Presently,—though it seemed an hour—we could feel that the bottom of the hill was reached and then came the slow lessening of speed as the Aymará brought the horses gradually to a stop. We climbed out, the Aymará got down off his perch and looked over the horses curiously, and waved his hands in expressive pantomime at the mosquito and back at the hill, a steep water-worn trail of ruts on either side of which the ground dropped in rough slopes. Luckily it was straight, the lightest curve, at the pace we had gone, would have shot the outfit halfway across the gorges before we struck the ground. One horse was lame and the others sagged until we made the last change at Guarina, another old time Aymará village.
It was in the cold dusk of the high altitude and tingling with the chill winds that blew from Mount Sorata when we clattered through the streets of Achicachi. Little crystals of ice were already forming in the stagnant pools and little flurries of snow stung as it whistled through the dull streets of this ancient town. On the edge of Lake Titicaca, this ancient town of Achicachi is the home of petty smugglers who can run their contraband in the native straw boats across from the Peruvian shores. The remains of the old mud wall that surrounded it in the days of the Incas are still fairly preserved in places and its population is still practically Aymará, with only a sprinkling of half-breed Cholos.
On fiesta days the little police are held in their barracks on the big open plaza and sally forthonly in parties. The Aymarás gather in great numbers from a score of tribal divisions and unite in the typical drunken dances and festivities. Factions forget and renew old differences and toward evening little battles break out in the streets or the plaza. The streets are unsafe and the few white Bolivians and better Cholos stay within. Always there is the danger of an Indian uprising and that occasionally takes form. Between times in the fiestas the Aymarás are handled without regard, at the first word—or less—they are clubbed and for but little more shot.
The dusk of fiesta is filled with drunken, sullen Indians among whom wander here and there dishevelled creatures with clotted wounds. Occasionally the sullen buzz rises, a little restless movement begins from some section of the big plaza, and in a moment a knot of Bolivian police are plunging in to come back with bloody carbine butts. Always there is the dull hatred of the Bolivian by the Aymará which comes easily to the surface at these times. And there is not a Bolivian statute governing the sale of liquor to an Aymará; if he gets dangerous when drunk, beat him; if too dangerous, kill him.
In the “hotel” in Achicachi the rooms are windowless and range around the four sides of the patio. You furnish your own bed and bedding and each holds a heavy log with which to bar the door. In the patio and in and out of the open rooms some native razor-back hogs wandered at their will and off on one side, more exclusive, was a friendly peccary who would sidle up and grunt sociably in return for a little back scratching. Over by one of the rooms and tied outside was the queerest animal; from across the patio it looked like a very small bear with heavy, long fur yet with queer indefinable difference that explained itself when a closer approach developed a monkey! He was a capucin, the most friendly and delightful of the monkey tribe, and here he was, miles from his warm, tropical home, cheerfully chattering by the side of a tin can that was already filmed with ice and sticking out his pink tongue to lick off the flakes of snow that gathered on his fur—a fur that had grown to enormous length and thickness and left him peering with a brown, quizzical face out from it like a shrivelled winter-clad chauffeur of some stock broker’s quean.
The next evening we arrived in Sorata—andfrom there on the difficulties began to pile themselves, one on the other. A big, abrupt and surly egotist had been carefully chosen by some Board of Directors back in the States to manage a rubber proposition—in a frontier country like that every one depends for countless things on neighbors, though neighbors may mean separations that measure hundreds of miles—yet this gentleman had left a trail of hostility from the coast, besides a record for both Scotch and rye whiskey that could hardly be surpassed. He wore khaki clothes and a Colt with a nine inch barrel on his strolls in Sorata and he published conspicuously in bad Spanish and English, which he ordered translated, his opinion of all, Bolivian, Cholo, Aymará, or American.
His company had committed unutterable follies from a leather director’s chair seven thousand miles away and he proposed to see those follies carried out to the letter. Sometimes we have wondered why our efforts in South American trade and development have met with such scanty success. He was one of the reasons. Rumors came that he had become hostile to our camp down the river, that they encroached on his privileges or were using men whom he hadcontracted, though we were miles from his properties or influence. As a matter of fact the leather chair directors had made a contract for callapos at a figure below cost to the balseros—and for an advance payment—and had been swindled. The leather chair directors had merely swindled themselves in what was at best an oversharp Yankee bargain—and in a country where the law does not run east of the Andes and only primitive justice prevails! In default of either of the latter, he proposed to dictate to any one who went into the montaña and down the river when and how they might or might not use callapos offered by balseros. But I had at that time other things to think of.
