling kalsomine and its porticos, perhaps ornamented with odd stone
carvings that preserve a strong Indian flavor in spite of the old
monkish guidance. Whole blocks in the heart of the city are bounded by
enormous walls enclosing the sacred precincts of a convent or monastery.
I was informed that out of every twelve inhabitants, men, women, and
children, one was in some of the many orders behind the high walls. Each
day in some part of the city is a fiesta in honor of some particular
saint who is heralded and honored by a vast popping of firecrackers,
squibs, and rockets and a grand procession through the neighborhood.
Often several saints' fiestas fall on the same day and from all
directions come the rattle of firecrackers and the plop of the daylight
bombs or rockets and any casual stroll will bring one against a
procession heavy with the smoke of incense or uncanny with the thin,
wailing chanting of the celebrants.
[Illustration: HARDLY A DAY WITHOUT ITS SAINT'S FIESTA.]
The whole city centers around an extraordinarily large central plaza on
one side of which is the ancient cathedral with its tiers of bells in
the bell tower still lashed to the massive beams by rawhide thongs. The
remaining three sides are business arcades of small shops, the pastries,
and cafés; the bullet chipped arches still confirming the earnestness
with which many a civil election has been contested between the liberal
and the clerical elements after the returns were counted--or, quite as
often, during that process.
The chief industry is in a few machine shops and central supply houses
for the mines of the interior. Outside of this there is nothing. A few
small shops with the cheapest and shabbiest of stocks cluster around the
plaza; on Sunday that same plaza is scantily filled with the select of
Arequipa while the stocky police keep it cleared of the tattered urchins
and Indians of the weekdays. There is the dull, oppressive sense of
wretched poverty or genteel destitution. It is in the sharpest contrast
with the general run of other and typical Latin cities; the whole city
seems to have become encysted in a hopeless poverty in which any form of
local energy is permitted to find expression only in ecclesiastical
fireworks or mystical parades of wailing and incense.
The start from Arequipa up to Lake Titicaca is made in the early
morning. The huge cone of Misti--looking for all the world like a vast
slag dump--stands forth with telescopic detail in the high, rare air
mellowed in the cool morning sun. Prickling and glistening on the even
slopes or in the purple shadows, the frost still clings like a lichen to
the barren rocks and there is a thin touch of briskness in the air like
the taste of fall on a September morning back home.
[Illustration: AN ANDEAN TOURING CAR]
Down at the station the departure of the train is in the nature of an
event like the sailing of a steamer. Already the train--one first-class
and two second-class coaches--is filled, aisles and seats, with a
shuffling crowd already in the ecstacy of a noisy and mournful, but
interminable leave taking. Their view of the hazards of a journey by
rail may not be so far out of the way for on the steep grades of these
Andean roads a train has been known to break in half and go scuttling
back down hill until the hand-brakes take effect; also, and later, on
the ancient engine I observed with interest the native engineer screw
down his throttle and then, in starting, bang it open with a monkey
wrench.
Presently, as the hour of departure drew near, the conductor appeared
and began sorting out the passengers. _Rebozo_-muffled ladies and
Peruvian gentlemen who failed to show tickets and who had been
picnicking in the seats burst into one final explosion of embracings and
goodbyes before descending to the tracks where they took up a position
alongside the car windows. The second-class were not admitted to their
hard benches except on proof of actually possessing a ticket, but the
stubby trainmen had their hands full in keeping the car door clear for
they were continually choked with Cholo or Indian groups committing last
messages to memory. Their windows were jammed with heads and clawing
arms exchanging or accepting dripping foods wrapped in _platano_ leaves,
bottles of _checha_, or earthen pots containing Heaven knows what.
At last the whistle screamed from the engine, a bell tinkled, and the
train moved out in state to the demonstrations of the populace. The car
was but moderately filled; a couple of _padres_ from Ecuador--one a
political refugee--a tonsured monk, a couple of black-robed nuns, and
three engineers, together with an assortment of Peruvians--the women in
the shrouding, tightly drawn _rebozo_ of funeral black against which the
heavy face-powdering showed in ghastly contrast--and a couple of small
children who turned up at intervals from under the seats, grimed with
train cinders and ecstatically sticky with _chancaca_, a raw sugar sort
of candy. And in every vacant seat was baggage, native, hairy rawhide
boxes shapeless from the many pack-mule lashings, paper bags, and
pasteboard hat boxes and bandanna bundles and somewhere in the
collection each Peruvian seemed to be able to draw on an inexhaustible
supply of the Arequipa brewed, bilious, green beer.
CHAPTER VI
THROUGH THE INCA COUNTRY
Slowly at first we rose, skirting the great foothills or gently
ascending valleys and always crossing some dismantled relic of the dead
Inca empire. Then we plunged boldly into the mountain chain teetering
over spidery bridges across gorges whose bottom was a ribbon of foam or
where the rails followed a winding shelf cut in the face of the
mountain, where an empty beer bottle flung from the car window broke on
the tracks below over which the train had been crawling a quarter of an
hour before. With the increasing altitude--the summit of the pass was
still ahead and something over fifteen thousand feet above sea
level--the soroche, mountain sickness, began to be manifest in the car
in deathly, nauseating dizziness until it closely resembled the
woebegone cabin of a sightseeing steamer at a yacht race. The engineers
had been discussing the traces of the old Inca works with special
reference to their irrigation systems, of which there was generally a
ruin visible out of one window or the other. Special emphasis had been
laid on the total lack of survival of any instruments or methods by
which this hydraulic engineering had been calculated or performed. There
is a trace of one irrigation ditch something like one hundred and
twenty-five miles in length--a set of levels for such a project even
to-day would be a matter for nice calculation. The Incas simply went
ahead and did it, some way. Their engineering had been turned over and
over and compared with the great engineering works of antiquity.
"Cut and try," said one engineer in conclusion; "that was the way these
old Inca people made their irrigation systems. Put a gang of Indians to
digging a ditch from where the water supply was to come; then let in the
water as they dug--in a little ditch--and dig deeper or dike it up to
the water level as it showed in the trench. When they had that little
ditch finished there was their level; all they had to do was to dig it
as big and deep and wide as they wanted."
It looked reasonable; there was no dissent. We swung around a curve and
a vista opened out of a ragged valley, broken by gorges and cañons with
sheer walls of soft rock.
One of the other engineers chuckled. "Look at that!" He pointed up the
valley and his finger followed one of the cañons. "How did they cut and
try on that proposition?"
There, for as far as the eye could follow the turnings of the cañon way
was the line of a ditch, an aqueduct, that hung some twenty to fifty
feet below the edge of the cliff. It had been cut into the wall of rock,
leaving a lip along the outer edge to hold in the current. Here and
there, where the ragged trace of the cañon made projecting, buttressing
angles, the aqueduct had been driven as a short-cut tunnel straight
through. Here and there great sections of the cañon walls had fallen,
while occasionally it appeared as though the outer lip had been
destroyed by man-made efforts--one of the old Spanish methods of
hurrying up a little ready tribute--but never had there been a
possibility of using any "cut and try" method of its construction.
"Well," remarked the first, "there goes _that_ theory--and it isn't
original with me either--for I reckon they had to run that level first
and chalk it up on the rock to cut by in some kind of a way."
It is a trifle staggering, when you think of it, that a nation that was
able to solve engineering difficulties like these, to turn an arid
desert into a teeming farm and to organize and administer a vast empire,
should have been wantonly destroyed all for the lack of a little
knowledge of the combination of saltpetre, sulphur, and charcoal. And
the wretched waste! Think of that church-benisoned riffraff of the
medieval slums, recognizing only the greed for raw gold, wasting a whole
people in torture to satisfy the rapacious gluttony of a Spanish court.
Sometimes the train crawled along no faster than a bare walk, so steep
were the grades and sharp the turns. There was nothing of the scenic
splendor such as one may get in the railroads among the Alps of
Switzerland and where, as one climbs, one may look down and back into
the green landscape of a panorama. The scale was too great, the sense of
proportion and distance was subdued; a stretch great enough for a Swiss
panorama was one vast gorge twisting its way among the vaster masses of
the Andes. The crest of the pass itself was higher than Mount Rainier.
Sometimes the train passed over high plateaus where occasionally in the
distance could be seen the low house of some hacienda or the grouped
huts of Indians while beyond in the great distance the plain was rimmed
with a jagged line of snow-capped peaks. The winds swept across the
level stretches, raising an assortment of sand-spouts and dusty
cyclones. They were of all sizes, from tiny _remolinos_ that died in a
few puffs to towering whirlwinds that spiraled fifteen hundred feet in
the air with a base of fifty feet that juggled boulders in its vortex
like so many cork chips. They would move leisurely for a short space and
then dart like a flash in an erratic path. Sometimes fifteen or twenty
of these would be in sight at the same time. Herds of llamas grazed over
the plain, sometimes a flock of sheep or an occasional horse, each with
a wary eye on the whirlwinds; if one approached too near they galloped
off. Not infrequently a herd of guanacos would gallop off at the
approach of the train or could be seen grazing in the distance.
From beyond the high plain the grades lessened and the train rolled
along at a fine speed--for South America. At rare intervals there was a
station and a short stop, usually the lonely outpost of some mining
company. Then the grades began to slope our way and in place of the dry
bunch grass there were rolling hills and gentle valleys of soft green
grass. Little lakes nestled in the hills, their cold waters black with
wildfowl that scarcely fluttered up as the train shot by. We were making
the slight drop down to that vast inter-Andean plateau that stretches
from Bolivia on up into Ecuador.
A cold winter sunset sank beyond the cold purple of the western peaks; a
couple of feeble, smoking and smelling oil lamps irritated the darkness
and added their fragrance to the close atmosphere--for in the bitter
winds and biting cold of the high altitude the windows had long since
been closed.
Juliaca was reached, a junction by which one may connect for Cuzco, the
old Inca capital. It showed in the blackness as a few dingy lights. Here
the car emptied itself of all but half a dozen bound for Bolivia across
the lake. Once again we wheezed under way and presently with a grand
celebration from the engine's whistle the train pulled slowly into the
train yards of the terminal at Puno and as we climbed out there came the
light, musical splash of freshwater surf and the unmistakable smell of
water. Dimly under the starlight there loomed the form of a boat and the
dim reflecting surface of the water was picked out by the dark patches
of the native Indian craft. It was the great Lake Titicaca.
Down at the end of the stone dock lay the _Yavari_ a slim, patched boat,
twice lengthened, whose hull and engines had been packed piecemeal on
the backs of burros, llamas, and mules over the Andes to the Titicaca
shores over fifty years ago. It had taken a year to do it. It was the
first steamer on the lake and wonderful was the amazement of the native
population as they beheld this veritable monster of the seas--some sixty
feet in length--shoot mysteriously through the water at the prodigious
speed of some seven miles an hour.
Forward, on either side, was an array of tiny staterooms, each about the
size of a wardrobe into which penetrated a most grateful warmth from the
boilers. A scrap of tallow candle threw the suspicious looking bunks
into shadow and it was not long before I was in one under my own
blankets. From the little cabin aft came the clatter of the native
travelers over a late lunch served by a bare-legged Quechua sailor; it
was in the main some kind of a hash preparation loaded with _aji_, a
venomous pepper that will penetrate the stoutest stomach. I had tried it
and having been both warned and punished in the same mouthful, I was
glad to seek the wardrobe bunk to weep it out of my system in cramped
solitude.
In the first streaks of dawn the _Yavari_ backed out from the long dock
and swung out upon the crystal-clear, blue waters of Lake Titicaca. On
the other side of the dock at a disabled angle and under repairs lay the
more pretentious steamer _Coya_--literally the _Inca Queen_--with
diminutive bridge and chart-house and all the trappings of a deep sea
liner shrunk and crowded into small compass. Varieties of water fowl
dotted the water's edge in large flocks busily at breakfast and almost
indifferent to the occasional straw or rather reed canoe of the Indians.
