Among the Cholo workmen it developed that each preferred to cook for himself with his own little pot and over his own individual fire. It was too great a waste of time and energy to have eighteen men building eighteen fires three times a day in order to cook their fifty-four meals. So a compromise was effected. The original Cholo cook—who was good for nothing—kept up one long fire on which the row of pots simmered. After each meal enough would be issued to each pot owner for the next meal. In the early morning the general day’s rations were issued. The Cholos wrapped them in smudgy bandanas and laid them away beneath their bunks—their bunk shack of cane, charo, being the first thing attended to—and then traded back and forth according to fancy, a little rice for a gristly shinbone of chalona, or some chancaca for a bit of coffee or chuño. Coca formed a regular part of the ration and was regularly used by all the workmen.
Agamemnon as a cook developed famously. As to results one could never properly place the blame upon him. With the exact and retentive memory of the utterly illiterate he followed directions with absolute fidelity. He was of the same family as that famous cook who, after having been instructed by the missus in cake-making, invariably threw away the first two eggs because in the original effort the first two had proved to be undesirable citizens. Agamemnon was of this order, yet he never failed to throw in all the frills of table service he could think of. This came from his days of stewarding on the Pacific coasters.
Every morning he appeared with a box lid for a tray set forth in fresh green jungle leaves and on it a species of muffin that he had developed or the boiled green platanos that took the place of bread, a tin can of jam, or some turtle eggs if we had been lucky in a trade with some passing batalon of Leccos. Coffee he served with a flourish and from his camp firebelow the bank on which our tent was pitched he would bring up a bucket of hot water with which he could keep a continual service of clean camp plates.
In the intervals at meals he stood back and fanned off the wild bees that flocked to the jam and condensed milk tins. Two little holes pricked in the milk tins guarded them, but with the jam it was different; often a half tin of jam had to be thrown away, the contents solid with reckless, greedy bee suicides. They would light on the jam while it was on the way to your lips or stow away on the under side of the jammed muffin, compelling the utmost vigilance on the penalty of a diet of raw bees. With all the reckless handling they received, not one of them stung.
It was the ant that was the irritable, hot-weaponed party who went out a-jousting from the sheer lust of battle. They were infinite in variety from the sluggish white-ant that left the table a hollow shell of sawdust on up to the leaf-cutters and army ants to whom nothing was so precious as the straight line in which they were going. But the worst, the most vicious and accursed was the large black variety one of whommade a murderous attack upon me in the darkness.
He is nearly an inch in length. To the Leccos he is known asbuno-istiand they also assert that he lives in very small communities in holes in the ground, not building the ordinary nests. Agamemnon had been stung and had promptly, darkey fashion, tied a rag around his head and stayed in his tent all night groaning. A Cholo boy was stung and he too tied a rag around his head and groaned throughout the night. It seemed absurd for a mere sting to have that effect and I looked upon them with a proper scorn. I have been stung by hornets and scorpions and the latter seemed to me, at the time, as the ultimate of all stinging sensations. I was wrong.
For some reason these buno-istis seemed to have a love for passing themselves in review up the guy rope, along the ridge pole, and down the other guy rope of the tent. By observing I noticed that no sooner did the buno-isti reach the bottom of the guy rope than he started back to the front guy and began another tour. One evening I stepped out in the darkness, my foot caught on a root and I stumbled; I clutched forthe guy rope to save myself and the instant my hand touched the forefinger connected with a high voltage current that gave all the sensations of a red-hot sausage grinder. I had caught a buno-isti on his way up the guy rope.
A delayed lantern revealed a crippled buno-isti and a finger with an almost invisible sting on the first joint. There was no swelling nor did any follow at any time. Yet the pain was intense; I could feel it spreading from the finger to the hand and then, slowly with an acute torture that brought no relieving numbness up to the shoulder. There it halted. But for hours, as the camp watch showed, there was no sleep possible, not until the exhaustion from pain paved the way. For three days the effects lingered in the form of a bruised sensitiveness that made that arm all but useless. A scorpion sting is a gentle tickle compared with the buno-isti.
Slowly the camp grew. A patch of jungle was cleared on the high bank above the river beyond the reach of any sudden freshet. In the early days of the camp one of these freshets descended from the Andean foot-hills and before the last of the outfit had been carried to the highbank the Cholos were struggling in a current up to their belts or portaging by the aid of poles held out to steady them. Where the first hasty camp had been was a torrent of muddy waters and a tiny island cut off from us by a creek torn in the bank by the flooding river. The water rose five inches a minute for about eight feet and then slowly went back during the night a few inches.
