CHAPTER XIXON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA
There are three such “railroads” running out of Cochabamba, though none of them venture more than a few miles. All were brought up piecemeal on muleback or on massive two-wheel carts, like the first steamers on Titicaca, for it is what the natives call a “mediterranean” town. One is a steam line with a single toy locomotive, which starts every hour from the central plaza, for the suburb Calacala, “noted” for its baths, splitting the ears with its infantile shriek and spitting hot cinders upon all the bench-holders in the vicinity. A cochabambino assured me that I could not believe it possible this “enormous” locomotive had been brought “from Germany” on muleback; but as he had never been further out of town than its three little lines could carry him, his conception of locomotives was somewhat atrophied. This one was so childlike that once, when it suddenly started up as I was crossing the street, I unconsciously put out a hand to thrust it back until I had passed.
Cochabamba, 60,000 inhabitants by its own count, the majority of whom have never left its suburbs, is conceded to be the second city of Bolivia, and considers itself the first, after the South American fashion. It is constantly quarrelling with La Paz as to which shall furnish the country its president, a truce being usually patched up by alternating the honor. The population of Bolivia is made up of just such heterogeneous groups, among which there exists a profound aversion. The rivalry is particularly tenacious between theCollas, those, chiefly of the Aymará race, inhabiting theCollao, or northern portion of the country bordering on Titicaca, and the south of the republic, containing a large proportion of Quichua blood and partaking of many of the characteristics of that timid, dreamy race. Like the Quichua in general, the cochabambino is wedded to his native soil, with an ineradicable affection for it, partly because isolation keeps its customs largely unchanged. The tongue of the Incas is still the chief one of the lower classes; the town’s name, indeed, is derived from the Quichua wordskocha(lake) andpampa(plain)—which the Conquistadoresas usual corrupted by pronouncing it as if they had a cold in the head. There is little question but that the surrounding valley was once a lake-bottom. Founded in 1574, the place was christened by a high-sounding Spanish name, which, as so often happened in South America, failed to stick. It has a restful, summer-resort air, with birds singing in its shaded alamedas, reminding one faintly of Granada, with its sand and cactus and half-arid soil requiring irrigation. The little river Cocha wanders by the north and east sides of the town on its way to join the Mamoré; the surrounding hills are less brown than the altiplanicie, half-clothed with trees and with patches of green running up the sides of the range. The showers were no highland drizzles, but perfect sheets of water for an hour or more—fine prospects for my continued travels at the end of wheel-going!
Yet it is a colorless place compared to La Paz. Adobe is the chief building material; there is no structure of great importance, though “La Compañía” of the early Jesuits has the usual ornatefaçade. Its houses are of the light yellow mud of the surrounding plain, less painted than those of the capital, and even the tile roofs are of so dull and dusty a red as scarcely to excite the eye. On a barren knoll at the back of the town is a ruined adobe bull-ring, once large and ornate, and still higher up, before the monument to the “Heroes of Cochabamba,” the gaze stretches away across a yellowish land, flat as a sea, baking in the blazing sunshine. Costumes, too, show far less color than those of La Paz. La chola wears a similar hat, but it is flatter and therefore uglier, and she has neither the immaculateness, instinct for pleasing color combinations, nor the sprightliness of her Aymará cousin. Natives of pure Caucasian blood are so rare as to be almost conspicuous. Important commerce is largely in the hands of Germans; even the English vice-consul was a Teuton. The municipal library bore a large sign announcing that it was open from 9 to 11, 1 to 4, and 7 to 9. At nine-thirty the doddering old librarian appeared, and at 10:05, when he had finished reading the morning paper and smoking his cigarette, he put on his hat and remarked, “Nos vamos, señores,” and go we did, sure enough. In the afternoon and evening he did not appear. Cochabamba has been called the paradise of priests. Fat, coarse-featured men of the cloth swarm, and the town is rated the most fanatical in Bolivia. As late as ten years ago ahogüerawas lighted in the central plaza to carry out anauto de féagainst a Protestant who had dared to preach his doctrines in a privatehouse, the materials, for the inquisitorial bonfire being the holy books and furniture of the evangelist. The troops were called upon to interfere and prevented the consummation of the act, but they were not able to keep the “heretics” from being cruelly stoned by the populace. The approach of the railway, however, the arrival of many gringos, and a now firmly established mission-school with a government subsidy is wearing down somewhat this medieval point of view.
In a corner of the main plaza of Cochabamba, where the sunshine streaks upon it through the trees, was the “gringo bench,” a rendezvous at which there was always to be found at least an American and an odd Englishman or two, generally miners and even more generally penniless. For Bolivia had proved less golden than the rumors that had oozed forth from her interior, and there is no better climate than that of Cochabamba in which to sit waiting for whatever chooses to turn up next. At the time of my arrival the bench had three principal occupants. The most permanent fixture was “Old Man Simpson,” over eighty, not merely a fellow-countryman, but originally from the same town in which I had spent my youth; indeed, he was still a subscriber to the weekly newspaper I had earned more than one school-day dollar folding and “carrying.” A “Forty-niner” who had drifted from California to Chile, he had been in South America unbrokenly—though frequently “broke”—many more years than I had been on earth, his fortunes rising and falling with miner’s luck and open-handedness, his “Spanish” still atrocious. Now he was so nearly blind that he could recognize us one from another only by our voices; and every day he sat from sunrise to dusk, except for his “breakfast” and siesta from eleven to one, in the shaded corner of the plaza, a cud of coca-leaves in one cheek, his gnarled and leathery hands folded on the head of hischontacane. All day long he would weave endless tales of the prospector’s life, wandering disconnectedly over all the western side of the continent, as long as he could get a single gringo to sit and listen. When he could not, and was, or fancied himself, alone, he sat hour after hour motionless, murmuring each time the clock in the tower above struck, “Well, it’s —— o’clock,” and relapsing again into silence.