All day the _Yavari_ skirted a coast that rolled back in long hills or
at times came down to the lake in a steep bluff. Very slowly the lake is
receding. Old Inca towns once evidently on the shore line are back from
the water; since Pizarro's time the distance is a matter of miles. In
the little party on the boat the old tales of the Inca gold and
Atahualpa's tribute became naturally a leading topic. The country from
the highlands of Colombia down to Chile are filled with legends of
secreted treasure and lost mines or caches, for Pizarro did not wait for
Atahualpa to pay his ransom--he burned him at the stake when he realized
that the Inca emperor could actually get together a council chamber
packed to the ceiling with raw gold.
There were scores of llama trains coming down the Andes from the
uttermost parts of the empire, a veritable flood of gold was on its way
to secure the release of the sacred Inca chief. It never arrived and
somewhere up and down some three thousand miles of Andes there are
legends galore of Inca tribute treasure concealed by the Indians on the
burning of their king. There are legends of monkish parchment maps left
by early missionaries that locate rediscoveries with apparent exactness
up to certain points, of mines relocated by accident; in one case, a
drunken Scotch donkey-engine driver took up and finally married a
wretched Aymará mine-woman, a half-human creature; she finally revealed
to him the location of one of the old concealed mines and the two worked
it together. As the story runs, they acquired fabulous wealth, he longed
for Scotland and went back taking her with him and importing for her use
the _chuno_ and _chalona_ that was her only food. He played fair.
Finally he died there and his widow managed to get back to her own
mountains where she was finally poisoned for her money or her secret.
Legend also has it that around the city of Cuzco--the seat of the
Incas--there was a great golden chain and that this, upon the approach
of Pizarro, was dropped into Titicaca. It is always a steamer discussion
as to how soon the lake will have receded enough to make its discovery a
matter of possibility. At the possible place where it was dropped in the
engineer of the _Coya_ holds that the lake has receded some six miles
since the conquest.
There is also the legend of the immense treasure train coming down in
sections from what is now Colombia and Ecuador which was on the mountain
trails at the time of Atahualpa's death; evidence is said to exist of
the despatch of this gold which would have more than completed the
ransom. It never arrived, it was never heard of again after the burning
at the stake, but it is a common belief to-day that there are many
Indians to whom these matters are tribal secrets. There are common tales
of odd Indians, neither Quechua nor Aymará, those being the two great
Indian divisions, suddenly appearing from time to time and taking part
in some Indian fiesta of peculiar importance, although evidently all the
fiestas now have been given an ecclesiastical significance--and then as
completely disappearing. There are rumors of tribes and even cities
buried in the eastern slopes of the Andes from which these irregular
excursions come.
Skirting the shore until the late afternoon, the _Yavari_ struck out
into the ocean horizon that stretched away in the blue distance, until
we raised the Island of the Sun and the Island of the Moon. The former
is reputed to have been the summer residence of the Incas and there
still remain the ruins of palaces together with a great basin or
reservoir hewn from the solid rock and traditionally known as the Inca's
bath tub. To the other island is ascribed the home of the wives and
concubines of the Incas, or perhaps a training school where they were
domiciled until, like an army reserve, they were called to the colors.
From each of them the _Yavari_ took on a little freight, a few sacks of
_cebada_, barley, and chuño, the little, dried up, original, native
American potato, not much larger than a nutmeg. The cargo was on board a
heavy, sluggish reed boat, a big affair in which burros and even
bullocks are carried to or from these lake islands--of which there are
many scattered here and there--and the mainland.
All the western slopes of the Andes are treeless, the high plains are
treeless, and the few poles that are used in the thatched roofs of the
Indian huts are dragged out from the _montaña_, as the interior over the
final Andean passes is called. These skinny little poles are regular
articles of trade. Therefore, the Lake Titicaca Indian has evolved his
reed canoe and boat.
The reed, which grows along the shores of the lake, is bound in round
bundles tapering at both ends; these bundles in turn are lashed together
to form the canoes, from the little bundles to the larger boats that can
carry freight. Sometimes a mat sail, also from these same reeds, is
hoisted on a couple of poles lashed together at the apex and at the base
braced against the inside of the clumsy craft. The steering is done with
an oar made from a pole and a board, while similar oars are used by the
crew who drive a wooden pin for an oarlock at any convenient spot along
the reed-bundle gunwale. In this kind of an outfit they put out on the
lake fishing for the little fish that alone seem to have survived in the
cold waters, or shuffling across the waves from the coast to one little
sugar-loaf island after another in their native trade. In Pizarro's day
it was probably the same--costume, craft, and barter.
[Illustration: In Pizarro's Day It Was Probably the Same--Costume,
Craft, and Barter]
One more night in the cramped wardrobe of the _Yavari_--during which my
solution of alcohol and salicylic acid procured in flea-bitten
Lima--against other similar emergencies--did valiant service, and in the
morning we awoke to the clatter of the Indian mate and his Quechua crew
as they made the little steamer fast to the dock at Guaqui. From here a
railroad runs over a continuation of the level high plain and past the
ruins of Tiajuanaca to the edge of the plateau above La Paz. The valley
of La Paz is a vast crack torn in the level plain as by some primeval
cataclysmic blast; on the farther side there is the tremendous peak of
Illomani with a cape of perpetual snow far down its grim flanks; far off
in the ragged valley and some two thousand feet below the railroad
terminal is the capital of Bolivia, La Paz. Once no trolley wound its
way down the steep sides, and in those days there still gathered at the
station every Deadwood and express coach that had ever existed at the
north. A crew of runners would meet the train, pile all the freight and
passengers that were possible inside, lash the rest on the roof, and
then with their four or six horse teams--never an animal free from a
collar gall--on a dead run race for a place at the edge of the mesa in
order to be the first on the winding trail that led downward to the
city. Whips cracking, horses on the jump, coaches swinging and banging,
here a hairy rawhide trunk goes off, and there an Indian hotel mozo is
snapped straight out in the rush as he tries to crawl up on the baggage
rack behind; and then the dropping trail in a whirl of dust over a road
scarcely better than a dry creek bottom until, at last, over the rough
cobbles of La Paz itself, to pull up at the door of the hotel with the
rough horses in a lather and with white eyes and heaving sides. That was
the way it was once. Now it is different; you can ride down sedately in
a trolley car and walk into the hotel with never a hair turned.
CHAPTER VII
OUT OF LA PAZ BY PACK TRAIN
Here in La Paz were completed the final arrangements for reaching the
interior; this was the last of the easy traveling, from now on it would
be by pack train and saddle, raft and canoe, and to gather them we
advanced from one interior town to another as best we might. It was the
third and last of the Andean series that was to be crossed, and it was
also the highest and hardest. Daily we haggled with arrieros over pack
mules or rode to their corrals in the precipitous suburbs of the city
and between times there were the odds and ends of a big outfit to be
filled in and the commissary to be stocked. It was the last place where
the little things of civilization could be procured, for there was but
one more real settlement, Sorata over the first pass, that could be
counted upon for anything that had been overlooked. And then one day it
appeared as though we were complete.
[Illustration: HAGGLED WITH ARRIEROS OVER PACK MULES.]
The arriero came around and weighed the cargo and divided it in rawhide
nets, equally balanced, according to each individual mule's capacity and
then even before daybreak on the following morning we were off.
It seemed like midnight. The dead, still blackness of the night, with
the lighter crevice of gloom that marked the dividing-line between the
curtains at the window gave no indication of dawn, and only the echo of
the little tin alarm-clock, with its hands irritatingly pointing to the
hour of necessity, indicated that at last the time was at hand for the
actual entry into the vague interior of South America. A thin tallow
candle glimmered in the high-ceilinged room and illumed flickering
patches between the areas of cold, uncertain darkness, and by its light
I scrambled into breeches, puttees, and spurs, and buckled my gun under
my heavy, wool-lined jacket. Down in the patio I could hear an Aymará
scuffling about in his rawhide sandals, and as I stepped out on the
balcony above the patio, a thin drift of acrid smoke floated up from
where he was cooking our tin of coffee over a clay fire-pot with llama
dung for fuel.
Below my window, up from the narrow street there came the shuffling
noises of the pack-train--the creak of rawhide cinches, the thud and
strain of the packs as they came in restless collision and now and again
the "Hola! hola!" or "Huish!" of an arriero or more often the long-drawn
hiss of a rawhide thong. Then the pack-train lengthened in file, and the
noise died away up the crooked, narrow street. The few final necessities
of the trail I jammed in my saddle-bag as the last mule was packed; then
had a cup of coffee, steaming hot, although only comfortably warm to the
taste from the low-boiling point of the high altitude, and we climbed
into the saddle and were off.
The city of La Paz was still in darkness, but above the rim of the great
crack in the depths of which it rests there was a suggestion of a silver
haze that dimmed the stars. The streets were deserted except for an
occasional scavenger pig grunting restlessly on its way. Sometimes a
little Bolivian policeman, in heavy coat and cape, and muffled to the
eyes in a woolen tippet, would peer sleepily from the shelter of a great
Spanish doorway, and then, observing our solemn respectability, sink
back into the comfortable shadow. By the time we had rejoined the main
body of the pack-train we were in the shabbier outskirts of La Paz,
where the Aymarás and the Cholos--the latter the half-breed relatives of
the former--live in their squalid mud-brick hovels.
[Illustration: Prisoners Along the Trail up from La Paz]
The streets were wider now, in fact they were nothing but a series of
ragged gullies, along whose dry banks straggled the grimy dwellings.
Always, in some of them, there is a _fiesta_ of some kind, a birth, a
wedding, a death, a special church celebration, or perhaps some
pantheistic festival that still lingers in their dulled history and has
prudently merged itself with the piously ordained occasions. The orgy of
the night is past, yet from here and there come the feeble tootings of a
drunken flute, an instrument that every Aymará seems to be able to play
as a birthright, whose mournful and monotonous strains drift through the
thin air from some less stupefied celebrant.
The Aymará love of their primitive music is very strong; it is universal
among them and, while their primitive flute, pandean pipe and crude drum
interpret the joy ordinarily, yet they take cheerfully to any new form
of musical instrument, and in some miraculous way learn, in time, to
produce the same series of ragged, droning sounds. The accordion,
concertina and mouth organ are much beloved and once I even heard a
self-taught Aymará band of brass horns, cornet, tenor horn, bass, and a
slide and key trombone, playing the Aymará airs with their own home-made
orchestration. The government bandmaster had drilled a large military
band that used to give concerts twice a week in the plaza and there was
not an approach to a white man in the outfit, it was composed wholly of
Cholos and Aymarás from the little boy drummers to the great horns that
curled like a blanket-roll over the shoulder.
Rapidly the first silver of the morning deepened to richer tints and
glowed above the purple silhouette of the rim of the great gorge, while
Illimani, the perpetually snow-capped mountain that overshadowed La Paz,
burst into splendid prismatic bloom as the first direct rays of the sun
shimmered over its slopes and ice peaks; below, the gorge and the city
slowly lightened and glimmered in detail through the frosty, early
morning mists. The thin bitter air of the night was gone; it was cold
still, but the thin high air held in some indefinable way the promise of
a seductive warmth.
The long line of pack mules climbed steadily upward; the rambling,
hovel-lined streets were gone and only now and then we passed a little
mud hut with its one door as the sole aperture, the headquarters of the
tiny Aymará truck farm. The acrid smoke from their cooking-fire leaked
through the blackened roof and rose in little spirals straight up
through the still air, while the members of the household squatted in
the chill sun, muffled to the eyes in ponchos and with woolen cap and
superimposed hat drawn down to meet the mufflings, squatted in the
chilly sunlight. They muffle themselves in this way at the slightest
suggestion of chill in the air; but from the thighs down they are
indifferent to cold or storm. It makes no difference if they are in a
blizzard blowing over one of the high Andean passes, they will trudge
along with legs bare to above the knees, but with heads and throats
muffled deep in woolens. I have seen them make a camp in a driving
snow-storm and go peacefully to sleep with their heads carefully
enshrouded, and awake at daybreak none the worse for the experience,
though their bare legs were drifted over with snow and their sandals
stiffened with ice.