A pack train of some fifty mules with supplies had come in from La Paz for our camp. Also some fifteen Cholo laborers, and a mechanic for the camp and among them a Jap, a queer, silent, pink-cheeked Jap. He was immaculate in appearance and always dapper; how or why he ever drifted into that part of the world was a mystery. He had a little baggage in a nice little lacquered box which, as was revealed later in the rainswept stone hut of Tolopampa, contained the secret of his pink cheeks. In that dull dawn he had outa little mirror and a bit of carmine and charcoal with which he was adding beautifying touches. On down the river in camp he always appeared the same; but he was a fine workman and could go teetering along on the ridgepole of a house as easily as a Lecco could run along the river bank. And this outfit arrived with no money to pay for itself, money that the company should have, and had promised to send in.
The agent left by the engineer in La Paz had sent no money and the outfit promptly began eating its head off. The single wire that irregularly kept La Paz in touch with Sorata was down—very likely one of the times when an Aymará had needed some wire in wrapping his iron ploughshare fast to the crooked tree trunk or for tying on his roof tree—and I could not reach the agent. Another day and no wire fixed. On the third came the news from the village of Illabaya, some fifteen miles away that the Aymarás had broken loose and there was an Indian uprising. From the valley of Sorata we could see the mountains with tiny fires flickering at night, apparently as signals, and occasionally an Indian driving a string of cattle into hiding along some far off Andean trail. The householdersin Sorata began storing water in ollas in their patios and rifles and cartridges tripled in price. And still there was no wire to La Paz by which either I or the intendente—who wanted soldiers—could get a message through from Sorata.
The men were boarded out and money was absolutely essential to keep their rations going and to pay any more bills that might come in with more pack trains. Once let the slightest suspicion get the air that there was no money at hand and the workmen would have fled like quail and it would have been a matter of the utmost difficulty to secure them, or any others, again. It meant a very serious emergency for the camp. What had happened in La Paz I did not know, but it became imperative to find out, Aymará outbreak or not. The only man available to go with me, Skeffington, was a great tall man, proportionately built, and a splendid fellow, whose weight would be a handicap to a horse in any emergency. So I decided to go alone.
I started at dawn on a little, tough mountain-bred horse and had passed the divide early in the afternoon. At Huaylata I stopped for breakfast—a tin of salmon and some cakes of Aymarábread—a little outside the sprawling collection of mud huts, and an Indian woman came out and sold me a sheaf of barley for the horse. There were no signs of Indian trouble here. The horse ate and then drank and as he finished drinking he threw up his head and the blood trickled in a heavy stream from his nostrils and he trembled.
If the horse was frightened he was not more so than I. To be horseless and on foot in an Indian plain and with the uncertain rumors of Aymará outbreaks that might have spread like a flame among that dull, hostile population was the most unpleasant situation I have ever faced. The little Indian towns where I expected to camp, Copencara and the tambo of Cocuta, were safe enough, but the thought of getting even to Achicachi—where I might be able to get a fresh horse—gave me five minutes of cold and clammy quivers of panic at the pit of my stomach. The horse stood with the blood dripping in a steady patter on the cold ground while a puddle slowly grew into a great red blot; he looked at me with what, to my understanding, appeared to be his final vision from dulling eyes; the straggling population of the scattering huts of Huaylataseemed to have become raised to the final power of sinister hostility; there was no doubt that I was frightened. I took a box of cartridges from my saddle bags and distributed them in my pockets so their weight bore evenly and waited. There was nothing else to do. There was no use in starting on foot till the horse was surely dead.
Presently the horse went back to the spring, took a little drink, and then turned to the cebada and began nibbling. I felt better for no seriously deranged animal would eat in its final moments. The trickling of blood grew less and the animal showed in better shape. If he could only last to Achicachi, that was all that I wanted.
I did not think it wise to start on foot and leading the horse—that would advertise the fact that I was crippled—while I could wait in Huaylata without betraying anything more than a sluggish and lazy disposition. I tried mounting at last and the horse grunted and then started slowly. How I nursed him those miles; out of sight of Huaylata I walked; the bleeding had stopped, but he seemed weak; I took his temperature with my hand, I petted him, I gave him a bite of chocolate, and when any Aymará hutsor little parties hove in sight I mounted and rode by.