After Simpson came Sampson, an extraordinary cockney, resourceful, quick-witted, full of quaint sayings, of a strikingly personal philosophy of life, so much of a “hustler” that his initiative often boiled over into audacity. He spoke fluently a colloquial Spanish and considerable Quichua, chewed coca incessantly, and came close tobeing the ugliest man I had ever set eyes upon. This last mentioned quality was enhanced by the slap-stick clown garb he wore,—faded overalls with a bib, some remnants of shoes here and there about his ham-like feet, a woolen neckclothà laWhitechapel, and an Indian felt hat on the back of his bullet head. His view of life he summed up—among friends—briefly with, “I am strictly honest; I never tyke anything I can’t reach.” As to his resourcefulness: in this identical garb he had gained theentréeto the haughtiest class of natives, with whom outward appearances constitute some 99 percent., and had talked his hypnotic way into the confidence of a lawyer and ex-senator of Cochabamba to such an extent that the latter contemplated giving him charge of a large tract of land to plant with cotton.
The third bencher, Tommy Cox, had been “down inside” with Sampson on some prospecting scheme that had failed. Originally from Toronto, he was in appearance and speech a “typical Englishman,” a little sandy-haired fellow of twenty-five, the antithesis of his companion in initiative, of so dim a personality compared to Sampson that one barely noted his existence when the two were together.
When I arrived in Cochabamba nothing was more certain than that I should continue my tramp down the Andes, through Sucre and Potosí, into the Argentine. But plans do not keep well in so warm a climate. I sat one day musing on the trip ahead of me, when Sampson cut in:
“’Ere! If you’re looking for something new, why don’t you shoot across country by Santa Cruz to the Paraguay river and down to Asunción and B. A.? Least I don’t think it’s never been done by a white man alone and afoot.”
The idea sprouted. I suddenly discovered that I was weary of high altitudes and treelesspunas, of the drear sameness of the Andes and the constant repetition of theserranosthat inhabit them. To that moment I had, like most of the world, conceived of Bolivia as a lofty plateau, arid and cold; whereas more than half of it is a vast, tropical lowland, spreading away from the slopes of the Andes to the borders of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, making it the third largest country of South America. There was, it seemed, a fourth way of entering or leaving this mediterranean land, and it was neither by way of Mollendo, Arica, nor Antofagasta; but a route all but unknown to the world at large, yet followed by many of its imports and exports. Themontañaoryungaspromised a new type of people, a new style of life; a knowledge of South America would be only half completewithout including in my itinerary the immense hot-lands and river-webbed wilderness stretching eastward from the Andes. I wished some day to visit Paraguay, anyway; the distance to Puerto Suarez was evidently greater than to railhead in the Argentine—by striking an average of varying information, with the assistance of such maps as the local librarian gave me time to glance over, I came to the conclusion that it was roughly 800 miles—but on the other hand much of this new route was floor-flat, and I had had my fill of climbing over such labyrinths of mountain ranges as lay to the south. True, in this season the region to the east would be wet and muddy, but with no bitter cold nights in prospect I could throw away much of my load, and at least there would be brilliant sunshine most of the time, which is half of life. Besides, is not the chief joy of travel the privilege of suddenly and unexpectedly smashing fixed plans, to replace them with something hitherto undreamed?
To all these arguments there was added another still more potent. When I began to make inquiries, I learned that the proposed trip was “impossible.” Several of my informants quoted recently received letters to prove it. The last hundred leagues would be entirely under water; the wild Indians of the Monte Grande would see to it that I should not get so far, to say nothing of miles of chest-deep mud-holes, “tigers,” and swarms of even more savage insects, and many days without food or human habitation. That settled it. In Bogotá the tramp down the Andes had been “impossible,” but had long since lost completely that charming quality. I decided to strike eastward in quest of the Paraguay.
“I wouldn’t mind tackling it myself,” sighed Tommy, when I mentioned my decision to the benchers. “I’m badly needed in B. A. But I’m stony broke. Of course if I could find anyone who would take along a steamer-trunk-size man as excess baggage—”
“If the senator doesn’t make up his wandering Bolivian mind soon, I’ll quit embellishing this plaza myself,” put in the cockney, though there was a glint in his eye that suggested, long afterward, that he had meant the hint as a hoax, and considered the trip as impossible as did the rest of Cochabamba.