Along the road that climbed up the side of the great crack in the high
plateau that formed the valley of La Paz, little groups of Aymarás who
had camped there during the night were packing their trains of llamas
and burros for the last short distance in to the La Paz markets. Often,
without taking the trouble to cook, they would gnaw on a piece of raw
chalona--the split carcass of a sheep dried in the sun and cold of the
high plateaus--which has about as much flavor as an old buggy whip.
Sometimes they ate parched corn or _chuño_--the latter the native
potato, shrunken and small after the drying in the high air in the same
treatment as the chalona receives--and tasting very much like a cork
bottle stopper. But always they chewed _coca_, the leaf that furnishes
cocaine. Leaf by leaf they would stow it away, and add a little ashes
and oil scraped out of a pouch with a needle of bone. Among the older
Aymarás, the cheek frequently has developed a sagging pouch from the
years of distention with _coca_. Aside from that, it seems to have no
effect upon them.
The Aymará pack-trains of burros would pass us with indifference, half
hidden in great sheaves of _cebada_--barley--or with chickens slung in
ponchos on either side and with only their heads visible and swaying in
time to the gait of the burro. But the llamas would go mincing past,
crowding as far as possible against the other side of the road with an
obvious assumption of fright. Their slitted nostrils would twitch and
their slender ears wiggle in an agony of nervousness, while their eyes,
the most beautiful, pleading, liquid eyes in the animal world would be
humid with hysterical fear. Yet from their infancy they have seen men
and horses, pack-trains, and all the travel of the mountains and
plateaus. But the apparent gentleness of the llama is purely
superficial; for it can spit with unpleasant accuracy to repel a frontal
approach, while its rear and flanks are guarded by padded feet that are
vicious in their power and uncertainty. To the Aymará the llama is
transportation, food, wool, and fuel. An Aymará child can do anything
with a llama, and with nothing more than her shrill little voice; but in
the presence of a white man it is a creature of hysterical and timid
peevishness.
[Illustration: AYMARÁ DRIVER OF PACK LLAMAS.]
[Illustration: MEMBERS OF A GANG OF PRISONERS.]
As we filed by these pack-trains, the Aymará driver would remove his
native hat of coarse felt, leaving the head still covered by his gay,
woolen nightcap with its flapping ear-tabs, and murmur a respectful
"_Tata!_" to which we would politely return a "_Buenos dias, tata,_"
unless the driver happened to be a woman, in which case we would
substitute the corresponding "_Mama_" for the "_Tata_." The women would
plod along barefooted while they spun yarn from a bundle of dirty, raw
wool held under one arm. As the yarn was spun, it was gathered on a
top-like distaff dangling at the end of the woolen thread. In some
miraculous way it was never permitted to lose its spinning twirl, and at
the right moment always absorbed the additional thread, so that it never
was permitted to drag along the trail. At her little home somewhere on
the inter-Andean plateau, she will afterwards dye the wool and knit one
of those night-caps or weave a poncho, according to some rough tribal
pattern, so tight that it will shed water as well as a London raincoat.
Her loom will be two logs laid on the ground, on which the warp is
stretched; the shuttle will be carved from the bone of a sheep, and the
threads will be beaten into place with the sharpened shin-bone of a
sheep. Weeks may be spent in the patient weaving. Whether she is on the
trail or is weaving, she has usually a pudgy, expressionless baby of a
tarnished copper color held in the fold of the poncho that is knotted
across her shoulders. Sometimes a prosperous Aymará gentleman, with his
pack animals, passed us and then he was apt to be accompanied by several
Aymará women and their assortment of tarnished copper babies, the women
being his wives, who assist in the heavier work of driving and packing
with complaisant domestic affection.
This road up from the great, raw gulch of La Paz was full of life;
pack-train after pack-train passed, loaded with the daily supplies for
that city. All of the trails of the high plateau above converge to feed
it and it broadens out into a real road, no longer a trail, under the
needs of the heavier traffic. A group of sandaled soldiers was
apparently detailed to act as road-masters; and they would stop the
Aymarás and enforce a bit of labor in aid of the gang of prisoners under
their guard. The instant dull and sullen submission of the Indians at
once indicated their position in the Bolivian scale.
[Illustration: THE GUARD FOR THE ROAD MENDERS.]
Steadily during the early morning hours we climbed, until the rim of the
high plateau itself was only a short distance ahead. Worn through the
rim by generations of plodding hoofs was a crooked trail, so narrow that
the mules bumped and scrabbled along, and we emerged, as through a
trap-door, out on the endless distances of the vast inter-Andean
plateau. Below, losing itself in the distant haze, stretched the ragged
crack that made the valley of La Paz and miles away, quivering in the
slowly warming air, was the city itself, a tiny clutter of gaudy houses
and red-tiled roofs, with the brilliant green of the little park making
a sharp contrast in color. Elsewhere the slopes of the valley were as
destitute of verdure as when they were blown into existence by the
terrific forces of primeval nature. Yet in this desert barrenness there
was no lack of color; in the cool of the morning the shadows were soft
in every delicate variation of purple and amethyst; the bare soil and
the jagged slopes blended and shifted in ochers and vermilions, in
golden tints and copper hues and, scattered here and there, were little
patches of greens where some little, irrigated Aymará truck-farm was
breaking into the world against the moist chocolate-colored soil.
Beyond--and in their immensity there was no suggestion of their great
distance--rose the jagged fangs of the last and most interior range of
the Andes, with their black cliffs and scarred flanks disappearing under
the everlasting mantles of snow; over all, was the clear, shimmering
turquoise heaven of the high altitudes.
[Illustration: WHILE RODRIGUEZ AND HIS CHOLO HELPERS TIGHTENED THE
RAWHIDE CINCHES AND REPLACED THE PACKS.]
Down in that valley were the little cafés, the little shops with
imported trinkets, the plaza Sunday afternoons with the band and the
parading élite and all the little functions of civilization, yet this
city is fairly balanced on the edge of the frontier, while beyond were
the high passes and the vague interior of South America, the last of the
great primitive domains, where men still exist by means of bow and arrow
or stone club, and where the ethical right and the physical ability to
survive are yet indistinguishable.
From this edge of the plateau the narrow trails run in all directions
like the sticks of a fan. Trained from many previous trips, the
pack-animals halted or wandered aside, nibbling at the tufts of dry
bunch-grass, while Rodriguez and his two Cholo helpers tightened the
rawhide cinches and replaced the packs that had shifted in the long
climb and scramble through the narrow gully. Then, with the bell on the
leading pack-animal tinkling monotonously, began the steady plodding in
single file along one of the furrowed trails.
CHAPTER VIII
THE BACK TRAIL AMONG THE AYMARAS
At first the plateau was dotted with the lines of converging burro- and
llama-trains, but, as the morning passed, there was nothing but the
lonely distance of the plateau, with here and there a tiny speck of a
solitary pack-train. The air had warmed rapidly under the sun; the light
breeze had the touch of a northern spring, and I yielded to the
seductive suggestion and strapped my heavy woolen coat to the saddle.
Five minutes later I halted and gladly put it on once more, for the thin
air was treacherous in its allurements.
Somewhere about the middle of the day we halted for breakfast at Cocuta,
a native _tambo_ or wayside inn, though the pack-train pushed on slowly,
nibbling the bunch-grass as it went. The tambo was surrounded by a high,
thick mud-brick wall that inclosed something over an acre of ground, and
inside this fortress were the little mud buildings, granaries, and
corrals. An old Aymará woman cooked our breakfast over a llama-dung fire
in one corner of the room, and it was served on a rough table over by a
dried mud bench that was built against two of the walls. The filthy room
was lighted only by the small, low doors, the high, mud sills of which
still further shut out light and ventilation, and the fetid atmosphere
was rich in its ethnological and entomological suggestion. A chicken
soup, reeking with the mutton tallow of chalona and with the head and
feet of the fowl floating in the grease, made the first course; then
came _lomita_ (the tenderloin of a steak), and eggs fried in mutton
tallow. We produced some coffee from the saddle-bags and the old woman
fluttered about and brewed a pretty fair article. It was at this same
Cocuta, on another occasion, that, in riding to La Paz, I ran into a
band of drunken _ladrones_ and, as some of the band took the trail after
me, it gave a most unwelcome and interesting zest to the rest of that
night ride.
That night we slept in a second tambo, smaller, but also with a thick
mud wall inclosing the collection of mud huts. The mules were turned
loose on the plateau to graze till morning, their hobbled feet a
guarantee of their not straying. At sunset came the piercing cold, when
even the barricaded door of the mud room and the steaming human warmth
inside proved grateful. A wide platform of mud-bricks was the bed--it
was the sole furniture--and on it we piled the sheepskins from the
pack-saddles, and over an alcohol lamp we made a thin tea and warmed up
some tinned things. An old Aymará woman was apparently the sole
caretaker of this tambo, but she viewed us with unlovely eyes and would
furnish nothing. Sullen and surly that night, she was all ingratiating
smiles the next morning when she saw my camera. She scuttled inside her
hut and then reappeared in some hasty finery, in which she trotted
anxiously about with conciliatory grimaces and pleadings in guttural
Aymará that her picture be taken. How she knew what a camera was for
and, further, why she was not afraid of it were mysteries, for
invariably I found all other Aymarás hostile against the evil witchcraft
of the little black box. As it was yet only early dawn, there was not
sufficient light, but I satisfied her by clicking the shutter.
After the heated air in the dark hut, the first moment outside in the
pure, still cold was like breathing needles; the long stretch of plateau
was soft with white frost, every grimy straw in the thatched roofs
glistened like silver with its coating of ice, and the morning ablutions
were performed through a hole broken in the crust of ice in a near-by
brook. A cup of tea boiled over the alcohol lamp was the only breakfast,
and then we started. As we climbed into the saddles the old Aymará woman
hovered in the gateway clucking pleased Aymará benedictions for her
photograph.
For some reason of his own Rodriguez elected to leave the main trail
beyond this tambo and take one of the little-used back trails to Sorata.
It was very much shorter but, as we afterward learned, is little used on
account of the surly, hostile attitude of the Aymarás of that district
and, except for a large outfit, is not considered safe. Here the Aymarás
are more secluded and view intrusion with aggressive suspicion; three
months before they had attacked an outfit and killed the trader. Those
who passed no longer greeted us with the "Tata!" Instead, they would
turn sullenly out of the trail to avoid us as we passed, or stop and
view us with unmistakable hostility. When we halted for a hasty bite by
the side of a cold brook, Rodriguez held the whole pack-train and the
arrieros close by, and did not allow them to go ahead, as on the day
before.
Just before branching off into this unused trail we came upon a large
party of Aymarás carrying, in relays, a stretcher on their shoulders
that was inclosed with cloth, so that it resembled a sort of palanquin;
six of them were carrying it at a time in a ground-eating dog-trot and
about each half-mile they would be relieved by six others, the transfer
of the stretcher being effected without jolt or jar. It proved to be a
wealthy Bolivian _haciendado_ who was ill, and was being carried in this
simple ambulance to the doctors in La Paz by his own Indians. The trot
and the burden were nothing to them; I have seen an Aymará boy carry
forty pounds on his back and trot hour after hour without apparent
difficulty and come into camp at night but little behind the mounted man
he was accompanying. Yet at this altitude, unless one has become
gradually accustomed, even walking is a heavy effort.
[Illustration: AYMARA HERDERS PLAYED THEIR WEIRD FLUTES.]
On the new trail the dead level of the plateau gave way to more rolling
country, the ragged, snow-capped line of mountains at the horizon came
closer; Huayna-Potosi loomed on our right, and, growing more impressive
every hour, was the great, white mass of Mount Sorata, dead ahead. Then
the rolling country closed in, and narrower valleys succeeded, with the
rugged foot-hills on each side. In this part was an enormous
breeding-ground for llamas; for miles the hills were dotted with them.