Steadily the horse improved and at times responded to a test trot without difficulty so that I rode through Achicachi without stopping. Only once had I had the sign of trouble and that was a little group of Aymarás near the beginning of an old Inca causeway that cuts across one arm of Lake Titicaca. They were drunk and I could hear snatches of their thin, wailing songs while they were still dots in the distance. As I rode by they were at one side of the trail where an old mud building held forth as achichariaand struggling in that aimless drunken fashion that seems so common to all topers and that divides all wassailing bands into those prudent souls who are already drunk enough and know it and those who won’t go home until morning or till daylight, or the day after, doth appear. They started for me uncertainly, one reached for a stone, but an Aymará rushed out of the house and knocked it from his hand. Some of the more sober came, too, and again the wrangling started, apparently as to whether they should rush me or not. And in the meantime I had ridden out of reach.
There was nothing to fear in that incident, at least so far as my immediate safety had been concerned. But the critical point lay in avoiding trouble; no one Indian or similar group would have had a chance, unarmed as they were, against any man with a gun, but in a peculiarly abrupt Indian fashion the countryside is aroused and trouble is apt to close in on the trail ahead in a particularly congested and fatal manner.
I had planned to camp in Copencara, but the delay left me plodding along in the cold darkness and I was glad when I reached Guarina. In the blackness I rode into a pack-train of sleepy llamas before they knew it—or I either for that matter—and on the instant I could hear the patter and thud of their padded feet as they scattered in a panic stricken flight, while from out of the night came the hissing herd-calls of the Aymará drivers trying to hold them together. Off from the highway that led through the town and from somewhere beyond the walled streets there came the dull beating of many Aymará drums and the mournful tootling of their flutes. Now and again there was the bang of a dynamite cartridge and the pop of firecrackers. An Aymará flitted by in the streets and I called tohim for the way to the house of the corregidor—the chief official. All I could get of his reply was the respectful “Tata” as he disappeared.
There was not a light that gleamed through a chink in any window or door, the wretched streets were deserted, and only the noises of the fiesta and the occasional glow from a big bonfire down some alley showed where the only signs of life existed. It was possible that the corregidor was barricaded in his house as in the very recent affair at Illabaya and I had no mind to intrude on any collection of Aymarás beating tom-toms and raising drunken memories of their abused ancestors. It looked ominous.
Presently another dim figure pattered through the darkness and again I asked for the way to the corregidor. The Aymará gave explanations that I could not have followed in daylight and then started off to lead the way, straight down an alley to the plaza where were the bonfires and the drums and the dancing and the explosions. Along one side we skirted until the farther side was reached. It was a big plaza—almost as big as the town—and it was filled with Aymarás from miles around. A mass of shifting groups shuffled in their trotting dance aroundthe fires and hundreds of unattached guests wandered drunkenly about or lay stupefied as they fell with their faithful wife—or wives—taking care of the bottle of alcohol till they should revive afresh and athirst.
At one end of this plaza my guide stopped, he was a tattered ragged Aymará—a pongo—a carrier of water and of the lowest caste, and left me at the headquarters of the corregidor to whom I had the customary right of the country to appeal for shelter. When there is no corregidor you go to the padre. He was a Cholo, a heavy, thick-set man with a strong face, dressed in the ordinary clothes of a white man, whose peculiar dull complexion alone marked him as Cholo. A couple of tattered police lounged in the doorway and a half dozen Cholos were idling around this headquarters. A Winchester leaned against the corregidor’s chair, some of the others carried theirs as they shuffled about, and back in the dimness of the room could be seen extra carbines leaning against the walls, and from every belt there was the bulge under the coat that indicated a revolver.
The corregidor looked at me curiously; a lone traveler at night on the high plateaus in theseuncertain times and speaking bad Spanish was something of a novelty. One of the ragged policemen took me in charge and once again I was back in the dark alleys. Before a door in a long wall we stopped and then a rusty key squeaked and both horse and I walked through into the walled patio around whose sides opened the windowless rooms. The policeman brought in a bundle of cebada for my horse and a bowl of native Bolivian soup-stew, stinging withajiand grateful in its warmth. For the food and forage I paid, but for the house and shelter the corregidor would accept nothing. There was no bed nor did I need any, with my saddle and blankets. After the door had been barricaded with the log used for the purpose, I was asleep at once to the lulling of drums and flutes and banging dynamite.
Early in the morning I was off; some of the celebrants of the night before were strewn along the streets, still drunk, and among them the sociable hogs rooted or wandered. The horse I looked over anxiously, but he was sound as a dollar and even a little frisky in the keen air. Once in a while an Indian was to be seen plowing a tiny patch of the Andean plateau with a bull and a crooked tree trunk or here and there a single figure plodding the trail. In the afternoon I caught up with a Spaniard, the manager of a gold mine back in the mountains he said, and together we rode comfortably along. Until we met I had no idea of the enormous craving for companionship that can develop in the human mind. Bolivian fashion, he had galloped and exhausted his horse in the early morning and now it could not be urged off a tired walk.