Were I to have a companion, I should not have chosen Sampson. He was a man with far too much mind of his own to be good company in an uncivilized wilderness. Tommy, diffident, unresourceful, totally lacking in initiative, without self-confidence, wholly innocent of Spanish, to all appearance tractable and harmless, was much to bepreferred. Moreover, he was better looking. Though I was thinly furnished withbolivianosand the nearest possible source of supply was Buenos Aires, I concluded that the code of world-wanderers forbade me to leave Tommy to waste away on the “gringo bench,” and we joined forces. He was to carry his proportionate share of such baggage as I could not throw away, including the tin kitchenette and the bottle of 40 percent. alcohol that went with it—if experience proved I could trust him with that—leaving me, thanks also to the offer of a fellow-countryman to carry the developing-tanks to Santa Cruz on his cargo-mule, only a moderate load. I should have bought a donkey, or anotherchusco, rather than turn ourselves into pack-animals, but for two reasons: first, such a purchase would have relieved me of most of the billetes I had left; secondly, the fate of “Cleopatra” and “Chusquito” caused me to doubt whether any four-footed animal could endure the journey.
It was two months from the day I had walked into Cuzco that one of Cochabamba’s toy trains carried us past adobe towns and mud fences, with dome-shaped huts that gave the scene an oriental touch, and set us down in Punata in time for dinner in thepicanteríawhere Tommy had once before washed down a similar plate of stringy roast pork with a glass of chicha. Then we swung on our packs and struck eastward into the unknown.
Beyond Arani next morning came the real parting of the ways. The trail that swung to the right along the base of the hills went on to Sucre and the silver mountain; that by which we zigzagged up the face of a stony range led across the continent. Here the mountains closed in, and the vast, fertile, yet dreary and desolate plain of Cochabamba, that had seemed to stretch out interminably in the brilliant sunshine, disappeared at length below a swell of land and was lost forever behind us.
For a week the going was not unlike that down the Andes, though it grew gradually lower as the endless ridges of the eastern slope calmed down slowly, like the waves of some tempestuous sea. It was only on the road that I began really to make the acquaintance of Tommy. In spite of his Canadian birth he dressed like a Liverpool dock-laborer, with a heavy cap, a kerchief about his neck, and a heavy winter vest—that is, “w’stc’t”—which he could not be induced to shed, however hot the climate, though he readily enough removed his coat. He spoke with a strong “English accent,” and a man following behind with a basket could have picked up enough H’s to have starteda supply-store of those scarce articles in Whitechapel itself. He had given Cochabamba ample opportunity to show its gratitude at his departure, but the fourteenbolivianosof his last eleemosynary gleanings turned out to be barely sufficient to keep him in cigarettes on the journey. His share of the load he carried in the half of a hectic tablecloth, of mysterious origin, tied across his chest, as an Indian woman carries her latest offspring. His own possessions consisted wholly and exclusively of a large, sharp-pointed, proudly-scoured trowel; for Tommy was by profession a bricklayer and mason. This general convenience, weapon, sign of caste, and hope of better days to come, he wore through the band of his trousers, as the Bolivian peon carries his long knife, and the services it performed were unlimited. I was never nearer throwing my kodak into a mud-hole than when it failed to catch Tommy solemnly eating soft-boiled eggs with the point of his faithful trowel.
The hospitality of the Bolivian soon proved low, even in comparison with the rest of the Andes, and every meal and lodging cost us a struggle. At Pocona, for example, I ended a 36-mile walk down the nose of a range on which a coach road descended by never-ending S’s to a narrow valley bottom below. Tommy had fallen behind, and I had begun to wonder whether he could endure the pace our scantiness of funds made necessary. As I debouched into the grass-grown plaza, I paused to ask a dim-minded person drowsing before one of the doors where one could find a night’s lodging. He silently projected his lips toward a building before which stood the empty stage-coach. There a group of supercilious, unwashed cholos of varying stages of insobriety informed me, with an air that plainly said “We are purposely deceiving you,” first, that there was no tambo in town, then that there was accommodation only for travelers “á bestia.”
“For horsemen only, eh?” I cried, in the voice natural to an all-day fast. “Where does the corregidor live?” What are gobernadores in Peru become corregidores in Bolivia.
“Down the street,” mouthed a half-drunken fellow, with a lazy toss of the head in no particular direction.
I snatched a youth out of the group and pushed him before me. Some way down the foot-torturing cobbles he halted at the open door of the usual slatternly, earth-floored room, saying:
“The corregidor lives here.”
“Go in and fetch him,” I answered, blocking his attempted retreat. He called out two or three times in the singsong with which neighborsgreet neighbors in the Andes, then obeyed my order to enter and summon the “authority”—at least he disappeared inside the building. Some time later two chola girls appeared at the door to ask in pretended surprise what I desired.
“Where is the corregidor?”
“He is in the country. He doesn’t live here,” they replied respectively in one breath, betraying themselves by their carelessness in not rehearsing the reply before appearing.
“Where is the boy who brought me here?”
“Escapado—he escaped—through the back door.”
I had long ago learned this trick of local “authorities” in Andean villages of hiding away at the approach of a stranger bearing orders from the government, and the complicity of all the population in the concealment. But I had learned, also, one means of bringing him to light. I marched into the house and, throwing my pack on an adobe divan covered with blankets, announced that I should sleep there. The cholas would call the corregidor at once, they had called him, they couldn’t call him, he was coming in a minute, he did not live in town, and a dozen other falsehoods poured in a chaotic flood from their lips. For an hour I held to the divan. But as evening settled down, it became evident that the ruse of Peru would not work in Bolivia; that though I might sleep there by force, I should remain thirsty and hungry. I shouldered my bundle and hobbled back to the plaza. There ten centavos spent for chicha convinced the sceptical inhabitants that I was not penniless, and in time it paved the way to a request for food.