For something like eleven miles down this river there was placer gold. Wherever a sand-bar or a sand bank showed it was of black, gold-bearing sand. Anywhere you washed you got a trace or color in the pan and sometimes thirty or forty bright flecks of gold glittering against the rusty iron bottom. But with that current, the uncertain rise of freshets, the distance from civilization and main supplies, only an Indian could wash out dirt and make a living at it. The plan was to prospect the placer area extensively and establish a basis for the permanent working camp that was to follow. The gold was there, but how deep to bed rock or hard pan, whether it were best to work by dredge or shaft or open workings, these were the questions that had arisen back in the world of civilization and weresolved on the basis of the results of this first camp.
From the bank at the water’s edge there stretched back a mass of matted jungle, creepers, vines, and underbrush and above, a mass of vines that tangled the treetops in great patches of aerial islands. Paths had to be cut, some kind of a working map made, the natural difficulties and conditions set forth, and the beginnings of the permanent camp put in form.
The eighteen men were swallowed up in the jungle. The clearing was scarcely made and burned before the jungle was again closing in and rising from the ground like sown dragon’s teeth. And slowly progress was made and up and down the river the camp became known and voyaging rubber traders and crews stopped as at a port of call.
One expedition passed the midday breakfast with us. Its head was an Englishman, a wiry, frontier hardened man who was on a punitive expedition at the head of his men, rubber pickers, balseros, and headquarters men from his barraca. Somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of acres that represented the rubber domain of which he was chief there was a boundarydispute. His trees had been raided and here, like a feudal baron—or rather like a salaried feudal baron, the fief of a plush-cushioned, rocking chair lord of a board of directors the half of seven seas away—he was at the head of his two callapos and fourteen Winchesters and a scattering of twenty bore, miserable trade-guns with their trade powder in gaudy red tins and a month’s rations for the expedition.
Again, a couple of Englishmen who had drifted down to Rurrenabaque, the last settlement of the frontier from this side of the continent, stopped as they were slowly poling up the river with a couple of new dugouts. Their crew was of Tacana Indians and these dugouts were the first known on the river. In effect these men had independently invented the “whaleback.”
The endless series of rapids made the callapo with its baggage platform a poor freighter. In their mahogany dugouts they had a series of deck hatches that, when the cargo was on board, were bolted down over rubber gaskets—rubber pure as it came from the tree and spread with a bundle of parrot feathers over a sheet of coarsemuslin and then smoked in a hot, blue palm smoke. With a couple of these dugouts lashed together they proposed to shoot the little cañons and the Nube, the Incaguarra, the Diablo Pintado and the Ratama. And they did, too, dropping paddles and clinging with tooth and claw to the bare wet decks on which they had omitted to put cleats or rope holds. But it was an eminently successful venture and they slowly chipped away with adze and ax until on their next trip they had a fleet of seven dugouts, each some thirty-five to forty feet in length, and from a single log ofcaobo, mahogany, orpalo-maria, with which they could run the river in either the dry or wet season. With balsas and callapos, as our long delay in Mapiri showed, only under the pressure of emergency was it possible to get up the river.
As the work progressed it became evident that our original outfit was not sufficient to make any adequate preliminary development. It was not possible to get to bedrock without some machinery, a pump, and some means of sawing lumber for sheet piling. The Cholos were perfectly useless at whip-sawing a log. We tried them and the work was too gruelling.They were curiously inefficient in any line outside of their narrow experience. A block and tackle was an unsolved riddle, although they recognized its power. They would take it along cheerfully in the morning and then later send for some one to come up and work it; they could never fathom which rope to pull. Main strength and awkwardness were their reliance and when these failed—carramba, what more could be done?
According to the custom of the montaña they had been contracted for six months before a judge, an intendente, and amid all sorts of mystic ceremonials of red tape without which Bolivian law and custom looks askance. Five weeks had been a dead loss in Mapiri and two weeks more for gathering them and the time of actual transportation and then almost two months of work in camp came perilously near the expiration of their contracts when it was considered necessary to bring in a new gang. These were hungry to get back to their little villages and join in the high class carnivals and drunken dances. Some of the Cholos were worthless, while others would come back again after a rest on the other side of the Andes.Segorrondo, the squat little drunkard, was one of the best men in the gang and he had added a new adornment to his peculiarly unattractive exterior. In a fight with the major domo he had had his head laid open with a machete from over his right eye to almost the back of his neck. It was a mere scalp wound, fortunately for Segorrondo as the machete glanced.