At Cocuta we stopped and had a little supper, some fried eggs and a hot stew, mainly of aji, while the horses rested with loosened girths. La Paz was only some twelve miles distant and to the edge of the high plain from which its lights could be seen even less. I was going on so that I could get in that night. The Spaniard’s idea was to stop in one of the mud rooms of the tambo and ride in, freshened, foam-bedecked, and prancing in the morning. The mud rooms, acrid with llama-dung smoke from the cooking fires and infested as well, made no appeal to me. My companion went outside to look over his horse and came back in a state of suppressed excitement. He beckoned me over in one of the mud rooms:
“There are here a gang of ladrones—highwaymen,” he said. “We must go on at once I know them. They killed the mail carrier on the trail last month. We dare not stop here—we will saddle slowly and ride on as if we had not noticed them. Then we can see if they follow.”
We tightened the girths and the Spaniard’s Indian boy picked up his bundle and swung alongside on foot—he could keep up with thehorse at the end of a day’s march on the trails. As we rode out of the corral there was a group of Cholos and Bolivians mud spattered and dusty who had evidently just arrived. Their animals wandered around while their riders with a bottle of alcohol and some bottles of native beer were getting drunk as rapidly as possible. One of them had on an old style blue army overcoat of the United States and, so far as looks went, they easily lived up to the reputation of brigands that my Spanish friend had just given them.
The interesting question for us was whether they would follow and overtake us. The cold afterglow of sunset was almost at our backs and we carefully watched the long, level horizon on which Cocuta long remained in sight for signs of horsemen. The Spaniard was for covering ground as fast as possible, but I insisted on keeping to a walk; his horse was played out and needed to be saved up to the last minute if we were really in for a bad time.
It grew dark, and the thinnest possible silver of moon gave only an accent to the night. No following horsemen had appeared and we were feeling quite relieved when the Indian boy spoketo the Spaniard. Off on our right, perhaps a couple of hundred feet from the trail furrows, rode a little group of horsemen. There were four or five, in the night it was uncertain, but they were off the trail—for nothing that one could imagine except of a sinister purpose since everyone follows the trail—and suiting their pace to ours, were walking abreast without closing in. We had dismounted to ease our horses and now we climbed back into the saddles. The figures did not close in nor did they give any sign.
“They are trying to count us,” said my friend, and then he added, “have you another pistol, señor, one that you could lend me—I have not one.”
I had not. And I remember to this day the cold, clammy undulations of my spine as I realized that the only gun between us belonged to me and that whatever responsibilities the situation developed the field of action was also to be wholly mine.
The hold-up in these parts is not practiced with the gentle chivalry of the “hands up” or stand-and-deliver method; you are first shot up and, if the aim has been successful from the chosen ambush, your remains are searched.Spanish—or the surviving Bolivian procedure—places a very high value on the testimony of surviving principals, so much so that one of the effects of any form of hold-up is to see that there are no surviving principals.
The little figures off the trail kept pace with us and gave no sign. Presently they gradually quickened their gait and disappeared in the darkness ahead. The Spaniard laid his hand softly on my arm:
“They have gone ahead to await us in an arroyo, señor,” he said. “Be sure that your pistol is in order.”
These arroyos are gashes in the high plateau, sometimes only six or eight feet deep and more often deep gullies with a dried watercourse at the bottom into which one rides in steep zigzags like the mountain trails, and by reason of having the only gun it became my part to ride ahead. Presently we came to one—deep and as dark as the inside of a cow. There was nothing else to do so I cocked my gun, a forty-four, Russian model, and shoved the spurs in so that my horse would take the trail, down into the arroyo first. There was not a sound except the rattle of stones from my horse’s feet; there was not a thing thatcould be seen in the darkness; I was on edge for the slightest sound.
“If you hear a sound, señor, shoot!” said my fellow traveler as I spurred ahead.
It seemed an age before I rode out on the plain on the other side—and it was only a little arroyo. And there were some eight or ten more of these ahead. How many we passed I do not remember, but it was from the opposite bank of one deep gully that I heard the rattle of displaced gravel and I swung my gun into the direction of the sound and blazed away. Down the last slope of the near side my horse slid and then in a rattling gallop stumbling and pitching over the dried watercourse on up the opposite side while I banged away in the direction of the first sound. More gravel poured down and then there came the sounds of scurrying and of hoof beats pounding on hard ground. Close behind me came the Spaniard in a clatter of flying stones and still further behind the noise of his Indian boy scuttling down the bank and trying to keep up.