“Cómo no?” came the mechanical answer, and a long time after dark a big bowl of broth, luke-warm of temperature but sizzling hot withají, was followed by some hashed blackchuño, or frozen potatoes, mixed with an egg, and some bran-like bread.
“How much do I owe?” I asked when I finished.
“Pues—ah—será setenta centavos.”
“Está bién.And who is going to sleep on those beds?” I continued, pointing to the long adobe divans, each with a roll of thin mattress and blankets, at either end of the room.
“Nadie.”
“No one? How much do you charge for a bed?”
“Un boliviano, no más,” replied the chola in that droning, soothing voice in which the Andean always names an exorbitant price which he knows the traveler cannot refuse to pay. “Voy á tender, no?”“Yes, spread it out.”
I was stripping to crawl into the “star” bed of the tambo—in which only horsemen are accommodated—when there sounded at the door I had fastened ajar with a bench, the worn and humble voice of Tommy. Having fallen behind because of a half-sprained ankle, he had stumbled on into town down that stony, looping descent which I had found bad enough even by day. Fortunately there was a bit of cold broth and somechuñoleft, after devouring which he turned in on the other divan.
Next day we passed a wind-blown, rain-gashed plain, with a few huts on which to practice my neglected Quichua and, early in the afternoon, reached Totora, so named from a long rush which grows in swampy ground. It is the largest town between Cochabamba and Santa Cruz and capital of a province, with several thousand inhabitants. Set in a hollow of the treeless hills, it was dreary and colorless as a mining town, with breakneck cobbled streets, and a little tile-paved plaza surrounded by what Tommy called “drapers’ shops,” all with the selfsame display of bayeta and other crude-colored cloths. The vista of many a street was enlivened by swinging red signs, like Japanese or Chinese banners, above the doors where chicha was for sale. Far better, and almost given away in Colombia, this native drink had come to cost twice what a larger glass of beer would in the United States. In the upper corner of the plaza we spread ourselves at ease on a shaded bench. Around thepilain the center of the square a constant crowd carrying earthen jars fought for the two trickles of water. Behind us stood what dared to call itself the “Hotel Union,” consisting of a billiard-table and an absent proprietor, who, according to the disinterested cholas, might be back during the evening to discuss with us our offer to spend the night with him. The neighboring tambo was closed “because of a wedding in the family,” so rare a ceremony in Bolivia that we had not the heart to complain. Tommy tired of sitting, and went to lie down in frank “hobo” fashion in the plaza band-stand. As dusk came on we made a round of the shops, warned that there would be none for some days ahead. We bought eggs, and blocks of crude sugar, now calledempanada, coca to chew when thirsty, several loaves of the bran-like bread that weighed us down like grindstones, and some shelled peanuts which we found next day to be unroasted. Any chip of stone or scrap of iron served as weights in the shops, though some had brass cups full of shot, over which a paper was pasted by the rare government inspector, soon to“break itself” until he came again. That purchaser who got twelve ounces to his pound was as lucky as the one whosevaracame anywhere near being a yard long. A half-pound weight was commonly the heaviest on hand, and the old woman who sold us sugar poured that amount in with the weight in the other side of the scales, and so on until she had made up the unprecedented quantity we demanded.
A telegraph wire strode bandy-legged over the hills with us on the twenty broken and panting miles to Duraznillo. Across a flanking valley the range was mottled with all colors from deep red to Nile-green, the depths of its gullies purple under dense cloud-shadows, while all the rest of the world lay in brilliant sunshine, and vast banks of snowy-white clouds took on fantastic shapes which the imagination could animate into all manner of strange beings, or people with innumerable plots and fairy-tales. One mighty descent brought us to a “river,” but at the very moment we reached it, it turned suddenly muddy from rains somewhere in the hills above and spoiled our plan for a “bathe,” as Tommy expressed it. In the dry, burning hills beyond, my companion went astray, but found himself again by following my hob-nailed footsteps. He had so little initiative that he would not lead the way, and his favorite plan of plodding at my very heels having been vetoed, as he did not mix well with the landscape, he commonly trailed a half-mile behind, usually taking care not to lose sight of me.
Duraznillo had a public “rest-house” that had once been an adobe chapel, but which was now as bare as a millionaire’s room in heaven. I boiled oatmeal and eggs in the water Tommy brought from a stagnant pool not far away, but waited in vain for the return of the only European-clad resident, who had volunteered to “arrange us.” As the shades of night spread, the beaten-mud floor looked harder and harder, and in nosing about we were astonished to discover several once-imported mattresses covering a pile of adobe bricks in the backcorredorof the chief house of the village, apparently uninhabited. Still, it was possible that the local “authority” would in time come out of hiding, and we lolled patiently, if road-weary, in the moonlight.
We had waited until—well, perhaps eight, though without a watch it seemed hours later, when patience ceased to be a virtue, and we slipped through a hole in the mud fence, each to embrace a mattress. It may be that a trap had been set for us. As we approached the wall again, an unusually large half-Indian, wrapped in a poncho, loomed up on the other side, and shouted in an authoritative voice:
“What are you doing inside that fence?”
Now I do not like any man to address me in that tone, least of all a South American Indian. It is neither good training for his own primitive character nor advantageous to future gringo travelers.