Baby llamas, very new, and still blinking at the strange world, huddled
timidly in behind a tuft of bunch-grass or behind some small boulder,
while the queer, goose-necked mother stood near with apparent
indifference; little llamas in all stages of adolescence and awkwardness
gamboled on the hillsides, and herds dotting the slopes looked for all
the world like big, stiff-necked, grotesque sheep. Among them were the
Aymará herders who, like traditional shepherds, played their weird and
mournful flutes or pipes. Over and over again came the same strain,
which carried for miles in the thin, still air.
One of its little phrases curiously reminded me of that chanted taunt of
my boyhood, "Over the fence is ou-oot!"
Rarely does the Aymará make his own flute or pipe, simple though it is;
their manufacture is a native industry by itself. Like a true musician,
the Aymará must have his instrument just so, and up in the higher
altitudes the flutes are made and brought down to be sold in the market
on the days of fiesta. His single weapon, a sling of the pattern made
famous by David and Goliath, is of twisted llama-wool, and will throw a
stone the size of a lemon. They develop a wonderful skill in its use.
On this lonely trail we came upon a castle, a veritable castle of the
story books! Alone, grim and battlemented, it stood boldly outlined
against the landscape. It was not large, but it was, or had been,
perfect in every medieval detail, and was constructed of mud bricks from
outer walls to keep. There was a moat, dry and unkept and now fallen
upon evil days; the high surrounding wall was loopholed, and the fringe
of battlements had been eaten away in places by the driving storms. The
keep was visible rising above the wall, while galleries and overhanging
balconies showed the purposes and possibilities of protection, even
should the outer wall be successfully stormed by some ancient foe; the
single, heavy outer gate in the wall was barred, and not a sign of life
or of a retainer was to be seen. For miles around the country was
deserted and bare, and in the desolate mountains remained this substance
of the past like a grim, dramatic ghost of ancient days. Back on this
unused trail it is but little known; Rodriguez knew of it, but that was
all, except that he had a very positive idea that its owner or occupant
did not care for visitors--but it was occupied.
Monotonously through the afternoon the pack-train wound through the
narrow valleys, and closer came the mountains and more chill the air
sweeping downward from their fields of snow. The melting snows flooded
the slopes and valleys in innumerable brooks; often the trail itself was
lost in wide expanses of icy water. The sun set, and with growing
darkness came the increased bitterness of the piercing cold. Along this
trail there was no shelter except here and there the little mud huts of
the Aymará.
The clouds rolling low overhead left the night pitch-black; a gale of
wind sprang up and hurled itself in our teeth, varying its monotony now
and again with a squall of snow that stung like a blizzard. Without a
stumble the sure-footed mules kept the trail in the darkness up and down
through abrupt gullies or fording some icy stream that left their
bellies a fringe of icicles, while, during some lull in the blast, the
tinkle of the bell on the leading pack-animal would drift back to us.
At last the old, deserted tambo for which we had been aiming was
reached. By the aid of a few matches--for the lantern was carefully
packed on some mule indistinguishable in the blackness--half a dozen
Aymarás were found sleeping in the litter on the floor of the mud room,
for here there was not even a mud bench. There was no barricade to close
the door, and a score of eddies whirled in from the broken thatch
overhead. The arrieros drove the Aymarás out--they were part of a
pack-train, and not natives of that district--and threw the sheepskin
pads over the muddy ground. The alcohol-lamp, screened from drafts by
saddles, sheepskins, and hats, finally furnished a lukewarm tin of soup,
some thin, warm tea, and some eggs, which though warm, could hardly be
considered cooked. The bitter wind swept through the openings, and no
candle could survive, so purely by a sense of touch the frozen spurs and
puttees were unbuckled for the instant sleep that came, clothes and all.
At the break of day we were again in the saddle. The trail the previous
day had been hard and rough, but following a general level; but from now
on it began steadily to rise. Early in the morning we had gained upon
Mount Sorata; in the deceptive distance it loomed apparently only a few
miles ahead, yet its nearest snow-field was thirty miles away. Lake
Titicaca is only a few miles distant, and one of its long arms reaches
back into the country in a vast, shallow lagoon covered with a water
growth through which swim myriads of fearless water-fowls. In some
ancient time a causeway was built over this long arm, solid and
substantial, and on each side, as we passed over, ducks and snipe and
waders eyed us impudently, the length of a fishing rod away, and one, a
snipe, flickered along almost under the heels of the pack-mules. Off in
the distance was the old Aymará city of Achicachi, still surrounded by
the remains of an old mud wall that dates from before Pizarro, where the
frosted thatch and tile roofs glittered in the sunlight against the
distant cold blue horizon of Lake Titicaca.
Beyond the causeway the trail rose steadily to the mountain pass. The
cold mists from Sorata swept down and the line of mules disappeared in
its chill fog. It thins, slender wraiths of eddying vapor drift past,
and we ride through the ruins of an ancient Aymará town where there was
nothing left but the rectangular lines of stone débris; the few streets
were still plainly marked, though the village has been dead these many
centuries. Its name is lost; it is not even a tradition. From under some
ruined rubbish an Aymará head was thrust out, framed in the acrid, thin
smoke from the wretched, make-shift hut; a few sheep were herded within
the ruined inclosures, and other small flocks were grazing near. The
head proved to belong to their shepherd, tending them until the time of
their transmutation into chalona.
[Illustration: The Few Streets Were Still Plainly Marked, Though the
Village Has Been Dead These Many Centuries]
Now and again an Aymará shrine loomed through the mist beside the trail,
in its niche an offering of wilted flowers and some cigarette pictures,
and above, in a crevice of the stones and dried mud, a crooked twig
cross. Sometimes we met an Aymará, with a bundle of reeds, sitting in
the shelter of a rough stone wind-break making and testing his reed
flutes. He whittled the reed and tested each finger-hole as he scraped
it larger. He looked up, and again we were saluted with the respectful
"Tata!" for in order to reach the last stage of the mountain pass we had
swung back on the main trail, where the Indians were more sociable. More
stone and mud shrines appeared, each with its offering of propitiation
to the gods of these higher places and each with its twig cross above.
Higher, rougher, and steeper grew the trail, often in a zigzag up some
precipitous gorge. A tiny, scattering Indian village came in sight,
Huaylata, perched on a high, rolling part of this Andean pass. Its mud
huts were smaller, grimier, and drearier, if possible, than those that
we had passed on the great plateau. A few Aymarás appeared and tried to
sell us _cebada_, or barley, for the mules; an old woman, squatting on
the ground, weaving a poncho on her log loom, stopped long enough to
look over our cavalcade curiously out of her bleared eyes red with
smoke. Through the little door of her hut the interior was visible,
stacked with chalona half prepared and waiting for the sun to shine
before it was moved out into the open ground for further drying.
Indifferently she watched me extract the camera from my saddle-bag, but
when the brass lens pointed in her direction, she clattered vigorously
in her dialect and scuttled into the house to hide. The other Aymarás
were instantly hostile, and I worked a scheme that had often succeeded.
I turned my back to them and reversed the camera, with the lens pointing
backward under my arm. This would almost invariably get the picture. If
it did not, I would stand behind the broad shoulders of one of the party
while I adjusted the camera, and then have him step suddenly to one side
as I pressed the button. Otherwise they would scatter like a flock of
Chinamen under similar conditions, and with angry mutterings.
CHAPTER IX
OVER THE FIRST GREAT PASS
The intermittent fog and mist turned to a cold rain that drove in
stinging gusts square in our faces. Slowly we climbed, and went a few
miles beyond the divide. A huge pile of loose stones marked the spot, a
tribute to the particular god of this high place that had slowly
accumulated with the offerings of Aymarás that had passed the spot. The
pile was larger than an Aymará hut, and on the summit was a little cross
of twigs from which a few strips of calico fluttered in the gale. At the
base were curious little altars made by two flat stones laid edge up,
and with a third long, flat stone across them. They symbolized a house
and were erected by some prospective Aymará bridegroom or house-builder
in propitiation for his enterprise. The cross that surmounted all of
these shrines and piles of stone has been readily adopted by the
pantheistic Aymará, who is only too fearful lest some unknown god may
have escaped his efforts at placation. Around the base of the cairn were
the withered and frost-bitten remains of floral offerings and also the
scraps of cigarette pictures, the latter, from their invariableness,
apparently one of the chief delights of the gods.
[Illustration: BLIZZARDS BLOWING OVER THE ANDEAN PASSES.]
At rare intervals some eddying rift would be blown in the mists, and for
a brief moment Mount Sorata would stand clear and sharp against the blue
patch of sky, with its great white shoulder scarcely more than five
miles away across a precipitous gorge. High above our world it seemed to
rise, a titanic, bulking, cataclysmic mass, magnificent in its
immensity. Enormous cliffs of snow towered above the scarred, black
gorges of its flanks, glittering in the flash of momentary sunlight and
iridescent in the purple shadows. High against its face clouds were born
and were shredded in the blast of an unseen gale; now and again an
avalanche of snow broke from some slope and was whirled in a feathery
spray into the shadows of a gorge thousands of feet below. It could
blanket a dozen villages, yet it was diminished on the tremendous slopes
until it seemed no more than the tiny avalanche on a tin roof at home;
before it can fall to the depths of the gorge a gale has caught it and
it is blown in a stinging blizzard half way across the mountain's face.
Vertically, nearly two miles above the trail across the divide, rose the
white fang of the summit, that has still defied all efforts at scaling;
there, according to the Aymará belief, is the chief treasure of the god
of the mountain, a great golden bull. The generous pantheism of the
Aymará has given a similar golden treasure to the summit of Illomani
back near La Paz, but in that case, in order that the balance of
conflicting religions might be kept, it is a huge cross of gold.
The difficulties and inaccessibility of these mountains conveys, to the
Aymará mind, the idea that they are inhabited by the most powerful and
exclusive of the gods. That hint of exclusiveness is enough for them and
only with the greatest difficulty have they been prevailed upon to
accompany the few climbing expeditions, while weird stories still
circulate among them as to the howling and malignant devils that ride
the storms in the great gorges high up. The Aymará is already supplied
with enough lesser deities that require continuous and troublesome
propitiation so that he does not care to go out of his way up into
Sorata and incur another, and possibly hostile and irritated theistic
burden.
After the cairn that marks the divide is passed, the trail leads
abruptly downward. At first it is a relief to lean back in the saddle
and feel the strain come on the crupper while the breast-strap flaps
loosely once more, but hour after hour of constant descent and the
constant straining back in the saddle become more irksome and monotonous
than was the leaning forward on the upward climb. The mists and cold
rains blow in lighter patches and with a softer touch; even occasionally
the deep valleys below can be seen marked out in irregular surfaces of
soft green where the Aymará farms are budding. The descent is rapid; the
pack-train coils about among the buttresses of the mountains along a
broad shelf that is often cut into the steep slopes, and always plunging
downward. We were almost below the line of clouds, and a few moments
later they were drifting past just overhead, and there, far below us,
stretched the deep, crooked valley of Sorata.
It was the very heart of the Andes. In the wedge-shaped channel of the
tortuous valley a slender thread of white torrent narrowed and
disappeared in the haze of depth and distance; the huge mountains swept
upward like the sides of a great bowl, while delicately floating strata
of fleecy clouds seemed to mark off and measure and then accent their
enormous altitudes. Beyond and above them rose other peaks and the
jagged fangs of interlocking mountain-ranges that formed this colossal
Andean maze; there was no sense of distance; even the feeling of space
seemed to be for the instant gone, and under the long, mellow rays of
the afternoon sun, with this vast, shattered universe spread before us,
it was as though we had been suddenly translated and left dizzy and
bewildered in an opalescent infinity.