On the farther bank we halted and took stock. To this day I do not know how many shots I fired for I broke the gun, dumped out all theshells, and reloaded without taking stock of expended ammunition. But the tension was gone; we looked at each other in the darkness and the rest of the trail seemed easy.
“They will not likely appear again,” he said. “But there are one or two bad places yet.”
There were narrow zigzags with sharp turns guarded by jutting rocks where a man could be hidden until the horse pivoted for the sharp turn and this constant riding with a cocked gun into a black gash that maybe contained something that never appeared wore on the nerves. How much I did not know until, as we rode into the outskirts of La Paz, a couple of fighting bulls broke loose in the streets and a loose fighting bull is very dangerous. A man on horseback was perfectly safe, but at the shrill, terrified cries of “los toros! los toros!” and the low bellow of the bulls, I spurred on a law-breaking gallop through the streets of La Paz and did not stop until I had clattered into the patio of the hotel. My nerve was gone.
The trouble over the lack of company funds was soon located. Our agent in La Paz, a hard drinking old man of many exaggerated politenesses and a teller of tales that began with a British commission in a Bengal lancers regimentand drifted through Sioux and Blackfeet raids, a man who was utterly delightful across a club table, had been seized with a madness for power. The poor old fellow, as honest as he was shiftless, a genteel drifter for years, had become an appointed and accredited resident agent and with a full company cash box felt for the first time in years the thrill of responsibility as “agent” and had been for days shifting from club to hotel and back to the club maudlin with boasts and Scotch-and-sodas. It did not take long to straighten out affairs and soon I was headed for the interior.
Once more I was back in Sorata. One of the men, our only mechanic, an Englishman, was quarantined in a little house on the outskirts, down with the smallpox. We had shared the room in the Sorata posada together before I started across the high plain, and he had become sick twenty-four hours after I left. The intendente of Sorata was irritated at him, he was some trouble with his smallpox. They had locked an old Indian woman in the house on the outskirts to which he had been removed and kept a guard at the door so she could not escape. She was cook and nurse.
The queer official government doctor who rana queer medicine shop and barely kept alive under the government subsidy, shuffled up to the house each day and called inquiries through the window that were answered by the sick man. Fortunately he was not very ill, and he pulled through. While the peeling or shedding process was on we would go up and sit across the alley from his window and smoke some pipes with the patient.
At night he used to be annoyed while he was helpless, by the Aymarás, who would hold little dances and celebrations under his windows, tooting the doleful flutes and beating the drums. While he was sickest he was helpless; one of his first messages was to the intendente to chase off the Indians. It had the usual result—nothing. His first convalescent act was to crawl over to the window one night with his gun and open fire. Two muffled echoes from the night proved that he had punctured two drums and he was left in peace. True, the Aymarás complained but the intendente came back with the information that a crazy smallpox patient was a free agent and they had better keep away. Thereafter no more drums or flutes broke the night’s peace.
This Indian music is interesting and I was fortunate in being able to have some preserved in musical form for repetition. In the remains of the vast Indian nation shattered by Pizarro, the Empire of the Incas, every man and boy, almost from the age when he can walk, is an adept on their simple reed flutes and Pandean pipes; the drum he merely thumps. They are a musical race; there are songs and airs for each season, for the planting, for the harvest, for the valorous deeds of the vanished caciques, for their gods of old to whom a new significance has been given by a pious Church, and the long-drawn chants by means of which, at their yearly gatherings, they pass down the history of their race. As there is no written language, there is no written music; it is handed down from generation to generation by the ear alone.
Their national instruments are but three innumber: the flute—a reed about eighteen inches in length, with six holes, and a square slit at the end for a mouthpiece, played after the manner of a clarionet; the Pandean pipes—a series of seven reed tubes that, in the large ones, are four feet in length, and in the smaller ones scarcely as many inches; and the drum. The last is the universal instrument of all peoples; there are few races so low in the scale of human society as not to possess it. The Pandean pipes are in a double row, and at the time of preparation for the Indiads, or the intertribal wars, the outer series is filled with cañassa, the native liquor, and the player receives the benefit of the intoxicating fumes without the delay incidental to drinking from the bottle. Only the men play, the women and girls never; their part is in the chanting and in the hand-clapping that measures the weird rhythm, although before marriage the girls are allowed to join in the dances and the drinking that goes with them.