“Speaking to me, indio?” I demanded.
“I am corregidor of Duraznillo, also guardian of this house.”
“Corregidor! Then you are the very fellow we have been looking for these last four hours. You will kindly lend us two mattresses to sleep on.”
“I will not lend youonemattress to sleep on. What are you doing?”
Plainly he was of Aymará rather than meek Quichua blood.
“And where have you been hiding yourself,señor corregidor? We have a letter for you from the government.”
“Ugh!” he snorted, with an effort at sarcasm. “Let’s see that letter from the government.”
“It is in my pack in the chapel.”
“Bring it over here.”
“Since when have caballeros run after Indians to show them government orders? Are you going to lend us two mattresses?”
“Not one!”
“Tommy, chuck them over.”
He did so with trembling hands, for something had given the diminutive bricklayer an extraordinary respect for “authorities.” The corregidor followed at our heels, bellowing, as we carried our finds into the ex-chapel and spread them out. A stocky youth and a woman with a flickering candle appeared behind him in the doorway, and the Indian demanded my papers.
“Can you read?” I asked.
“I can,” he snarled; which he could, to the extent of spelling out the order at about a line a minute.
“Bien,” he admitted at last, in a surly voice, “but you are to ask for things, not take them.”
“From a corregidor who hides himself?”
“And the prefect orders that you be furnished what you needat a just price,” he added triumphantly, ignoring my reply.
“Exactly.”
“Then you will pay two bolivianos for each mattress.”
“Very well; but you will first make out a receipt for that amount, that I may send it back to the prefect.”
It was not the first time I had played this unfailing card against an Andean “authority” attempting extortion. He knew he was beaten; for though he could read, after a Bolivian fashion, he probably could not write, and certainly would not dare let such a document reach the prefect. Like a true Latin-American, however, he saved his face as long as possible:
“Very well, give me some paper to write it on.”
“As corregidor, you should furnish your own paper. I have none.”
“Well, you may use one mattress, but not two,” he growled.
“You lose. Inmycountry we are not accustomed to sleep two on the same mattress.”
A shiver of rage seemed to pass over him, while his Castilian pride struggled for expression behind his mask of Indian features. Then he faded away into the night and was heard no more, though I was not so certain of him as not to prop a heavy wooden beam against the door in such a way that an attempt to sneak in upon us during the night would quite likely have been followed in the morning by the intruder’s funeral.
Never-ending spiral descents, so steep we had to set the brakes constantly, making our thighs ache, brought us at last to a hot and stony river-bed across which a luke-warm, knee-deep “river” snaked its way incessantly. We stuffed leggings andFusslappeninto our bundles and walked all the rest of the day barefoot in our unlaced boots, crossing the stream perhaps a hundred times, and envying the hoof-soled natives as often as we paused to pull on our footwear. Tommy found it too much trouble to roll down his trousers after each crossing, and complained of sunburned legs for days to come. But at least the going was level. The stillness and lack of population recalled Jaen in the far north of Peru. For hours we tramped stonily between ever lower cactus-grown hills, only the mournful note of the jungle-dove breaking the silence. The first gnats and giant-jawed insects we were doomed to endure more and more as we advanced to the eastward began to annoy us. As scrub trees thickened, bird life grew more prevalent. Bands of parrakeets screamed by, as always along these dry, tropical river-beds; now and then a parrot or two, forerunners of many to come, passed overhead. The rare huts squatting in scant patches of shade were now of mere open-work poles. To sleep in them was far less inviting than to lie on the ground under a shrub.
“Sandy” leading his train of carts loaded with construction material for the railroad to Cochabamba
“Sandy” leading his train of carts loaded with construction material for the railroad to Cochabamba
“Sandy” leading his train of carts loaded with construction material for the railroad to Cochabamba
The “gringo bench” of Cochabamba,—left to right, “Old Man Simpson;” Tommy Cox; Sampson, the Cockney; Owen, and Scribner
The “gringo bench” of Cochabamba,—left to right, “Old Man Simpson;” Tommy Cox; Sampson, the Cockney; Owen, and Scribner
The “gringo bench” of Cochabamba,—left to right, “Old Man Simpson;” Tommy Cox; Sampson, the Cockney; Owen, and Scribner
But the Andes did not subside so easily. Next morning the trailshook off the river and climbed wearily to a wind-swept puna, then dropped by a leg-strainingbajadainto anothercañonwith a muddy, lukewarm brook, only to pant upward again to another summit. Several times each day we sweated to a hilltop and lay down in a cool breeze we should not often enjoy in the days to come. Range back of blue range spread away into ever-bluer, purple distance. The region recalled the Malay Peninsula—with all its romance rubbed off and even more inhospitable inhabitants tucked away in the undergrowth. Yet surely, if slowly, the Andes were flattening down, and each summit was less lofty than the preceding.