The Aymará huts that clung to the steep slopes with their little patches
of corn were shrunk to miniature; the single bull plowing with a crooked
tree-trunk was a diminutive bug, prodded along the furrow by a
microscopic insect. All the air was filled with the low roar of
cascades; every slope and valley was scarred with the slender, white
threads of torrents from the melting snows above. Far ahead, where the
buttress of a mountain projected like a hilly peninsula into the Sorata
valley, a toy village of scarlet tile and thatched roofs was compactly
lodged on the flattened crest. It was the village of Sorata, clinging
like a lichen to a spur of the huge, overhanging mountain from which it
takes its name.
Late in the afternoon, although the gorge had long since been cool in
the shadows of the inclosing mountains, we crossed the old Spanish stone
bridge that still spans the torrent of melted snows, where an ancient
mill remains to testify to the enterprise of the early Spanish
adventurers. A short climb up the steep promontory to the village, and
we clattered over the paved streets and on into the patio of the sole
_posada_, the old bell-mule leader trotting in with the easy familiarity
of many previous trips.
The proprietress, a plump Cholo lady, made still plumper by the many
skirts of her class, all worn at once, so that she swayed and undulated
like an antebellum coquette, fluttered about in welcome. Her pink
stockinged legs--the skirts come just below the knees--and fancy slashed
satin shoes, with the highest of high French heels, teetered about the
patio and over the rough floors, giving orders to a drunken Aymará cook
and a small Aymará boy, who proved to be the chambermaid. Gracefully she
joined in a bottle of stinging Chilean wine and bawled further orders
for our comfort out into the shuffling kitchen. At supper we had
soup--chicken soup, with the head and feet floating with the chalona and
chuño. There followed a kind of melon, scooped out and loaded with
raisins and scraps of pork and whatever other scraps and vegetables were
at hand, blistered with _aji_, the fiercest and most venomous pepper
known to man.
A real lamp and some flowers graced the bare table and, after the filthy
mud huts and smoke-impregnated tambos, with their acrid smoke ingrained
in the walls and thatch, the tinned food warmed by the futile flame of
an alcohol lamp, this posada glowed with a gaiety and cheer that could
not be duplicated. Damask and cut glass could have added nothing to the
table; even the smelly lamp glowed with a seductive radiance in the
balmy atmosphere, and reminded us, by contrast, of the tallow candles on
the plateau above, where the icy wind blew them to a thin spark of
incandescence.
[Illustration: SOLDERING THE FOOD IN TIN CANS.]
Here it was necessary to stop and rest the mules for the second and
hardest stage of the journey over this Andean pass. Besides, with the
more difficult trail ahead the loads of the mules must be lessened. More
mules were needed, and more supplies--the staples--corn, chalona, chuño,
and rice, and those to be soldered in tin cans where the storms of the
mountains and the rapids in the cañons of the interior could not spoil
them. Rodriguez pastured the outfit somewhere up the valley until it was
again ready; then one day the arrieros were busy weighing the packs,
balancing them and lashing them in the nets of rawhide for the easier
packing and adjustment.
Again it was in the pitch blackness that precedes the break of day that
we climbed into the saddles for the long pull over this highest and
hardest pass that leads into the great tropical basin, the heart of
South America. Salmon, a huge black who had drifted in from Jamaica and
who baked Sorata bread and attracted the Aymará custom in the plaza on
fiestas by whirling in a grotesque dance of his own devising, shuffled
down the steep street from his oven to see us off. The huge muscles of
his half-naked body rippled in massive shadows in the fading darkness;
heavy silver rings dangled from his ears against the black, bull neck
and matched the brass and silver with which his fingers were loaded.
He spoke no connected language, for his wandering had left him with a
scanty and combined vocabulary of English, Spanish, Caribbean French
patois, and a sprinkling of Aymará. He was nothing more than a pattering
savage, although never for an instant did he forsake the proud dignity
of his British citizenship. Once, as a gift, he prepared for us a salad;
but as there was no oil to be had in Sorata, with sublime unselfishness
he dedicated one of his own bottles of heavily scented hair-oil to the
salad dressing!
He stuffed a bottle of atrocious brandy into my saddle-bag, and added a
pious "Lord bless ye, sar!" for he was a Methodist, and on Sunday
afternoons, in support of his orthodoxy, appeared in the plaza loaded
down with massive silver ornament, a frock-coat, a battered silk hat
balanced on his shaven, bullet-head, a heavy, silver-studded stick, and
a black volume under his arm. As there was no chapel, this illusive
church stroll was purely a surviving symbolism.
The jam of pack animals in the narrow street straightened out under the
stimulus of the arrieros' rawhide thongs and we clattered by the little
plaza and on up a narrow, rain-washed gully flanked with the thatched
mud huts of the Aymarás, on past the walled cemetery and into the steep
trail that led up the mountains. High above us the peaks were still
hidden in soft masses of clouds that were already golden under the first
rays of the morning sun. The trail wound in and out, following the trace
of the steep foothills that buttress Mount Sorata, but always rising,
sometimes abruptly, and then again in a series of steadily ascending
dips along a succession of narrow ledges.
[Illustration: SCATTERED IN HYSTERICAL FLIGHT UP AND DOWN THE
PRECIPITOUS SLOPES.]
On one of these narrow ledges we came around a corner suddenly on a
large pack-train of llamas and on the instant they scattered in
hysterical fright up and down the precipitous slopes with the
sure-footedness of mountain-goats. An hour later we could still see
their Aymará drivers, far below us, crawling over the slopes with the
slings hurling pebbles at the stupid beasts in their efforts to collect
them on the trail.
[Illustration: SKIRTED THE BASE OF AN UNBROKEN CLIFF.]
Rapidly the semi-tropical vegetation that flourished in the lower
altitude of the village of Sorata disappeared; more rugged and hardier
shrubs succeeded, and these, too, in their turn disappeared and nothing
was left but the storm scarred patches of high pasture. Above these the
wet, black rocks of the Andes thrust their jagged masses into the air in
sullen cliffs surmounted by snow-capped minarets and pinnacles. Only
once I saw a condor, for they are not common, sailing lazily a couple of
hundred feet below us. It was a distinct disappointment. The white puff
of downy feathers about the neck identified it, but amid these
impressive surroundings it seemed no more than a sparrow flitting about
in a down-town city street.
For miles we skirted the base of an unbroken cliff that rose three
hundred feet sheer from the trail, and then suddenly came upon a ragged
break in the wall that accommodatingly opened a passage where the trail
climbed to meet it. The narrow passageway was as dim as the dusk of
evening; it zigzagged through the cliff in a series of high steps cut or
worn in the rock; the high walls on each side and its tortuous turnings
shut out all light except such as fell from the illuminated strip of sky
above. Here and there tumbled walls of stones suggested the possibility
of ancient barricades, and no more weird a setting could be devised to
set a fanciful adventure afloat in fiction.
That night we made camp in the open in a little gorge, and sheltered
ourselves in the lee of an enormous boulder. The packs were piled in a
wall, and over this the tent was thrown and held down by heavy stones. A
blinding snow-squall roared through the narrow gorge as through a pipe;
later it changed to a stinging blizzard, where the tiny particles of ice
stung like a sand-blast. There was no fuel for a fire, and only by
carefully barricading the alcohol lamp could a little thin tea be
warmed. That, together with cold tinned things and a nip of Salmon's
effective brandy made shift for dinner.
The tough little mules, hobbled and turned out to graze among the shale
and thin, snow-covered grass, made no effort to seek a lee shelter and
wandered about, indifferent to the gale. An Aymará family, driving a few
burros packed with rubber, spent the night in the lee of a small,
overhanging rock. There was a baby not two years old in the family, yet,
without a fire and with nothing but raw chalona, they made their
customary camp. Their heads were heavily muffled as usual, but the dawn
found their bare legs drifted over with five inches of snow, and
apparently comfortable and indifferent to the fact.
CHAPTER X
THE TOLL GATE AND MAPIRI
Packing the mules in the bitter winter dawn was slow work. The rawhide
lashings were frozen stiff; our saddles were covered with sleet, before
we could mount and swing into them; two arrieros were drunk together
with Agamemnon, but the latter alone was helpless and useless after the
tender care he had bestowed on a secreted bottle of alcohol. His usual
chocolate grin was lost in the agonies of "de mis'ry in de haid, sar,"
and, utterly dejected, he rode along with his wooly skull naked to the
sleet and with an ice-coated sock as a bandage to keep it within the
normal circumference.
[Illustration: ANDEAN MOUNTAINEER.]
Whatever course the trail turned, the blizzard seemed to shift to meet
us again square in the teeth. The shale and débris along the narrow
ledge of trail was treacherous with an icy glare. The saddle buckles
were knots of ice, and every now and then we beat our hats against the
mule to break the ice that encrusted them; on my poncho the sleet froze
in a thin sheet that would crackle with any movement and rattle off. The
particles of ice and snow did not fall as in a self-respecting gale, but
were whipped along in the blast in streaks that never seemed to drop. In
the high, thin air, the bitter cold of the storm seemed to bite like an
acid. Even though the mules were mountain-bred, the rare air of this
high pass affected them and as we climbed higher, they began to halt
every fifty yards for breath, with their icicled flanks heaving in
distress. In a moment they would start on again of their own accord, yet
sometimes in the fiercer blasts of the storm only the constant spur
would keep them in the trail and headed for the pass above.
At last there was the feel of a level stretch under hoof, and there
loomed the big mound of stones, with a twig cross on top and its strips
of calico whipped to shreds; the summit of the pass had been reached.
The small house-builders' altars at the base were drifted over with
snow; a few twig crosses sticking out of the snow marked the Aymará
graves of some who had been of mark among their people, for it is a
great and desirable honor to be buried high up among the mountain gods.
The lesser Aymarás, dying on the trail, are left, or rolled over a
convenient steep slope. In the lee of the stone cairn a solitary Aymará
was resting; his coarse, woolen trousers rolled above his knees, his
feet bare. His eyes grinned at us from out the poncho mufflings, and I
recognized him as a little Indian who was picked out to carry for us a
long cross-cut saw that was too awkward to be lashed on a mule. He dug
the saw out of a drift to show us that it was still safe, and for less
than two dollars he delivered the saw after a six-days' journey across
the pass and into Mapiri, his only equipment for the trip being a small
bag of parched corn, a chalona rib, and the invariable pouch of coca.
Late in the afternoon we rode into the Aymará village of Yngenio. There
had been but a slight drop since leaving the summit and the rocky pocket
in which the village exists was covered with a light snow. The Aymarás
here are miners and looked with unfavoring eyes on the outfits passing
through. There was an empty house of dry-laid stones with a tattered
roof of blackened thatch that was used as a public shelter by any
passing party, and a walled corral into which the mules were driven.
[Illustration: There Loomed the Big Mound of Stones, with a Twig Cross
on Top]
In this village the huts were chiefly of stone chinked with mud and
grass; some even rose to the dignity of two stories with a rough ladder
leading above. Three mountain torrents joined in this gulch to form the
Yngenio River. The Aymarás bed these torrents with flat stones in the
dry season and after the next high water has passed, wash the fresh gold
brought down in their wooden pans. But all about were the ruins of
elaborate ancient gold workings that indicated that this was one of the
centers from which the Incas drew their enormous golden treasure. All
along the gulch as we rode in there were the broken openings of tunnels
and drifts high up on the mountain-sides. Some had been concealed by
walling up and this had been torn away by some later Spanish prospector
or had tumbled in during the course of time.
There were the remains of a great flume and of the stone-laid troughs
where the streams were diverted and laid their nuggets in the crude
riffles--even as they still do in other Aymará workings. Near the
junction of the three torrents there was an immense rectangular pile of
carefully laid stones, with carefully constructed ramps leading from one
level to the next. Throughout this district there were also many little,
low, round stone huts that reminded one forcibly of the Esquimaux
_igloo_; they were of great age, their arches had fallen in, and the
stones were black with the centuries of aging.
The present day Aymarás raise a little corn and potatoes for chuño, some
sheep for chalona, while a few muscular pigs make the razor-back seem
fat by comparison. The arrieros foraged among the huts for cebada for
the mules and a chicken or some eggs for us, but the Aymarás either had
none or else surlily refused to sell, but there was fuel and with that a
fine hot tinned dinner was prepared.