In the cities and villages there are the constant beating of the drums and sound of the flutes. Every community or group has its special festival days. Now it is a wedding or a christening with the hosts of “compadres”—godfathers—orthe Church day of some obscure saint celebrated by the mission padre, then a village fiesta or house-raising, and from day to day the sounds of barbaric strains stretch in an endless chain throughout the year. In riding over the high plains in the Indian country one is seldom beyond the sound of the thin flutes. Every llama and sheep herder passes the monotonous hours with his playing. In the still air it carries for miles and softens in the long distances with a weird pleasing effect. The strain is short, but one bar, and for hours it is repeated with unvarying exactness.
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Even in the bitter cold and snow of the trails of the high passes the presence of the Indians is announced long before their appearance by the echoing flutes. They plod along in single file, muffled in their ponchos, driving the llamas or burros before them; one of them supplies the music, but as the air is thin in these high altitudes and breath is precious, they relieve each other at frequent intervals. There is no markedcadence to the music; it is a weary minor air unlike the sturdy measures we associate with marching music, but it undoubtedly stimulates its audience in some mysterious way with an inspiring effect.
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But it is in the great fiestas that one has the best opportunity of hearing the Indian music. I was waiting in the Indian town of Achicachi for the arrival of my mule to carry me over the pass to the village of Sorata. The fiesta was for the birthday of the town and in honor of the ancient gods of the place; at daybreak the Indians gathered within its walls from miles.
With the light of dawn the streets began filling with dancing bands of Indians in their gaudy festival attire. They were there in thousands. The plaza was a weaving mass of brilliantponchos and feathers; Indians with contorted masks, and jaguar-skins trailing from their shoulders, performed dances in the cramped spaces cleared for their benefit; silver and gold bullion decorations glinted in the clear atmosphere along with cheap tinsel and tin mirrors; and above all rose the sound of the Pandean pipes, the flutes, and the drums, filling the air with a confused discordant roar.
Often several groups of Indians would band together and in single file follow the pipes and drums in a little jerky, dancing step. Sometimes they went through simple evolutions, figure eights and circles, or divided and came together in the pattern of the “grand march” of the East Side balls. The players would dance as well, and occasionally some inspired individual would halt the line while he whirled dizzily around in one spot to his own music. The others would watch these performances with approval, chanting in a high wailing key and clapping their hands in accompaniment.
With the darkness of the night the dancing and playing in the plaza became less and less. The groups withdrew to their ’dobe huts and squatted on the mud floors. A tallow dip or asmoky wick floating in a dish of grease furnished what light there was. The wind from Lake Titicaca blew fresh and keen, but in the lurid gloom of their squalid huts the air was foul with the crowded Aymarás. The chanting took the place of the dance, and the flutes and pipes led in the air; the drums were silent. With the finish of each verse or section the note ended in a prolonged maudlin wail that continued until it became the opening note of the succeeding stanza.
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This song is also popular with the Cholos—the half-breeds. They hate the whites, and sing it with either Spanish or Aymará words of foul denunciation. In Sorata one time they marched past below my window, singing it for my benefit. Between verses they cursed the “gringos” in vulgar Spanish.
It was in this same village of Sorata that I was present at its greatest Indian fiesta. It is the fiesta of the harvest and generally lasts for an entire week. The mission padre pronounces it the feast of Todos Santos, but to the Indians that is a matter of indifference. The maize and the “choque” (potatoes) have been gathered, and the “chalona” (frozen mutton) prepared for the ensuing season; the year has ended; it is the fiesta of the harvest. They go to confession on the morning of the first day, but the remainder is spent in their own customs.
The little parties organized themselves after the early-morning visit to the ’dobe church and paraded with their odd trotting dance-steps through the lanes of the town. There was the usual collection of thin drums and shrill flutes, with here and there the mellower tone of a Pandean pipe. One band stood out conspicuouslyin the crowding throngs. This band had been carefully trained by its host, who did not play himself, but with a proud dignity directed its evolutions. A huge Aymará headed the party; he played Pandean pipes with tubes four feet in length. A great drum swung by a rawhide thong from his shoulders. Its shell was from a log, the core of which had been burned out. Following him was the line of Indians in a reducing scale, each with a smaller set of pipes and a smaller drum.
Each Indian contributed but a few notes to the air; the range of the pipe was limited. The drums never rested; they marked the sonorous rhythm of the measures. The training was perfect; there was never a break in the succession of notes; the effect was much like that of a calliope, but more mellowed and pleasing. They played but two airs, and these seemed to be reserved for that peculiar form of orchestra.