One afternoon passing arrieros told us that three of ourpaisanoswere not far ahead. We increased our pace and strode at five, with thirty miles in our legs, into the miserable mud town of Chilón. In the corral and corredor back through one of the dismal dwellings we found, camped with their four mules, the American prospectors, Scribner, Kimball, and Owen, who had burdened themselves with my developing-tank. We foraged together. These interior villages are less useful to the seeker after supplies than a lone country hut, for in them each native “passes the buck” by sending the inquirer on to someone else. The traveler who has lived for days chiefly on the anticipation of what he will eat in the town he has been assured is “provided with everything,” is fortunate to collect the ingredients of even one real meal, and that only at the expense of wandering from door to door, like a Buddhist priest with his begging-bowl. Chilón was even more anemic and indifferent than usual. It is rated the most fever-stricken region of Bolivia, and the government has striven in vain to drive out the almost universalchuchoby planting the eucalyptus and sending doctors to study its cause. The only water to be had was a yellow liquid mud dipped up in the back yard. Kimball prepared to cook in it some of thecharquihe had bought at blockade prices, only to bring to light a swarm of maggots. A can of peaches from Chile—some time in the last century—cost two bolivianos; four ounces of tea, a boliviano, a pound of sugar as much, and at that it was a coarse, dirty, stony stuff, so hard an ax was required to break it. One slattern a bit less sullen in aspect than the town in general asked if we “knew how” to eatmoteandcharol. We assured her we knew how to eat anything we could get our fingers on, and she set before us a single plate of boiled shelled corn and little cubes of fried fat pork, which we ate with the spoons nature had provided us. In the entire town we gleaned two whole eggs. Most of the huts that displayedthem answered with that clumsy old Andean lie, “Son ajenos—They belong to some one else.” A woman squatting behind one of the huts admitted she had eggs to sell, but said she did not feel like getting up to sell them. That was the attitude of all Chilón. It may be that the hookworm, as well as thechucho, was prevalent.
When I awoke at dawn, Kimball, in retaliation for the state of the charqui, had already picked a chicken from one of the trees in the corral and managed to stuff it into hisalforjaswithout a squawk. By the time we were off, it began to rain. A half-sand, half-mud road splashed and skated away through semi-tropical scrub woods, caking our feet with glue-like mud, and soaking our garments from both inside and out. In spite of the rain the tropical heat weighed down upon us like water-logged blankets, and nowhere was there water to drink. Rarely among the spiny scrub trees we came upon a miserable hut of poles and sticks, in each of which lounged a dozen or so of the colorless, mongrel natives of the region.Ranchowas being cooked in one such hovel, and though the householders showed no joy, or any other species of emotion, at our presence, when the meal was ready, a small wash-basin of rice, charqui, and pepper stew was set on the ground before us, and we were each silently handed a wooden spoon. There was, of course, no bread, but a gourd bowl ofmotewas added for our competition. This was one contest in which Tommy was easily my superior. The languid, fever-yellow chola would not accept payment for the food, though she did so readily enough for the chica we had drunk, calling up to Tommy far-off memories of the land of “free lunch,” so that several times during the blazing afternoon I heard his sheet-iron voice torturing the wilderness behind me with his own version of a one-time Broadway favorite:
“Stake me back to New York town....”
Not two hours beyond we drifted into a saw-mill hacienda, and before I knew it Tommy had told his tale so feelingly to the Italian owner, who had the misfortune to understand a little English, that we must go in and have a plate of cold spaghetti, imported to these wilds at nerve-shaking prices. Best of all, after nothing better than liquid mud for days, was several glasses of almost clear water. The Italian was bubbling over about some new invention by one of his countrymen that would forever abolish war. Half the world might be abolished without our hearing of it in these wilds. Before we left he inquired whether we had quinine, and forced upon Tommy a box of pills, with the urgent advice to take one every morning. I had already begun todose myself daily, but was never able to convince my companion that ills might be forestalled far more easily than they could be ousted after they had staked their claims.
It was December 21, the longest day of the year, and the sun was still high when we again overtook our “paisanos,” camped this time along a brick-floored corredor under the projecting eaves of a large tile-roofed hacienda-house, among scrub trees and scattered huts to the right of the trail. The building was imposing for the region, for the owner held title to a vast tract and many cattle. I recalled the plump hospitality of many a similar hacendado of Peru, but was quickly reminded that we were in Bolivia. Our “paisanos” had already eaten. Having come on foot, Tommy and I were too low caste to be invited into the brick-floored dining-room with the swarming family. After much reconnoitering I found a hut where a lean chicken could be bought at a high price, and theseñoraof the hacienda grudgingly agreed to have her servants cook it. Here, too, the only water was a thick yellow liquid flowing behind the house and common to all its animals. At sight of it we had abandoned our plan to bathe, yet we must drink it and cook in it. The apathy of life in these parts is exemplified by the fact that an hacendado of comparative wealth will drink mud all his life, rather than dig a well.
Long after dark an unwashed chola came waddling into the corredor with a single bowl of charqui stew and two wooden spoons. Tommy fell upon this gratefully, as he would have upon a bone discarded by a dog. Personally I was not pleased with the metamorphosis the fowl had undergone, and calling out the haughty hacendado, I thrust a handful of bills toward him, asking if he could not sell us something fit to eat, even if he did want the chicken for himself. The hint caused him to turn a livid green. These landowners of the interior, too “proud” to sell food to travelers, are yet too tight-fisted to give it away; and a lifetime on their own broad, if worthless, acres, with only a few cringing Indians about them, lording it over even their own women, causes them to consider themselves vastly superior to all mankind, and to treat travelers accordingly. So thoroughly had I ruffled his pomposity that the fellow, visibly shaking with anger, went to sit under a scraggly tree in the grassless sand before the house and rage in silence, then took to pacing back and forth, in and out of the building, and kept it up until well into the morning. He might have vented his rage more effectually, for law has but slight foothold in these wild regions, but for the half-dozen revolvers, rifles, and pistolslying about us in the corredor. Meanwhile a servant brought my chicken in a pot, and though it was tougher than life in Bolivia, we drank the broth and hung the remnants of the fowl to a rafter above our heads, out of reach of dogs, Indians, or ants.
