CHAPTER VITHROUGH THE INCA COUNTRY

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 byrawhide 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 coneof 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.

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 andtwo 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. Theirwindows were jammed with heads and clawing arms exchanging or accepting dripping foods wrapped inplatanoleaves, bottles ofchecha, 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 ofpadresfrom 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 drawnrebozoof 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 withchancaca, 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.

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 goesthattheory—and it isn’t original with me either—forI 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. Thecrest 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 tinyremolinosthat 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 lessenedand 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 whistlethe 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 theYavaria 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 shadowand 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 withaji, 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 theYavaribacked 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 steamerCoya—literally theInca 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 theYavariskirted 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 upand 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 thechunoandchalonathat 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 theCoyaholds 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, theYavaristruck 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 wivesand 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 theYavaritook on a little freight, a few sacks ofcebada, 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 themontaña, 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 thesesame 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.

In Pizarro’s Day It Was Probably the Same—Costume, Craft, and Barter

One more night in the cramped wardrobe of theYavari—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 roughhorses 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.

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.

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 atlast 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 onlycomfortably 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.

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 afiestaof 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 whollyof 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 andwith 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 muchflavor as an old buggy whip. Sometimes they ate parched corn orchuño—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 chewedcoca, 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 withcoca. 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 ofcebada—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 animalworld 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.

AYMARÁ DRIVER OF PACK LLAMAS.

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 willafterwards 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 areal 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.

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 ploddinghoofs 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.

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.

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 nativetamboor 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 thelittle 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 camelomita(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 drunkenladronesand, 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 muleswere 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 usas 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 Bolivianhaciendadowho 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.

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 thetrail 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 theAymarás 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.

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