It took six men to hold him while he was stitched up with six stitches. Beauty was to him no object compared with the pain of stitching, and when our surgical job was over, the effect of only six irregular stitches in a twelve inch cut may be imagined. Then we bandaged him securely, gave him an extra drink of cañassa, and once more he grinned cheerfully. Later he and his antagonist appeared for another drink, each affectionately embracing the other. Without the slightest difficulty the wound healed, leaving an interesting scalloped pattern that was a source of much pride to its owner.
But it was obviously necessary to get out to the coast for machinery, supplies and another gang of workers. Aproprio, a messenger, was sent overland up the river to notify the Leccorivermen a few miles above and a week later four balsas and ten Leccos swung around the bend under the bank in the dawn and we started.
The crew of a balsa is two men, one fore and one aft of the platform with poles or a jungle vine for a drag rope. It is not safe for more than one passenger to each balsa for the narrow raft of a wood almost as light as cork is lightly balanced as a canoe. There is no freight worked up river, except rubber, and of that the big bolachas are wedged in under the stilts of the platforms.
Slowly the little fleet of balsas hugged the shore, poling against the current. Then across the river appeared a stretch of narrow beach and the poles were dropped and the balsa swung out across the current to the other side. Here the vine drag rope would come in use with one Lecco pulling and the other poling, and fairly rapid progress could be made. There was a short stop at a tiny Lecco settlement at Incaguarra where the chief Lecco, the cacique, lived. He was a shy, bashful, good natured old man who invited us into his hut where we gave him the customary drink.
On a grass matting was an old woman, a very old woman, his mother, the cacique explained. She was past all intelligence and in the last stages of senile dissolution; huddled up in a corner, she murmured and clucked to herself, meanwhile playing aimlessly with an empty pot and a few bits of grass. The dulled eyes gave no signs of interest or understanding when the old man spoke to her; she suggested more an animal, an aimless, warped little monkey rather than a human being.
A few months later she died of old age and the old cacique, her son, came with her body wrapped in a frayed matting and borrowed a pick to dig a grave. He obviously was deeply grieved in the subterranean Indian way, and yet there was not the slightest vestige of ceremonial or belief connected with her death. She was dead, a hole in the ground was necessary, and there alone and by himself and full of grief the old man dug it in the remote jungle without any more curiosity in death or religious expression than he would have felt in digging a post-hole for a new hut.
We bought a few platanos and yuccas from this place and made our breakfast there. Twohours after leaving a freshet from the rains in the mountains ahead suddenly made itself felt and we were forced to camp till it went down a little. We did not move until the next morning.
The next day the river was harder and steeper and the banks offered more difficulties either for poling or dragging. From one side to the other we shifted, losing hundreds of yards in crossing as we swept down with the muddy current. And yet these crossings were never made until the last moment when the poles could find no bottom and the steep bank came down like a cliff into from fifteen to fifty feet of water. The little rapids that were nothing more than riffles coming down—that is, in comparison with the real cañons and rapids—were slowly poled and dragged through with double crews, inch by inch around some jutting, strategic rocky point and into the upstream eddy beyond. Boils of water burst from under the balsas until you balanced with the Leccos on the straining raft like rope dancers on the same strand.
Once—and no one would suspect a clumsy looking balsa of tippiness—an extra heavy boil of water burst under the balsa ahead and shot Agamemnon and the Leccos into the water. Fortunately it was at the edge of an eddy and no serious consequences resulted except that it kept the Leccos diving in ten feet of opaque, muddy water, for half an hour to recover a rifle. And it took a half a day to get the rifle in shape again.
That night we reached Caimalebra, a rubber pickers’ shack, where was collected the rubber from a still further sub-divided picket line of rubber pickers, and here we camped, exhausted. The Ratama was just ahead and this could only be made if the river was below a certain stage. It was curious to watch the Leccos read every river sign; by this bush and that boulder they knew the height of water in any rapid above. Here in Caimalebra they announced that unless the river went down at least the span of a man’s hand, six inches, it would not be possible to get through the Ratama cañon and rapids.