It rained most of the night, and the wood we could find in the chill slate-tinted dawn was so wet that it was a good hour before we boiled tea and rice in the yellow mud—and coaxed Tommy to get up in time to eat. Barely two hundred yards beyond, we came to the muddy river, must unshoe the feet we had just carefully shod for the day, and had a provoking task dressing them again on the mud-reeking further bank. Tommy went to hunt cigarettes—which are to be had in these parts only by inquiring at each hut until one has found some old woman who has inadvertently rolled a dozen or two beyond her own consumption—and it was hours later that he overtook me. We undulated on over half-sandy country, a thorn-tree desert without sight or sound of human life, grown with thousands of immense cactus trees of the pipe-organ species from which fell myriads oftunas, an “apple” Tommy called it, the outer spines of which fall off when ripe, the juicy interior, full of tiny black seeds, with mildly the taste of strawberries, effective at least in quenching the thirst.
At a scattered cluster of huts called Mataral we found a group of drunken Indians, male and female, celebrating the customary wake in and about a hut where a baby had died. The corpse of theangelitolay pale-yellow and half naked on a bare, home-made table, a lighted candle on either side of its head, its nostrils stuffed with cotton, and already beginning to make its presence known to another of the five senses, while all about the premises rolled maudlin, fishy-eyed half-breeds, only too glad of any excuse for consuming gallons of overripe chicha. Outside, a half-sober cholo was piecing a coffin together from the odds and ends of boxes that had once held foreign imports. The priest’s assurance that infants, properly baptized, go directly to heaven makes such a death the cause almost for rejoicing among the ignorant population of Bolivia, even if it leads to nothing worse than passive infanticide.
Frequent ridges and a stream that forced us to unshoe and shoe a score of times, reddening our legs where our leggings should have been, decidedly reduced our pace. Not without surprise, therefore, did I sight at dusk, among the trees on a low bluff across a nearly waterless river-bed, a village of moderate size, thirty miles from where we had started in the morning. It was Pampa Grande. My fellow-countrymenhad already commandeered a mud room on a corner of the second street, and chucked their possessions pell-mell into it. Among the luxuries the place offered was bread, soggy and gritty, dark of complexion as the inhabitants, but bread for all that. While we were swallowing chunks of this and ofempanada, some one discovered that it was Christmas Eve. A celebration was imperative. Kimball dug up an ancient fife from his pack, I still possessed a battered mouth-organ, and all but Owen, who had none, lent their voices to the lusty, if not musical, carols that astonished the apathetic hamlet so thoroughly that a few found energy to gather in a drooping group in the noiseless street outside. We ended with our patriotic anthem, in the midst of which Kimball’s fife suddenly broke off its wail long enough for him to assure Tommy:
“Here, young feller, don’t get it into your nut that’s ‘Gawd save no King’ we’re treatin’ these greasers to!”
The prospectors pushed on in the morning, but finding ourselves a day ahead of our schedule, and that we could still reach Santa Cruz before the end of the year, we decided to spend Christmas in Pampa Grande. It was ideal Christmas weather. The village stands on the eighteenth parallel, at an altitude of some 4000 feet, giving it a soft midsummer air, with a caressing breeze and a most restful atmosphere. Life had slowed down to a snail’s pace. The mud-housed inhabitants were too indolent to make a noise or disturbance; even our next-door neighbors were too apathetic to come and satisfy their curiosity by staring at us. Lying on the adobe couch under the eaves, we could let our eyes roam lazily over the surrounding sandy, scrub-wooded country of unabrupt hills, utterly silent but for the occasional faint note of the mourning jungle-dove.
But the all-important question was Christmas dinner. The boyish corregidor was duly impressed by my papers, and assured me we could have “anything we might desire.” I took him at his word and handed over a boliviano with a request for eggs. He called in a sandaled youth and sent him away with orders to round up a basketful. Then he wandered home. After a time the youth came shuffling back to say he could not find a single egg; and thrust the coin toward me. I was too experienced an Andean traveler to accept it and thus absolve the “authorities” of any further aid. Blocked in his turn, the corregidor came again in person to suggest a chicken at a boliviano. My extravagance in accepting this offer startled him, but he dropped the coin deftly into my hand and hurried languidly off, ostensibly to look forthe fowl, really to sneak home by a roundabout route. He could not be blamed much for such conduct. Appointed by force and obliged to serve without emoluments, the rural “authority” lives between two millstones, the lower composed of his fellow-townsmen and lifelong friends, with whom he must continue his existence, a far more tangible and permanent reality than the somewhat nebulous government that furnishes travelers with imperative orders from far-off La Paz or Cochabamba.
But a Christmas dinner is nothing to grow sentimental or sympathetic about. When I had loafed and drowsed and read an hour or more longer, I wandered a few yards up the sandy street to the corregidor’s hut.