The following day the pack-mules filed from one hog-back mountain ridge
to another, crawling up the steep ascents or gingerly picking their way
downward over an intricate system of connecting mountain series. Hour
after hour the bitter winds blew without rest. At times we would be a
long column on some ridge that dropped away on either side in a steep
declivity; the great depths, whenever they became visible through a rift
in the clouds below, gave the valleys beneath the blue haze of distance,
while a glass revealed the heavy vegetation, the palms, and the mellow
glow of warm sunlight. Farther on the trail would cling, a mere ledge,
to the side of cliffs where the melted snow, dripping from the stirrup,
would fall a couple of hundred feet sheer.
On the narrow ledges of the trail there were the most abrupt turns and
sharp angles and often a rough series of steps up which the mules would
clamber in plunging jumps. There was no danger as long as one put faith
in the mule and did not attempt to over-balance him by leaning too far
to the cliff; those sure-footed animals have no desire to kill
themselves or slip carelessly and they may be implicitly depended upon.
In one particularly bad descent known as the "Tornillo" no one rode
down. It was a zigzag trail apparently cut in the face of an almost
perpendicular cliff, and the arrieros took the pack-train down in
sections, so that, in the event of one mule stumbling, it would not bump
half the others over the edge.
Just beyond the "Tornillo" we passed a llama train. One of the Aymarás
came toward us, one arm supporting the other at the wrist and his face
drawn with pain and fright, chiefly fright, out of all proportion to the
simple sprain. He stopped uncertainly, a short distance off, and
repeated, "Tata! Tata!" over and over, plaintively pointing to his
injured wrist. It was a simple matter to bind it up and throw in a few
impressive and magic gestures, and with a distinctly beneficial effect,
for he began to grin cheerfully. The pain was nothing; it was the fact
that he had fallen that had worried him. The Aymará, as sure-footed as a
goat or one of his own llamas, a mountaineer by birth, is worried when
he stumbles and falls; it is one of the very local gods clutching at
him, and every one knows the powerlessness of a mere mortal when a god
gets after him.
Months later, in a little interior village in the _montaña_, I met this
same Aymará. He came forward grinning and beaming and then, about ten
feet off, shuffled from one foot to the other in respectful and
embarrassed gratitude. Evidently the magic gestures had done their work
well and had so far frustrated the peevish god who had been after him.
In bandaging him my hand had slipped over the muscles of the arm and,
although they lay without tension, they were like bundles of steel
cables; in that stubby, squat figure lay the strength of a gorilla. In
La Paz I had seen the Aymará _cargadores_ walk off with three hundred
pounds of flour--sometimes more,--and carry it with ease half a mile in
that rarified atmosphere. Another time, at Guaqui, a _cargadore_ picked
up with his shoulder rope a piano in its case, and carried it across the
tracks of the railroad yard.
That night we camped in a tiny stone hut built by the government on a
high, mountain promontory where the clearest weather known is a dull,
depressing, drizzling rain. An outfit of Aymarás were already crowded in
and Rodriguez hustled them out again, in fact, they were already packing
up their scanty outfit preparing to move when they saw the mules coming.
Outside in the mud, there were the remnants of a human skeleton, picked
clean by the eagles and tramped carelessly in the mud. The skull hung
from a stick jammed into the wall of the hut.
"Aymará!" remarked Rodriguez contemptuously, as he pried it out and
tossed it over into the cañon below. That was his delicate tribute to
the sensitiveness of the gringoes who, he thinks may not fancy a skull
as a wall ornament.
With this camp, the last of the high pass was over and in the gray dawn
we began the long descent out of the clouds, the sleet, the snow, and
the bitter rains. The bare cliffs and slopes gave way, and stunted
shrubs appeared now and then even a gaunt tree reared itself, and,
perched on a dead branch, an occasional buzzard or eagle looked with a
speculative eye at the mules and the steep descents. We dropped through
long distances of sunlight that glowed with a grateful and novel warmth,
and once in a while a brilliant little bird flashed past, while gorgeous
butterflies began to flutter about the mud-holes. The eastern side of
the Andes drop in a succession of forest-clad cliffs; looking up and
back, it seemed at times hardly possible that a trail could cling to the
steep face. Many of the hardest have names--Amargarani, the "hill of
bitterness"--Cayatana-y-huata, the "place where Cayatana fell" are
directly suggestive.
There is no more telling strain than leaning back hour upon hour as the
mule picks his way downward, but it is forgotten in the relief of
basking in the mellow rays of the long afternoon sun, and it was
grateful that night to be able to undress in place of turning in "all
standing," except for spurs, and in place of the howling gale and the
snow that sifted through the crevices, to hear the soft rustling of the
night-blown palms. An open-work hut of split palm and cane was kept here
by a Bolivian who was under some kind of vague government subsidy, and
under his palm roof we slung our hammocks.
His Aymará wife was stolidly indifferent to our presence, but a little
daughter--a mere baby she would be considered back in the States--had an
unbounded curiosity in the white men--white men especially who wore
queer, transparent stones set in glittering frames before their natural
eyes. A watch was even more mysterious, "Ah," she announced, "there is a
bug inside!" Following the matter up, she decided that the watch was a
bug itself and marveled greatly that a full-grown man should bother to
carry a bug about on the end of a little string, unless--aha! it was a
magic, and she dropped the watch, nor would she touch it again. Thereat
she showed me a scapular and offered to take me up the trail a bit where
there were some graves and I could see some ghosts, and perhaps talk
with them, as she did. Not among any of the Aymarás was I ever able to
notice any particular interest or fear in regard to their dead. Their
trails are scattered with graves and mountain tragedies, they believe in
spirits, but the almost universal fear of ghosts, dead spirits, or
cemeteries after dark is apparently lacking. In fact, in Sorata, it was
no common thing to hear them drinking and celebrating under the cemetery
walls far into the late hours.
Pleasantly from here the rest of the trail ran on down into Mapiri. The
giant foothills of the Andes surrounded us, but they were covered with
forest and jungle, and for miles we would ride in the cool shade where
the trees were matted overhead by the interlocking jungle-vines. Little
trails opened off now and again from the main road, and often would be
seen the cane hut of some pioneer. Down the valleys were patches of
sugar-cane, with the smoke of a _falca_, alcohol-still, rising close by,
and as we rode closer, the smell of burned sugar where _chancaca_,
something like maple-sugar in appearance, was being poured into molds
gouged out of a dry log.
Occasionally, in the forest, a thin column of blue smoke showed where
some rubber-picker was smoking his morning's collection of rubber milk.
On all this the sun beat with its full, tropical strength, and the raw
fogs and blizzards of the high pass seemed to be months behind us.
Coffee, tea, and tinned things, but now comfortably warmed or gratefully
cool, were served alongside the trail at the brief noon-day halt and
what was left of a bunch of bananas cut from the patch in the camp of
the previous night added the final touch. In the cool of the early
evening we rode into the village of Mapiri, and the saddles were taken
off and oiled and packed for the last time. From here on the journey
would be by raft and _batalon_ on the rivers. The mountain trail was
ended.
The village has a long, grass-grown plaza on two sides; toward the muddy
Mapiri River the plaza is open, and the entering end is blocked by a mud
church with a mud-walled yard, loopholed and battlemented. Once a year a
priest makes the trip to Mapiri and down the river, performing his
offices as they are needed. He blesses the graves of the dead, christens
the living, and performs canonical marriages for those who desire, and
can afford, the luxury.
A squat Cholo welcomed us; he was the head man of the settlement and
gave us one of his houses for our headquarters. While he talked with us,
a monkey climbed up his leg and coiled its tail affectionately about his
neck. A pink-faced little marmoset, with a black-tipped tail, overcame
his first nervousness and chattered at us from the refuge of the eaves,
while a thin, waving spider-monkey cooed with weird, sprawling gestures
at the end of his tether, and from the high, peaked roof a dozen parrots
shrieked their evening songs to the sunset. The Cholo's wife, a thin,
shrewish Aymará, viewed us with disfavor; for days she refused to sell
us eggs while we were waiting for the rafts to arrive, and then she
threw away five dozen that had spoiled on her hands. When her Cholo
husband saw this lost profit he said nothing, but that night sounds that
suggested a primitive family discipline arose in his household and
pierced the little village.
CHAPTER XI
WAITING FOR THE LECCOS
FOR a month we waited in this tiny straggling rectangle of thatched huts
before the _balsas_ or _callapos_ could get up to us to move our outfit
down the river. Somewhere below us on the turbulent river Lecco crews
were toiling up against the current, dragging and clawing their way
through narrow cañons, hanging fast in places to the bare rock, and
again helped by the long, tropical vines that drooped to the swift
water. Twice they had been beaten back by sudden rises in the river; the
third time they got through, although two balsas had been wrecked and
for the past two days they had lived mainly on the berries and leaves
along the jungle banks.
A splendid lot of half-civilized people, tremendous of muscle and
capable of prodigious feats of strength and endurance on their rivers;
ashore sober and diffident, afloat on their rafts, by right of an
immemorial custom they are always drunk and serenely confident in their
intuitive skill.
For twenty-four hours after they arrived on the hot stone beach below
the bluff on which Mapiri lived they drank and feasted and slept and
then their head man, a Bolivian refugee, announced that all was in
readiness. The gang of workmen we had chartered were collected and
counted and then assigned to the three callapos, a queer lot, but in the
main fairly promising for our purposes.
One was a negro who had been a rubber picker down the river before.
During his absence his wife had left him preferring a gentleman of
lighter color, but who had only one eye; some frontier mechanic had
hammered a patch out of a silver coin and then engraved with a nail the
ragged outlines of an eye, which the owner proudly wore as a most
elegant makeshift. Both of these gentlemen were in the outfit and
ordinarily both would boast in the utmost good nature of their
fascinations with the ladies--except when they were in process of
getting drunk. And on the Bolivian frontier getting drunk is recognized
as a perfectly legitimate pastime. There are no games, no concerted
forms of amusement, the montaña offers nothing except these little
gatherings with some childish hopping as a dance and then the tin cans
of cañassa and the ensuing drunkenness.
There was another man in the gang, a stocky, loose-jointed fellow,
Segorrondo, who was never sober, except during his working hours, but
during that time he was worth any two of the other men--and he never
failed to turn up sober for that allotted period. His capacity was
nothing; three times in one afternoon in Mapiri he was sober and drunk,
with the lines of demarcation startlingly distinct. He rarely joined in
the little hoppings to the reed whistle with his face daubed with clay
or charcoal and decorated with bits of twigs or leaves, yet he was
perfectly sociable and never dangerous. Later, in the established camp
down the river, there came a three day fiesta for which he prepared in
advance. There was a _falca_--a still for making the cañassa from a
half-wild sugar-cane--up the river, and he drove his bargain before the
fiesta began. He was, for the sum of one Boliviano--about half a dollar,
gold--to be allowed to drink all he chose during the three days, but was
to carry none away.
Long before dawn on the first day he was at the falca; for three days he
never moved from the litter of crushed sugar-cane, lying in a stupor
from which he only roused himself to reach out shakily for a tin cup of
warm alcohol as it dripped from the still-worm. We expected a wreck to
show up, but on the morning of the fourth day he returned, grinning
cheerfully, and worked as though nothing had occurred.
Also there was Nosario, a stocky boy of about twelve or fourteen, who
had been added as general utility around the cook or camp. He was
worthless and it later developed that his wife, a Cholo lady of some
thirty or forty years, had prodded him into the effort in order to add
to her matrimonial support.
Agamemnon viewed the whole collection with great scorn. "These yer
pipple ain't noways fitten, ba's," he would remark. The other darky was
included in his disfavor.
Agamemnon always swelled with pride at the thought that he was a
Britisher by birth--born in Barbadoes--and he counted Americans as being
too subtly differentiated to be separated; humbly accepting his place as
assigned in their eyes, he looked down with scorn on these shambling,
good natured animals.