That afternoon they shook their head against going on, the six inches made it impossible. Bymorning it would be lower as they read the weather signs. A little stick was stuck in near shore to measure. In the dawn the river had risen six feet and was raging past the camp, carrying the usual collection of swirling dead driftwood and newly uprooted trees. Food was running low for we had taken nothing from the main camp, as they would need it all before we could get back. The Leccos had a little rice that was giving out, here and there we could get platanos from a rubber hut along the river, but the main reliance was to be on the country between these points. The day before a wild turkey, shot with a rifle for the shot cartridges swelled so that a shot gun was useless, was delicious but scanty. This day I took a balsa across the river to try for pig or parrot or turkey, or monkey if we were lucky, or something anyway, for the Caimalebra place was vacant of platano or food except for the small family there.
All day I tramped over the hardest kind of country with four of the Leccos, swinging down ledges by the jungle vines or wriggling through the masses of tangled growth in the trail of a Lecco with a short machete. And as a result—nothing.Once there was a parrot motionless in the fork of a tree high up and across an impassable gully and not worth while.
The river had dropped two feet and risen three later; all day it had been playing at this game and the heavy clouds in the hills made the prospects discouraging. It was a scanty meal that night. After darkness had settled a tropical downpour came up that showed no signs of abating. Steadily it poured until after daybreak and all hands slept as best they might, soaked to the skin. The shelter tent was in a thin, widespread brook that the upper trenching did not stop or divert. As fast as one built a little protecting dam it was washed away and the bank poured a steady stream into the river as from the eaves of a roof. And the river rose ten feet in the night. It seemed impossible that we could ever get around the Ratama, but there was not a half day’s rations left in camp.
It seemed as if it was useless to wait for the river and essential that we should get to the big barraca of Ysipuri where there were ample supplies for our party. There was no overland trail, it was through a jungle, six, ten, fifteenmiles, you could take your choice of the Lecco guesses. So with a couple of Leccos we started. The others were to try the cañon when they would, and reliance was well placed in them; there are no finer rivermen to be found anywhere in the world.
The hunting of the day before had seemed hard going, but it was nothing to this; up and down over gullies and waist deep in the tumbling brooks at their bottom; down sheer cliffs where the tropical vegetation grew so rank that a natural ladder would be formed by the tangle of interlaced roots or hanging mora, and skirting the face of ravines clawing a hand and foothold step by step. I carried only a rifle and twice I had to pass it to a Lecco and then had no easy task left. As for the two Leccos, they carried somewhere around a fifty pound pack each and barefooted swung along among the vegetation as easily as might a couple of monkeys.
Perhaps the river went down suddenly, though it is more likely that it was the removal of the diffidence that our presence entailed; at any rate, the Leccos themselves pulled through that night and reached Ysipuri with the balsas.For thirteen days we were held in Ysipuri, the river persistently refusing to lessen its height, while a succession of rains sent down a series of heavy freshets. It was not a dull time.
A Lecco was held as a prisoner by the agent on a charge of attempted murder. I saw him as in the dusk of evening he sat in the doorway of his prison hut taking the air. His wife and small boy sat with him and kept his legs muffled in an old poncho so that the heavy iron shackles riveted upon his ankles would not show. He was a fine looking Lecco and obviously of enormous strength. It seems that another Lecco was found with his back cut to ribbons, apparently from one of the twisted bull whips of that country, and with his breast beaten in.
The victim lived and this Lecco had disappeared. Presently he was captured and held in leg shackles, waiting for some indefinite arraignment. However, while we were at the barraca he escaped, leg shackles and all, and was not heard of until, some months later, he turned up below at our camp and we became good friends. There was the gravest doubt as to his guilt, the Leccos are most peaceful, and the whole affair was the result of a drunken fiesta ofmixed breeds in which not one was fit to remember anything.
In addition there was a serious fight among the Cholos, Leccos, and rubber pickers one Sunday evening in which shots were fired, a dog killed, and a couple of men wounded slightly, while numerous others nursed unseen sore heads and bruises. An appeal for help was sent over the little creek that ran through the barraca and the agent called on us; so our little party of three white men, a half dozen of the more reliable employees, and the messenger splashed back through the darkness with our guns in our hands—in addition my heart was in my mouth—and reestablished order. It was a drunken fight over the favors of an old Lecco lady, a bleared old party of some fifty coquetting years.
In one day in the main shack two snakes were killed, one in a room and the other in the kitchen, both of the deadly German-flag species. Beautiful, slender reptiles they were, with broad bands of black broken at regular intervals with narrow bands of cream and vermilion stripes, and of exceeding venom. That same night as I threw open my blanket preparatory to turning in a third German-flag made a graceful letterS on the blue wool. Alarmed he darted off through the cane walls into the next room, the store-room. Two successive rooms were emptied before the snake was at last killed. There was not a man in the place who would have gone to sleep with that snake in the place, if it took all night to get him.