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This they would play for hours before changing to the other, as follows:
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White squares of cloth hung from the shoulders of the players like the capes of the old Crusaders, and with their brilliant new ponchosand the bright green of the parrot-feather decorations they made a most picturesque effect. The weird and barbaric music was rather attractive at first as it rose from the distance and swelled in volume while the procession came nearer, but after eight or ten hours it palled, and the prospect of a week more of it was not cheerful. But an outbreak in the Indian town of Illabaya, ten miles off over the mountains, brought it to a close much earlier.
To Mrs. Arthur T. Jackson, of Boston, the wife of a prominent rubber-dealer in Bolivia, who was in Sorata at the time, the only white woman within hundreds of miles, I am indebted for the transcript of the Indian music. An accomplished musician, she was much interested in the subject, and at different times during her months on the Indian frontiers she had gathered and noted the airs as she heard them in the fiestas.
More difficulty developed when I, in an amiable frame of mind bought a chance in a watch from a Sorata man, for when a man moves from a village he raffles off all his household goods and his own and his wife’s jewelry. This raffle was made famous by the fact that I won something. I won the watch; and the next morning was arrested by the intendente on the complaint of a thrifty Soratañian that the whole machinery of the raffle had been undermined and debauched, and Bolivia dishonored in order that the dice might give me this marvelous watch. The watch, by the way—I will keep it for years as proof that I am Fortune’s favorite—didstrongly resemble gold in a dim light and when wound would tick for quite a while, but in its general aspect was on the order of those given as a premium with twocakes of scented soap for a quarter by the slick corner spieler of a gang of pickpockets.
At last we were to start the next day over the pass to Mapiri with our outfit and men. The surly American with his ever-present extraordinarily long barrel Colt sent a messenger to me to announce that his home office, easy chair, contract on the Mapiri River happened to cover all of the available balsas and callapos and that I could not use any. Presently we met in the plaza and he remarked with a suggestive emphasis, “You got my message about my callapos?” I replied briefly that I had and that I would act as my judgment dictated when I arrived in Mapiri. “Very well,” he said suggestively; “then you know the consequences and can take them.”
That night a friend came to our party with the information that this man had shipped in to his barraca recently some dozen Winchesters and considerable ammunition and that he was arranging to ship more. That gave their barraca some twenty-six rifles—a pretty heavy armament for merely a peaceful rubber company. His ignorance of the country and his truculent vanity and the carelessness with whichhe talked “fight,” drunk or sober, made it a matter of no little concern. And he neither knew nor respected the rights and customs of river travel, although he attempted to dictate them.
Like many patriots he was willing to fight as long as he could hire his fighting done for him—an absentee bravo.
We bought four Mausers and a thousand rounds of ammunition and started back to our camp, with five white men and some thirty-five Cholo workmen and three pack-trains of supplies.
Once again we climbed sleepily into the saddles at daybreak and began crawling up to the final pass over this third and last great range of the Andes. The first night’s camp was hardly below the snow line in a little sheltered cove on the mountain flank; the next morning a slippery climb in a blizzard that coated every mule in ice as though with armor brought us to a ragged, narrow cleft in a long fin of rock through which we passed as through a gateway. It was the summit of the pass. There was on the farther side the usual votive cairn of stones built by the Aymarás with the twig cross at its apex while, leaning against the fin of protrudingrock as far as the eyes could penetrate the blizzard, were narrow, spear-head pieces of shale placed on end as further efforts in worship or propitiation of the great god of the mountain.
From the pass the trail dropped a trifle and we crowded for that night into the tambo in Yngenio. They were a surly lot and viewing with a hostile suspicion—doubtless with causes inherited from the remote past of the conquistadores—any outfit of wayfarers.
Again followed a day of sleet and snow-squall with an occasional rift in the clouds when, thousands of feet below, could be seen the soft greens and the waving palms of inviting tropical warmth and dryness. The narrow trail zigzagged up the bare mountain steeps, followed for a distance the wanderings of the crest, and then dropped in another series of zigzags to lower levels. For hours there was this constant rise and fall. In a cold rain we camped in a stone hut, Tolopampa, a place that has the reputation of perpetual mud and rain where the skull of some deserted Aymará packer still kicked around in the cold mud outside.
And then at daybreak began the drop intothe warmer zones where there was sunlight and a riot of tropical color. For two days it was one unbroken descent while the back grew weary and exhausted leaning against the cantle and the stirrups interfered with the mule’s waggling ears. The clayey mud of the wallowing trails rose up and wrapped us in its welcome until boot-lacings, spur and puttee buckles blended in shapeless, indistinguishable masses. And then, five days after leaving Sorata, we plodded into the straggling line of palm thatched huts that is credited on Bolivian maps with being the town of Mapiri. For two days the mules were rested while the arrieros passed the time in keeping mildly drunk. Below the high bank on which the town stood, the River Mapiri boiled past in muddy eddies; here in a cane hut we camped and oiled and packed the saddles; from now on it would be rafts, callapos, until we again reached the main camp.