“No,” he mourned regretfully from his hammock, “I have not been able to find a chicken. Nobody wants to sell.”
“But,señor corregidor,” I protested, “we haven’t a thing with which to make dinner—Christmas dinner, and the Minister of the Interior in La Paz told me—”
The official name brought him slowly from the hammock to his feet, a worried look on his face.
“Very well,” he sighed, “then we will make you analmuerzohere in my house, which is your own.”
“Not at all,señor; we would not dream of troubling you. But if you have wherewith to make analmuerzo, let us have the ingredients and we will cook them to suit ourselves.”
“Well, there is charqui—”
“Don’t mention it. We don’t want to insult our stomachs, even on Christmas. I was speaking of food.”
“Well, there is a house down at the edge of the river where they have killed a beef—”
“Yes, three days ago; and the lump of it my compatriots bought this morning all but lifted the roof off our hut. A slice carved out of the middle of it was grass-green. The yellow dog that picked up both chunks of it when we threw it into the street may have had the Christmas dinner of his life, but he is not likely to see another.”
“Ay, Diós, señor, then there is nothing else.”
“Now, for the good of Pampa Grande, I advise you! There are plenty of chickens in town.”
“The people will not sell. The only way is for you to go out and shoot one with your revolver.”
“I never risk my aim on anything smaller than a bullock. Cartridges are expensive in the wilds of Bolivia.”
Such gringo persistency was annoying. Native travelers needed only to be told the same lie two or three times before they left him in peace to drowse in his hammock. With a badly concealed sigh he wandered into the street, and led the way across the noiseless sanded plaza to the house of his friend thealcalde. The two conferred together and finally sent out a cholo with orders to run down a chicken—“anybody’s at all.” The emissary returned by and by to report that he could not find one. The pair looked at me as much as to say, “There, you see the last hope has failed.” I ignored the hint. In despair they called in another cholo and with a mumbled order handed him a shotgun. A long time later a report was heard some distance off. The two officials shivered. By and by the cholo returned with the shotgun and announced that “it was badly loaded.” He said nothing about the aiming. The officials looked at me imploringly. I remained like a statue of patience seated on a cactus. At last thealcalde, with the air of a member of a suicide club who has drawn the black bean, snatched up the gun and, calling upon the cholo to follow, disappeared into the sunshine. For a time only the chirp of an insect in the thatch above sounded. Then a shot was heard, and a moment later thealcaldedodged into the room like a man pursued by bandits, thrust the weapon quickly under a reed mat, and assumed his seat and his most innocent air. Legally he might shoot all his neighbors’ chickens on government order; practically he was not anxious to be seen at it. The corregidor looked sorrowfully but appealingly up at him. His voice was a weak whisper:
“Yes, we got him. It was Don Panchito’s red one. No, the pullet. No, none of the family seemed to see me, but quién sabe?”
For a considerable time more nothing happened. I began to wonder if this, too, had been a well-acted ruse. Now and then thealcaldeor the corregidor rose and peered anxiously down the street through the crack of the door. Whenever the patter of footsteps sounded outside, the pair grew stiff with misgiving.
Then suddenly in burst the cholo, carrying under his poncho thepollo, already relieved of its feathers, thus accounting for the last delay. It was a tolerably plump bird, and the corregidor thought fifty centavos would be a just price. He would give it to Don Panchito to-morrow, when his wrath had cooled. I paid it and hurried home.There followed an hour’s wandering and pleading, all of which I must do in person, since Tommy spoke no Spanish, and several more appeals to the corregidor before I got lard, rice, tiny potatoes at ten cents a pound, as well as an unexpected bowl of what purported to be stewed peaches. The pot the corregidor could lend us was large enough for an army. Tommy, who had once been second cook on board ship—after they had found him—was appointed fireman and general assistant, and soon had the three-stone fagot cook-stove out under the back porch roaring. Then with plantains fried in lard and —. But why enumerate? By the time we had fed the ragamuffins at the back door and hung the not yet empty kettle on the top of a hammock-post, even Tommy’s inclination to make tea had evaporated. It may not have been a genuine Christmas dinner. Pumpkin pie, for instance, was painfully conspicuous by its absence. But it produced the same effect. While Tommy stretched out on a mud divan, I spread my poncho on the sand under a tree in the back yard, where the gusts of breeze came often enough to lull me quickly into a siesta.
I had barely fallen asleep when the chicken-shooter came to “give me information about the town,” and I must get up and go back to the room with him. There he picked up the scattered pages of Ibañez’ “Flor de Mayo” I had discarded as I read, then clawed out my copy of a Cochabamba newspaper. When he had perused that he took to fingering my note-book, which fortunately he could not read, until at last in disgust I spread my poncho again on the brick floor and was soon sound asleep. When I woke again at sunset both informant and information had faded away. I went out on the porch to write, and a neighbor came to pull the note-book out of my hands and solemnly “read” it, quite oblivious in his illiteracy to the fact that there was hardly a word of Spanish in it, besides being legible only to the elect. Then he must inspect my fountain-pen and learn all its inner secrets. When I recovered it and continued writing with what ink was not smeared over his person, he thrust his nose between the pages, inquiring:
“Are you noting all the inhabitants of Pampa Grande?”
“No.”
“Ah, only the notable ones, then?”
“Alas, no; you see I have only a moderate-sized note-book.”