Then, just as we were about to start, a young boy was brought in, half Lecco and half Cholo, the son of a man who had been murdered while working in his little yucca patch up across the Uyappi River. He had been shot from behind through the stomach and had lain helpless until he died, although this boy, from his own account, was in the hut less than a hundred feet away all the time. The boy, he was not twelve, stuck to his story that he had heard no shot, nothing out of the ordinary. The chief agent in the barraca consulted with the Lecco crews who had brought him in.
“He did it,” they responded; “make him tell.”
He was flogged with a knotted rope’s end and though he still clung to his palpably false story—and also he had been heard to make threats against the old man. After the flogging he waslocked up to face another later unless he should have repented.
Up here in nicely civilized and sensitive surroundings the flogging reads like the brutality of a savage tribe. It was revolting and yet—what would you have done? The intendente would have had him flogged with a twisted bull whip—do you know what that is or what that means? A twisted thong of rawhide whose blow, drawn skillfully in the delivering, cuts a strip from the flesh; where fifty lashes properly laid on are equivalent to death. And to have turned him over to the legal authorities—the legal authorities east of the Andes! They are there in name—but their functions are a joke. The best the boy could have hoped for would have been to march wearily day after day in leg shackles and chained to his guards or to any other adult prisoner, over the snows and blizzards of the high passes and then to rot dully in a Bolivian jail. Probably he could not have undergone the rigors of the march, and lucky for him if he could not.
As it was, he had the benefit of a civilized doubt and received only what the sentiment of his own people demanded. And he was not tooold but what he could profit by it. By strict adherence to legalized forms, or those of them that would have been applied, he would have been killed by slow, indifferent inches.
At last the river went down enough and we were off. We poled steadily along through an unending series of rapids, crossing from one side to the other through cañons and losing in the crossing all and more of the hard won ground. In one place in three hours we did not gain one hundred yards. And then came the rains again.
We barely made the farther side of the Uyappi when the river laid siege. It rose twelve feet in the night and held us three days in a little hut at the junction of the two rivers, raining for two of them. The agent at Ysipuri had joined with us as he too was going out on business, and his balseros combined with ours made a very respectable expedition. The tiny hut was built by one man for himself and into it each night crowded some twenty Indians. They held a dance, a queer, shuffling trot with dull, droning mumbles that passed among the Leccos as song, one night and the next day they spent in celebrating the birthday of one of the crew. Cane platformswere built in the hut until there were three floors, or tiers, to the eaves and on these we all crowded sociably.
Their shy diffidence gave way, they laughed and joked openly and with a childish innocence over any man being able to see out of glasses. They asked me questions of my home, my tribe, and my rivers, but the answers were Greek to them. They had no means of knowing the outside world. They answered my questions cheerfully, through an interpreter each way, of course. They taught me to count in the Lecco tongue, the Riki-riki as they call their dialect:
One—BeraTwo—ToiThree—TsaiFour—DiraiFive—BerchaSix—Ber-pachmoSeven—Toi-pachmoEight—Tsai-pachmoNine—Ber-pelaTen—Ber-beuncayEleven—Beri-beuncay-ber-hotaiTwelve—Beri-beuncay-toi-hotai, etc., etc., etc.
One—Bera
Two—Toi
Three—Tsai
Four—Dirai
Five—Bercha
Six—Ber-pachmo
Seven—Toi-pachmo
Eight—Tsai-pachmo
Nine—Ber-pela
Ten—Ber-beuncay
Eleven—Beri-beuncay-ber-hotai
Twelve—Beri-beuncay-toi-hotai, etc., etc., etc.
Twenty is simply Toi-bencai and beyond this few Leccos could go with certainty, while some were at sea even up to this point. Yet they had no difficulty in actual counting; it was simply over names for the higher numbers that they stumbled.
Once more we began the poling and dragging. This stretch of the river had given us no concern coming down, yet it was one of the hardest we encountered on the long pull up. One rock that jutted from the shore took my balsa an hour and a half to pass. Time and time again the vine parted and my Lecco and I were swept down with the current and around in the eddies, to repeat the process after we had paddled ashore and tried again.