In Mapiri the callapos were waiting and we embarked. One camp on a sand bar, one camp in Guanai and the next day we shot more rapids and came into the country of the truculent one with the long barreled Colt. The barraca lay just around the bend where the river broke insome small rapids and then saved itself in miles of smoothly coiling eddies for the grand smother of the Ratama. It was here at this chief barraca of his company that there might be trouble—we had been warned that if we attempted to round this bend in any unapproved, uncensored callapos we would be fired on. The four Mausers had been issued and the case of ammunition unscrewed. There were four callapos with the white men on the one in the lead. It was rather exciting, this uncertainty, but it was accompanied by the invariably clammy spinal undulations and the strong desire that I was somewhere else or that what that jungled river bed held for us was an incident of the past rather than of this imminence.
As though casually the freight had been loaded on the callapo platforms so that it made an informal breastwork and quite as informally we loafed behind it. And then the callapos drifted silently around the bend—we had not fired the salute that is ordinarily made when approaching a barraca at which one is going to stop and call—and the clearing with its collections of huts and palm thatched roofs broke into view. A little figure scuttled across the clearingand disappeared. The edge of the clearing on the bank was within a stone’s throw and not a sound broke the stillness. A word to the Leccos and their heavy paddles began working us over to the bank where a little path ran down to the water’s edge. If the two camps were in for a frontier war, a feud, it might as well be found out at once. Before there had been only the threats of a foolish man—here was the place and here were the men under his control. How far would they back his stupidities?
In single file we climbed the steep path to the clearing; at the top the head man came forward cordially.
“What’s this about firing on us as we came around the bend—you getting in Winchesters by the crate?”
He laughed cheerfully:
“Oh, phut! If it amuses that old fool outside to send them in I don’t mind, but if he wants to start any fighting let him come on in and do it himself.”
We told him of the rumors and the threats that came from Sorata.
“Sure, I know,” he said; “that old cuss didn’t do much else but talk fight with me whenI was out; how many rifles, how we’re going to run things—you know him—and I’ll bet he’s never heard anything more than a firecracker go off in his life. He’d fire me if he thought I had you at my table. Bring up the hammocks and come on into grub!”
And so like most other really serious things it faded away on a close approach. But it had held all of the serious elements.
The next morning we swung out into the river and again shot the rapids of the Ratama and drifted out where the whirlpools drew the callapos under neck-deep. As we approached the site of our camp we turned loose the rifles and shortly came the answering pop of guns. The callapos grounded on the shallows at the foot of the bank, the old Cholo workmen swarmed around the new comers and waded ashore with the new freight. Where we had left the beginnings of a palm thatched roof was a long bunk-house; a patch of young platanos was opening its long leaves with its promise of our own base of supplies; a hen clucked around with one lone chick—the rest having succumbed to snakes—the result of some trading with the cacique; under a palm thatch there drifted the blue wispsof smoke from a bank of charcoal burning and a well defined trail stretched through the jungle to a clearing farther down where the placer workings would be finally located.
It was like the Swiss family Robinson—it was coming home. The Cholo with the one silver eye, the drunken shoemaker with the scalloped scar, and all the others crowded around and chattered in a happy excitement. The proper native custom is to celebrate so according to formula a tin of alcohol was ordered for the night and the workmen decked themselves with leaves and shuffled round in what passes for a dance until exhausted. The next day the time expired ones started up-river with the callapos.
It had been five months since I left the camp and we began that slow, heart-breaking struggle against the current. It was with all the feelings of having at last reached my restful home that I turned into my hammock that night. Rapidly the camp grew under the influx of the new men; the song of the whip-saw rose in the forest and long clean timbers began piling themselves along the trail; now and again the roar of some huge tree shook the air as it mowed a swath of jungle in its fall; a tiny store was opened andnow and again Leccos came to trade—out from the original jungle of the year before had come a tiny, fragmentary community hanging on to the frontier.
And three weeks later I started on a callapo down the river to cross the interior basin of South America, over the Falls of the Madeira and then down the Amazon and to London. Two days and two night camps with a callapo and a crew of Leccos and one forenoon we drifted and scraped on the gravel beach of Rurrenabaque. Here was the last touch of a town, or of a straggling settlement that I would sleep in for many days.