During the four weeks of delay in Mapiri we had seen much of a
neighboring rubber baron, old man Violand, whose barraca was a half
day's ride over the steep trails. The old man was as typically Teutonic
as though he had but just pushed his mild, blue-eyed way into the
jungle. His headquarters--a square of palm-thatched and palm-walled
buildings--was self-sustaining from the coarse flour that a row of
Indian women were grinding between heavy stones in one corner of the
patio to his coffee and also a superior brand of cañassa distilled in a
wooden worm, cooled in a hollow palm log, which really had the flavor of
a fine liqueur. He had been the chief figure in a couple of rubber wars
over disputed territory with his nearest neighbor some thirty miles away
and he showed a spattering of bullet holes in every room of his house
with delighted pride. The dispute was a trifle complicated, but as the
result, his opponent was a fugitive from Bolivia while Violand himself
tiptoed into Sorata or occasionally La Paz with some caution.
Often during the month we rode down to see him--he would have had us
stay there for life. No sooner did our mules round the shoulder of the
hill than we could see some small Indian boy darting off with the news.
The familiar figure of the old man would bulk in the doorway to confirm
the news and then his voice would begin booming out orders; chickens
squawked, sheep blatted, and at once the place was a turmoil of pursuit.
From an outbuilding would come the blue smoke of fresh fires and the
shrill clacking of the well-grimed Aymará cook summoning her family
help. Always were we greeted thus and always there was a ready crowd of
Indians at our heels on the crest of the boom to take the mules when we
arrived and feed and water or put them up for the night.
The formalities over or properly supervised, Violand would seat himself
at a huge table with the top a single plank of solid mahogany three
inches thick and before the ingredients for a gin cocktail. At his elbow
a tiny little girl, one of the daughters of the Aymará cook, took her
position to trot out for anything lacking in the first array. A gin
cocktail is sugar, Angostura bitters, and gin--and I have seen it served
in full goblets. All the rest of the forenoon the host would busy
himself compounding this. It made not the slightest difference whether
anyone else in the party joined him or not, genially he would attend to
it himself in little sips whose cumulative effect was prodigious. As the
midday breakfast hour approached he would roar for pisco, a species of
Peruvian brandy, and then, as the little Aymará maiden announced the
final hour of nutrition, champagne.
And then the dinner, half a sheep, or a whole pig and once the head of a
young bullock to whose cooking the old man had given personal attention,
waddling back and forth from the mahogany table to the cook house
accompanied by the little Aymará girl fluttering in a state of ecstatic
excitement. For the rest there were the chickens and the native foods,
the chalona slowly simmered for a day to make it taste like food, with
the chuña floating in it like so many old medicine corks, the chickens,
the platanos, boiled green and pith-like or better in their black,
melting over-ripeness and to be eaten with a spoon, baked and delicious,
native bread from home made flour, and imported preserves for dessert.
Also there was champagne and whiskey and pisco and cañassa and gin
cocktails again until in final triumph a little beer--everything
lukewarm or tepid from the shallows of the tropical brook.
By and by the old man would venture on a German song or two and then
beckon to the little beady-eyed Aymará girl; off she would dart to
return with a couple of heavy footed Indian women. The host would
rise--with assistance--and trolling some uncertain song march off to his
bedroom to doze. And the rest of the time would be spent with his son
and manager, both fine, pink cheeked young Germans who looked after
affairs. It sounds like a wassail, though as a matter of fact, it was
old Violand who was the chief performer--he was an old man, civilization
was far away, eight days to La Paz over pass and plateaus and blizzard
and after that to Germany--six months for a letter and an answer!
Later he would reappear suddenly, generally clad in a shrimp pink bath
gown, a patent, German Emperor-moustache-shaper over his moustache, and
groping for his spectacles. When they were found he once more settled
himself for a pleasant time, generally having to go through a second
search for a key so that another bottle of bitters could be produced.
The morning after, he would appear, fresh and blue-eyed and solicitous.
"You hef a goot time--yes?" then he would chuckle until he shook in
ponderous ripples and go on in Spanish, "I do not remember much--after
dinner--yesterday--a good dinner--yes? A good dinner is much in this
country of the black gold--the rubber--yes--we drink a little for the
digestion, la, la--yes. Hoi, mozo--" the little Indian girl clattered
inside for the bottles--"just one little cocktail before the
saddle--yes?" His face would beam in its frame of thin whiskers with the
proudly upstanding German-emperor-moustaches the center of their
radiations.
In the jungles across the river from Mapiri was another rubber barraca
in which a Bolivian owner held court. Every morning we could see a dozen
thin threads of blue smoke trickling above the forest where his pickers
were smoking their morning collection of rubber milk. Over there the
cañassa was always on draft for all at all times, while half the week
was a fiesta and Sunday a brawling bedlam.
Slowly the days dragged on with an occasional rumor of the progress of
the Leccos and the callapos. Once, as much to furnish a variation as
anything else, I routed out a couple of jars of mincemeat and ventured
on some pies. An oven was heated, a big clay dome, such as our
great-great-grandmothers used, from out of which the fire was drawn and
on a long handled paddle I shoved in a load of pies. Almost instantly
they browned and then passed to a crisp black before the paddle could
maneuver them out again. The native population, however, appreciated
them highly. It was small loss as the manufacture of pie crust is
somewhat of an undertaking--at least in that tropical temperature. The
lard, native or imported, is a beautiful amber liquid that is bought or
carried in bottles and pours with no more deliberation than so much
water.
A little later a general fiesta in Mapiri helped out the dull waiting a
little. We noticed an extra number of candles burning before the altar
in the little mud-walled church and for some days before there had been
the thrumming of hollow-tree drums from the little huts of the village.
The night before the great day, while it was scarcely dark, the big
drums began booming with a typical Indian rhythm; from the line of huts
came the droning wail of the guests that rose and fell in fitful bursts,
while now and again a straggling line of drunken Cholos, men and women,
in a weaving single file, trotted in a staggering hop around the grass
grown plaza. There was feasting and drinking and noise; from the barraca
across the river came a delegation to lend a joyous hand. Toward morning
it died down, slumbered uneasily during the forenoon, and then began
working to a frenzy of excitement as evening approached.
All the drums had been concentrated in the church, tallow dips lined the
walls, attached by their own tallow to the sun-baked clay, and cast
uncertain masses of shifting shadows that flickered in the hot and smoky
drafts; overhead a flood of bats chittered in amazement at the invasion
of their domain. On one side of the church were squatted all of the old
women in Mapiri with dull, cañassa bleared eyes and cheeks distended
with coca leaves hammering out a monotonous rhythm on the drums.
Before the altar and facing it side by side were two lines of the
smaller boys with the tallest at the front and then shading down to the
rear, each naked to the waist but for some cheap necklaces of gay beads.
Each had a forked twig like those we used for our juvenile sling-shots,
and strung on a wire or twisted bark thread that connected the forks
were a dozen little bits of flat tin hammered out of old sardine cans.
Like castanets they jiggled the forked stick in rhythm with the drums
and as they jiggled shuffling in a hopping, dancing lock-step in single
file up to the altar, and then back in the same way half the depth of
the beaten earth floor. As one file advanced the other jiggled back and
so on alternately. For hours they had kept it up and there was no sign
of either a stop or a rest.
The rest of the villagers flitted in or out as ordinary spectators,
still nibbling at portions of the feast or sharing a continuously filled
bottle of cañassa with the drumming old women. It was not until daybreak
that Mapiri dropped into an exhausted rest.
During this fiesta there had been no shooting of dynamite--that is
quarter pound sticks with a short fuse like a fire-cracker. This once
more popular amusement had been dampened by the last really important
fiesta they had celebrated. A Cholo gentleman had, it seemed, zigzagged
out into the grass grown plaza with his stick of dynamite, lighted it
from his cigarette, and then in a drunken effort to throw it away had
dropped it. He did not notice this trifling difference in his program
and swinging dizzily round with the effort of his throw fell sprawling
upon the cartridge. His demise is still spoken of with awe on that
river. Therefore it was that Mapiri celebrated a quiet fiesta.
And then the balsas arrived. Their Lecco crew gorged and slept and drank
for a day and then were as fresh as ever, busy in lashing each three
balsas together with cross logs to make callapos for the down-stream
voyage. Three of these callapos we had and, when loaded with their
freight, crews and workmen passengers, their logs were four inches under
water, the little platforms on which the baggage was piled and carefully
lashed, rising like a little island on stilts above the current.
CHAPTER XII
OFF ON THE LONG DRIFT
[Illustration: SLOWLY THE RAFTS SANK UNDER THE WEIGHT.]
A long line of half-naked Leccos trotted across the grass-covered bluff
and disappeared over the edge and down the steep path to the river,
where our clumsy rafts swung and eddied in the boiling current. They
grunted and sweated and laughed as they threw the heavy packages of our
outfit on their shoulders, for they could swing a hundred and fifty or
two hundred pounds as carelessly as you could handle a valise. Steadily
the raised platforms on the rafts piled higher with the accumulating
baggage, while slowly the rafts sank under the weight, until the logs
were entirely covered by the muddy current. As the last package was put
aboard, the Leccos began lashing the cargo in place with our spare rope
and the long vines which they used for towing the rafts up-stream. They
used as much care in throwing and tightening the lashings as though
stowing the pack on a "bad" mule for a mountain-trail, rather than a
cargo raft that was only to drift with the current. It seemed absurd.
"Here, good," grunted a Lecco, waving a hand toward the mill-race
current; "below, very bad, patrón, _muy peligroso_--yes."
When later we struck the "bad places," and waist-deep in the boiling,
angry waters of the cañons, clung to those same lashings, to keep
ourselves from being washed overboard, the need of lashing for the
baggage was plain.
[Illustration: THE SHREWISH LEATHER-SKINNED INDIAN WIFE.]
The _intendente_, the jefe _politico_, and the only postmaster for many
leagues of this virgin interior came down to tender us his farewell
embraces; for as a strict matter of fact those three functionaries
resided in the single person of that one short, stocky Cholo half-breed,
who had given all the hospitality in his power during the dreary weeks
of waiting in his little palm-thatched domain, but whose Aymará wife had
viewed us with such sullen hospitality. Officially he noted with
approval that we had already complied with the Bolivian regulations in
regard to navigation, and at the bow floated the green, yellow, and red
flag of Bolivia, and with much curiosity he viewed our American flag
fluttering at the stern. It was the first he had ever seen. It gained,
too, much approval from the Leccos, its decorative scheme of stars and
red and white bars drawing admiring comment, and we could have sold it
many times over as dress goods or as strictly high-class shirting. As a
special mark of favor the shrewish, leather-skinned Indian wife of the
Cholo jefe came down to see us off, and while we patted her lord on the
back in our mutually polite embracings, she fluttered in the background,
clacking unintelligible, but cordial, Aymará farewells.
When first we had dismounted in this tiny settlement of Mapiri this
Aymará woman had borne us a fierce dislike that was kept from literal
and open war only by the strong hand of her Cholo lord. A little later,
unfortunately, one of our men, in making his offering of candles in the
little mud-walled chapel, had ignited a saint. When I saw the saint
shortly after, his vestments were charred shreds, he was as bald as a
singed chicken, and his waxen features had coagulated into limp
benevolence, out of which his sole remaining glass eye stared mildly. He
had been placed on a little table up against a mud wall, and the Indian
women were weeping and wailing before him in abject apology. They were
hastily offering flowers, candles, and libations, but with this last
straw the Aymará lady's dislike had become even a more fixed, fanatical
hatred.