In another place we had to work the balsa up into the very spray from a cataract only four feet high, but over which the river poured in a thunderous volume, then cast loose with one mighty shove, and paddle for the opposite bank, while in the meantime the balsa was being tossed in the bursting boils of water at the surface or spun and dragged like a chip by the whirlpools that floated with the current. Three times this swept my balsa half a mile below—only one balsa madethe crossing at the first try—and it looked more than once as though we would be upset for an uncertain swim.
That night we made camp at Tiaponti. Here a new cane shack had just had the triumphant finish to a palm thatch roof and everyone in that little finca was already drunk. From somewhere we got one precious chicken for ourselves and the Lecco crews laid down to sleep, scarcely bothering the cook; they were so exhausted. It was the only time I ever saw any of them decline the opportunity for one of these festal drunks.
Early the next morning we started. One more day that was a little easier and for hours we poled upstream against a gentle current along the bank and picked wild guayavas from the overhanging trees. It is a delicious fruit—although never since have I been able to find its kind, even in the cultivated tropics. This wild guayava looked somewhat like a small, gnarled quince on the outside; on the inside it had a most delicate pink pulp beyond a little rind, a delicious pulp that combined the melting flavor of the strawberry with the texture and modifications of a superior watermelon. It was good.
That night we landed in Guanai,—twenty-three days of baffled progress against the same river and the same current that had flicked us down from this same Guanai in two days.
It was useless to attempt to battle with the river further. Above, before Mapiri could be reached, were narrower cañons where there were only handholds and often not that, where the cañons were often nothing more than a polished flume of rock. It had taken the Leccos two failures and over a month of the most gruelling work when they finally reached us before in that village, and then they had been living on berries and roots and palm-nuts for the last two days. So we decided on the overland trail to Mapiri. There we could get our saddles and outfit for the trail over the high passes.
Up to Guanai there was no trail, not even a Lecco foot-path, and it was a relief to give the orders for mules and see the sure-footed, flop-earedbrutes come ambling to our doorway. For a saddle there was a wreck, a dried leather cast-off that would go after some piecing with rope. An arriero, dressed in a suit made from old flour sacks with the brand still showing in faded blue, had a pack train that was just going out with some rubber and it was his cargo mules that we hired. His ordinary route lay through the Tipuani country and he charged us some outrageous sum—something like five dollars apiece, silver—for going out via Mapiri over the worst trail in Bolivia and some sixty or eighty miles out of his way.
Officially, both Mapiri and Guanai recognize that they are connected by a land trail yet we had not left Guanai a half hour before the last vestige of a trail was gone and the mules plunged into a wilderness of low scrub and tall ferns. The Andean foothills twisted themselves in a maze of huge convolutions through and up and down whose great gullies and jungled ravines we slipped and scrambled. By intuition or obscure landmarks the Cholo arriero found his way and presently we zigzagged down a slope where once more appeared the overgrown remains of a trail. Then that too disappeared andwe followed up the bed of a mountain brook, struck off to one side, again plunged into the brook, climbed a hill, struck another foaming torrent and skirted its banks or followed its windings—the ravine through which it flowed being impassable in any other way—and at last struck a tiny, grass grown, level glade. It was not late, yet overhead the tops of the trees were matted in jungle growths until but scant light filtered through, there was the cool dampness of evening and the perpetual sound of the creaking chirping bugs that, in the open world, only tune up for night concerts.
The rains had left the jungle dripping with water; we ourselves were as wet as though we had been out in a storm, and even the blankets from the tent pack were clammy and damp. By morning they were wringing wet and all hands were soaked to the skin. A night storm and a hasty camp were responsible, although how a camp could be made on a spongy soil up against a mountain that shed its waters like a roof on your camping bed, and for one night in a march, is a matter of engineering and not of travel.
In the morning all the wood was too wet to burn and a cold breakfast of leftover tea fromthe night before, some soggygalletas, crackers, and chancaca added no zest to the opening day. Like the day before this was spent in climbing through the jungle-matted hills or taking advantage of occasional brooks. Here and there the trail reappeared, generally in a series of steps cut in a slippery clay hill, steps three and four feet high and with their tread banked by a log to keep it from washing away. It was killing work for the mules and generally we dismounted and climbed alongside. They would go up in a series of goat-like jumps, throwing the watery mud in a shower with every plunge. Walking up such places was safer for they were really of about the pitch of a ladder and a single slip on the wet, greasy clay would have sent both mule and rider in a broken mass to the bottom of the gully.
Early in the afternoon—it was not two o’clock—we were blocked by the Mariapa River; it was a creek, broad and shallow and turbulent and swollen with the recent rains. The only ford was impassable, so once more we sat down to wait for a river to go down. It rose instead and that night we camped by the ford, wet from the afternoon rain and caked with mud.
There was no wood dry enough to burn and a cold supper with a tin of Chicago’s most famous clammy beef stew—“roast beef”—purchased in Guanai set forth the camp banquet log. It was already dusk above the tree tops when we made camp and darkness below so that the Cholo arriero had not noticed where we hung the shelter tent from the bushes and lay down together. In the morning we awoke covered with a multitude of scurrying, inquisitive ants of some large red species. They did not bite and were inoffensive so far as that was concerned, but our belts, our holsters, our shoes, our gauntlets, everything of leather, looked as though it had broken out with small-pox. Tiny disks, perfectly round, had been cut out of the surface of the leather; and in some apparently choice spots where the surface leather had become exhausted they had started cutting out disks in deeper layers. One gauntlet was worthless and the upper of one shoe was on the verge of dissolution.
By morning the river had gone down enough to make it possible to attempt it. The cargo mules were packed with their packs high on their backs and driven in. As the pack mules took to the water, our riding mules—who hadalways carried cargo with the others—came scrambling down the bank and before they could be stopped were out in the ford. Thereupon we undressed, cut long stout poles, hung our clothes about our necks, and started for the farther bank.
The water was from the mountains, cold and icy, and the river bottom was rough with boulders. With the pole we groped along after the cautious fashion of a tripod while the cold current rose and chilled rib and marrow and made the matter of balance one of delicacy. There was no danger of drowning, but to be swept off one’s feet meant broken bones among the white waters below. Not until it was too late to retreat did these phases loom up clearly. Often one stood poised and balanced by the pole with its hold down stream while the current boiled around the up stream armpit, not daring to grope for the next step lest the pressure of water would carry one off. It was different with that tough old arriero; he cut himself a pole, hung his clothes around his neck and came briskly across the water through which I had been teetering uncertainly for twenty minutes.
Another camp, high and, for a wonder, in the open from which we could see the rolling Andeanfoot-hills stretching like a billowing sea to the horizon. Three months of steady traveling would not bring one to those farther hills that were within vision.
The smoke of a rubber picker’s hut drifted up from a little gully below us and the arriero came back with a chicken, a bunch of platanos and some onions. The grub box was empty and for that day we had been going on a handful of rice for breakfast, and parched corn and Indian cigarettes. Not a sign of game had been encountered since leaving Guanai, not even a bird big enough to eat. The mules were thin and gaunt, for them there had been only what they could forage in the jungle or here and there along the trail.
From here on there was a fairly defined trail. There was also a continuation of small rivers and half the time we seemed to be fording. An occasional rubber picker’s hut was in plain view and the late morning smoke from their curing fires rose from many points in the forest. A sugar-cane finca with its distillery alongside for cañassa spread beyond a broad, muddy river. The mules forded this river, as did the arriero, but there was a bridge there, a rough tower and platform on either side of the river and a rope stretched across. On the rope a trolley worked back and forth from which was suspended a tiny platform for the passenger to straddle. On the farther platform an Indian ground the windlass that produced the ferriage. It cost four cents, gold, to be hauled across high in the air, over this affair.
On the Rope a Trolley Worked Back and Forth from which was Suspended a Tiny Platform
On the Rope a Trolley Worked Back and Forth from which was Suspended a Tiny Platform
The old Indian at the distillery sold us some real bananas, some platanos, and three eggs. This latter is one of the rarest of articles in any Indian or Cholo’s shack, for always there is a pet monkey and the monkey is more fond of eggs—quite as much for the delicious thrill of breakage as for their flavor—than the Indian; also he is far more adept at finding them and it is a very vigilant hen indeed that can guard her full original setting of eggs once the monkey’s agile suspicions are aroused. One more camp in the hacienda of Villa Vista, a place very similar to the hacienda of old Violand, where at last we had real beds, or those saw-buck cots of native make. I recalled how clumsy these same cots had looked as we had come into the montaña and left civilization behind us. Now they seemed to our sophisticated eyes like the most alluringlyæsthetic devices for inducing and encouraging sleep that were ever invented.
From the comforts of Villa Vista it was but one day into Mapiri, and here we got out our own saddles, rubbed the mould off, saw that bread enough was baked to last us out to Sorata, and started. It had been exactly one month since we stepped on board the balsas at the camp down the river. And that same distance from Mapiri to the camp had been made on rafts on our voyage with the current and shooting the rapids and cañons, in three days—a day’s travel down the river being equal to ten days’ slow work against the same current.