Shrewish, unattractive, and savage though she was, she was devoted in
her love for her Cholo husband. Some time after the burying of the
saint, one night their son developed a difference with his father in
which each tried to kill the other. The father had just reached his gun
and would have been successful when, being thick-necked, violent, and
full-blooded, he toppled over in a stroke of apoplexy. There being no
doctor, not even an Aymará _yatari_ within three hundred miles, the old
lady turned to us in a panic, and, probably despite our amateur efforts,
the Cholo pulled through. In the meantime the poor old woman fluttered
about in an agony of helpless fear and love, eagerly hanging on the slow
words of translation that came to her, for she spoke nothing but Aymará,
and everything had to be translated first into Spanish and then into her
own tongue. That very night she burned a box of candles before the
charred saint, while in the morning we had for our breakfast a fine
chicken apiece. Her gratitude endured, and in the quivering furnace heat
she had come to see us depart, and as we waded aboard she followed us
and laid on the cargo a pair of live chickens as a final gift.
The Cholo handed us a small sack of mail, asking us to distribute it on
our way down the Rio Mapiri, these irregular trips being the sole means
of mail communication with the rubber _barracas_ of this far interior;
the Leccos cast off the vine ropes that moored us, and a few strokes of
their heavy paddles swung us out into the full, swift current of the
river. As we struck it there was no feeling of speed or even of motion,
but immediately the green walls on each side of the river began flitting
past in a shimmering ribbon of confused green jungle. In a moment, far
behind, came the crackling of rifle-shots. It was the Cholo and his
Winchester in salute; even while we were pulling our guns to reply he
and his wife had dwindled to tiny dots that the sound of our guns could
have reached only as a faint echo. Then a bend in the river hid them
from view, and my river voyage had begun.
The balsas were slender rafts of very buoyant logs spiked together with
heavy pins of black palm; they had a rough bow made by the crooked
center log, which turned up in a snout-like projection, giving the
affair a curiously animal-like and amphibious expression. For the return
voyage three of these balsas were lashed side by side with cross-logs
and strips of the inner bark of some tree. The _callapo_, as this
combination is called, is entirely submerged and except for the cargo
platform and the turned-up snouts, nothing is visible above the muddy
river.
As we disappeared around the bend in the swift current, the hills
against the background seemed to close in upon us, and as they narrowed,
the muddy river snapped and crackled in peevish, little waves. The banks
grew steeper, and the air damp and cool, and although directly overhead
there was the glaring blue sky of the forenoon, yet we moved swiftly
through an atmosphere of evening. Long, trailing creepers drooped from
the overhanging trees into the current near the banks and cut the water
like the spray from the bow of a trim launch; the soft murmur of rapidly
moving water rose, and was broken only now and then by the shrill cries
of parrots flying high overhead; sometimes a pair of macaws, with their
gaudy plumage flashing in the high sun flitted across the gorge. But
though the river doubled and twisted among the hills, there were yet,
according to Lecco standards, no "bad places," and they passed the
bottle of _cañassa_ sociably around among themselves, inspecting their
passengers with interest and chuckling over their own comments. They had
never seen a man with eye-glasses before, and I was a matter of fine
interest and guesswork. What were those panes of glass for? Cautiously
they would make a little circle with their fingers and thumbs and peer
through it to see what effect of improvement might result. I received my
name, "the four-eyed patrón," promptly.
[Illustration: THERE WERE, ACCORDING TO THE LECCO STANDARDS, AS YET NO
"BAD PLACES."]
The whole crew of Leccos was amiably drunk; it is the custom of the
river, and it seems in no way to impair their efficiency. It has become
their right by long custom, and one that it is not prudent to disregard;
for a trader, being of a thrifty turn and not caring to buy the cañassa,
decided to run the river on a strict prohibition platform. Every one of
his callapos was curiously enough wrecked in the same rapids on the day
after he announced his thrifty principles. The general allowances is
about two quarts a day for three men, and perhaps, if the day has been a
hard one, a small teacupful each in the camp. Money to them has no value
compared with cañassa. Once, when trying to buy a fine bead neckband
from a Lecco, I offered him money up to a dollar, Bolivian, the
equivalent of eight bottles of cañassa, and he refused, for his Lecco
sweetheart had made it; then I began to barter all over again by
offering him a bottle of cañassa, and at once he handed me the neck-band
without question.
While the current was swift, from eight to ten miles an hour, we had not
come to the bad rapids. Sometimes the river would open out into broad
shallows, where the callapo would bump and scrape along over the bottom,
and then would close up into another gorge that in its turn would merge
into tortuous cañons with bluff walls of rock. Drunk though the Leccos
were, yet their river skill did not seem to be affected. When we floated
along the quieter reaches, they would play like silly children.
Occasionally one would be tumbled into the river, and would swim
alongside in sheepish embarrassment until he decided to climb aboard,
amid the pleased cackles of the rest.
[Illustration: LECCOS LOWERING THE CALLAPO THROUGH SHALLOWS.]
One, a young Lecco about seventeen or eighteen years old, who handled
one of the stern paddles, accidentally stepped off backward into the
river. The others shrieked with delight as the Lecco struck out for
shore. We saw him land, pull his machete out from under his shirt, and
start chopping down some saplings. Perhaps fifteen minutes later, in the
next milder stretch of river, down came the Lecco like a cowpuncher on a
pony, only his pony was a bundle of mere sticks lashed together with
vine, and in place of a rope he swung a bamboo pole, using it as a
paddle. He was standing up like a circus-rider on his frail raft,
shifting it with his pole over to where the current was swiftest, and he
coasted down the inclined glissade between rocks, avoiding every little
eddy and catching only the roughest and swiftest places, until presently
he had worked his way alongside and stepped aboard again. His little
bundle of sticks did not number ten, and not one was as thick as your
wrist, while merely two bits of vine at each end held them together.
[Illustration: THE LECCO OF THE TWIG RAFT.]
I asked what would have happened had the vine lashings broke. When that
was translated to the Leccos, they roared with laughter. That, it was
explained to me, was what they were hoping for, so that then he would
have had to swim. Swim! A fine joke to swim rapids and whirlpools that
looked like sure death or worse mangling. But I found later that any one
of them could have done it on even worse passages. If they are sure to
be caught in a whirlpool, they will dive, and the fury of the rapid
itself troubles them not the least. A Lecco once, to avoid a whipping by
his rubber boss, threw himself into the river and swam six miles in the
worst section of the river without a thought. A German later attempted
to swim the mildest of these, and his broken body was picked up in an
eddy three miles below.
CHAPTER XIII
THE LECCO TRIBE
[Illustration: THESE LECCOS ARE AMONG THE FINEST INDIANS.]
These Leccos are among the finest Indians, or semi-civilized savages, I
have met. They are sturdy and muscular, with a distinctly Malaysian
suggestiveness, and very superior to any of the surrounding savage
tribes of the interior. Yet they have neither religion nor superstition;
they have no legend or tradition, and their only historical recollection
is from the time when quinine bark was the main river commerce instead
of rubber--the time of the "Great Quina" they call it,--about half a
century ago. They are brave and loyal, although not a fighting race, and
have made but a poor showing against the neighboring tribes. Their life
is on the river, chiefly this Rio Mapiri, and they stick close to its
banks. Their sole work is transportation with these balsas and callapos
up and down the river.
For months in the year the stream is virtually closed by reason of the
rains and the impassable cañons. Down stream is simple and finely
exciting, but against the currents up-stream, portaging or hauling the
balsas through the cañons, where there is often barely a hand-hold on
the naked walls of rock, and often vines must be lowered from above,
drenched during the day and sleeping on the sand _playas_ at night, is
the hardest kind of labor. As had happened while they were trying to
reach me on this trip, the food gives out--it is not a game country--and
unless they are near enough to the goal to live on nuts and berries, as
they did for two days on this occasion, they have to go back, replenish,
and start over again, with all the previous labor lost. And there is
scarcely a free Lecco among them; they are always in debt to the rubber
barracas, who by the sale and purchase of their debts pass them as
veritable chattels. With thriftless, unthinking good nature, they accept
this condition and at the end of each trip will squander their
credit-wages on worthless trifles. A Lecco friend of mine once
squandered the wages of a whole hard trip up-stream on a woman's straw
hat and its mass of pink-ribbon bows that he wore for two days in great
pride on the drift down-stream until it was lost overboard in one of the
worst rapids. He watched it whirling off in the spray and foam with a
childish pleasure and no sense of loss, but rather with the calm
complacency of a man who had lost a trifle and could with easy labor
earn another.
The Indians whom I had met before were the Quechuas and the Aymarás, the
great tribes of the high plains; heavy-boned, stocky, and powerful
peoples, who, in feature and color strongly resemble our own Sioux and
Apache type. These Leccos, on the contrary, were slender, well-built
men, with a direct, soft quickness of movement that revealed the perfect
strength that lay behind it. In feature they were absolutely Malay--a
perfect reproduction of any of the Malay tribes that fringe the coast of
Asia.
Other rivers have the balsa and the callapo too, and the long rapids
through narrow gorges, but the Indians of those rivers lie down and
clutch for safety when they go through them. Your Lecco goes into the
boiling smother of a cataract with a grinning yell of pure joy, and
keeps his feet like a Glo'ster skipper in a high gale.
The balsa of the Leccos is a raft made of the light, corky wood from
which it takes its name. Eight-inch logs of this balsa wood are pinned
together with palm spikes from the hard, black palm that is also used as
arrow-points and for bows. When floating in the water it looks like some
unwieldy amphibian that has risen to the surface for a fresh supply of
air. It is generally about twenty-five feet long and about four feet
wide. The Leccos lash three balsas together, broadside on, by means of
stout cross-logs tied with strips of bark or vine, and this result is
called a callapo. It is a structure that is capable of carrying some
three tons of cargo--that is if handled by Leccos.
The first thing that impressed me about these Leccos was the
distinctness with which they represented another race. It was not the
mere divergence of tribe; it was more fundamental--it was a racial
difference. There was nothing in it to suggest even a remote relation to
any of the tribes with whom I had come in contact up to that time, or,
for that matter, with any of those that I subsequently met. To begin
with, the Leccos looked clean--a condition that one seldom finds in the
Quichua or Aymará nations; although cleanliness is almost an invariable
condition of all river peoples. Their complexion was of the soft, warm
brown of the Hindu or the Filipino, having no suggestion of the dull
chocolate of the negro or the weather-beaten copper of the Aymarás or of
our own Western Indians.
[Illustration: NAPOLEON A LECCO CHIEF.]
Their features again are decidedly Malaysian--straight high nose with
thin nostrils; forehead fairly high and well shaped; finely cut thin
lips, and the narrow, though not slanting eyes of the East. The hair is
oily jet-black, thick, and grows to a point on the forehead, in the
style made known by Aguinaldo, and is kept neatly cut in a straight,
bristly pompadour. They do not care for the gaudy feather head-dresses
of their savage neighbors--not even ear-rings--and for head decorations
are content with the brilliant bandanna of the trader, twisted and tied
in a band about the head in very much the same manner as used by our own
Apaches of Arizona. A band necklace of bright beads, strung and designed
in simple patterns by their own women, on threads of wild cotton, is
their only ornament. These are almost invariably worn by the men only
and are tied tightly about the throat.
[Illustration: A LECCO TYPE.]
Another striking point about the Leccos, one in which they differ from
all of the "barbaros," or the savages of the Amazon tributaries, is
their muscular development. The barbaro in this respect is very
deficient. He is strong almost beyond belief, but it is the strength of
sinew and not of muscle. It is like the strength of the monkey, that is
not made visible by the ordinary signs of muscular development. The
barbaro has no apparent deltoid, no biceps, no triceps, none of the
finely developed muscles of the leg and thigh that with us make for
strength. He is built like an undeveloped boy who has suddenly suffered
from too rapid growth. The Leccos, on the contrary, are beautifully
developed physically; knotted muscles shift and play evenly under the
soft skin and suggest a swift sureness of movement and a strength of
endurance that are demanded in their life on the river.
The likeness of these people to the Malays is still further accented by
their costume. They wear rather tight breeches of white _tucuyo_, a
coarse muslin, that taper to the ankle, and above it a short shirt of
gaudy red, yellow, or blue, or even sometimes white, though the red is
popularly regarded as the most aristocratic. The shirt is cut square
with the armholes in the two u
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/48613