Again the slow, killing climb over the high pass; the toll gate with its queer little Indian child, the drizzly promontory of Tolopampa, Yngenio, and then the final blizzards and snows at the summit of the pass. From this summit it is less than a half day’s ride into Sorata, a trail that takes the best part of two days’ climbing to make the other way.
At Sorata we changed mules and took the regular trail, not this time that rarely used, but shorter back trail where the sullen, hostile Aymarás have their homes, and on the third daywere once more above the valley of La Paz. We looked down on its warm red roofs and the little green patch of its park with the masses of low dobe houses through which there ran the feeling of rectangular streets with pavements and the lazily drifting throngs with actual stiff, starched collars and shoes with soles and laces instead of the patch of leather with a pucker string around the top, and thick crockery plates instead of enamelled tin, and pastry and roasts, and twice a week a real band in the plaza—all the effete accomplishments of civilization. It is no wonder the Bolivians solemnly assure you that La Paz is the Little Paris of South America. When you approach it from the eastern slopes of the Andes, it is a little Paris, a little London, a little old New York.
Two weeks later I was on my way back into the montaña while the chief engineer was on his way to Iquiqui or Callao after machinery. A Mr. and Mrs. Jackson had their headquarters in Sorata where the former represented a rubber company and they, together with Drew, a wiry little Englishman, who had packed into the country with nothing but a blanket and the ragged clothes he walked in, and myself, combinedto charter a tiny stage-coach, the “mosquito” as it was known. This, with six horses to haul it to the top of the alto and then with horses in relays at each tambo would bring us to Achicachi on the southern shores of Lake Titicaca in one single day of from before dawn till sunset. From there it would be muleback over the first pass and down the trails into Sorata.
The mosquito was just big enough for four and a tight fit at that. This was fortunate for the little coach—from the outside it looked more like a packing case—with slits of side windows slung above a pair of axles on top of which perched two barefooted Aymarás, one to drive and the other, a boy, to sling the long thonged whip pitched and tumbled in the steady gallop over the rough trails of the plain like a motor boat in a choppy seaway.
At the mud walled tambo of Cocuta the first change of horses was made. Before we reached Machicomaca, the next tambo for new horses where we ate breakfast in a mud walled, windowless room, the brake broke or fell off and had been lost somewhere on the rough trail. The steady gallop of the tough, rough mountain horses kept time to the steady singing and punctuatingcrack of the whip. And yet rarely was a horse struck. An Aymará will drive a crippled animal or leave it to die of starvation on a lonely trail without a thought, but it is rarely that he will abuse a beast with actual violence.
After the change of horses at Copencara there came a steep descent something under a mile long. The driver stopped just over the crest and pointed to the broken brake. Drew spoke a little Aymará, but the sight of the broken brake and the steep hill was enough. We began untangling ourselves to descend. Drew climbed out stiffly and was followed by Jackson, this freed his wife, but she had scarcely put her foot to the step when the mosquito gave a lurch forward and we were off. There had not been even time to jump. It happened in an instant; the door was banging with the plunging coach; Mrs. Jackson was thrown in one corner and above the noise of flying stones and rattling of the coach could be heard the Aymará yelling at his horses and the crack of the whip.
Unused to breechings, these mountain horses, half wild—at least as far as harness was concerned—had felt the mosquito press forward against them. They were off in a flash andjumping down this hill with an unbraked coach bouncing at their heels. If the horses could not outrun the coach we stood a certain chance of piling up in a wreck, horses, Aymará, coach, and two perfectly good and useful Americans. So it was that the Aymará held his horses at their top speed.
Never was there such a ride—not even in the rapids of the Ratama. In one instant of lurching we looked fairly down upon the swift, blurred ground over which we sped, and in the next there flashed past the rim of snow-capped mountains and then the cold, deep blue of the high heavens. The flying stones from the horses banged against the mosquito in a vicious storm. Inside my voice could not be heard above the uproar. I had somehow wadded all the ponchos and blankets and wedged Mrs. Jackson in one corner of the mosquito in very much the same way as one packs china; if we smashed the wadding might help a little. Then I braced myself with my feet against a corner of the roof with all the purchase I could secure and pushed against the bundle I had made. It was the only thing I could think of, and at any rate, it held us both firm against the terrific bouncing.
Never Was There Such a Ride—Not Even in the Rapids of the Ratama
Never Was There Such a Ride—Not Even in the Rapids of the Ratama