Chapter 41

One of the two huge figures facing the grass-grown plaza of modern Tiahuanaco at the entrance to the church

The ancient god of Tiahuanaco before which the Indian woman, herding her pigs, bowed down in worship

Roughly speaking, the population is divided into three classes, as everywhere in the Andes, each shading into the other until the lines of demarkation are at best hazy. Of the whites, the census report itself asserts, “Sequestered, they knew more of theological subtleties than of religion, were more devout than moral, and had more preoccupations than ideas. There is even to-day no stimulus for their best faculties, and they have lost almost completely that virile character bequeathed them by their Spanish ancestors. They will work only at commerce or government employments that demand no corporeal fatigue.” Effeminate is the description that most quickly occurs to the foreigner; but they are no more so than all men of the “gente decente” class throughout South America. Even the whites take on something of that sulky dis-confidence, that unobliging insolence of the Aymará character, and one quickly catches the feeling that the foreigner is disliked in Bolivia, at least far more so than in Peru. Another native, with the point of view of wide travel, assures us, “The whites are really Indians and cholos in their mode of thought. Thanks to the Aymará blood in his veins, or to the effect of that environment on his character, thepaceñolacks docility, is uncommunicative, and is bored at all times at everything; hence his desire for excitement, for noise, and the resultant life in the canteens. In the three cold cities of Bolivia more liquor is consumed than in all the rest of the country; alcoholism is the national vice par excellence, and the surest way to win a fortune is to run a bar.”

But in any strict census the cholo is the most numerous class of La Paz. A native writer succinctly explains the rise of this mixed race: “As in the beginning the Spaniards had not within reach many women of their own race, they satisfied the physical and moral necessities of the sex with women of the vanquished tribes.... A few of these succeeded in inspiring real passion in the breasts of the hardy Conquistadores, sometimes even to the extent of causing the latter to marry themselves legally and Catholicly with our Indian women.” All hail to the inspiring Indian women! One must not, however, overlook the fact that “real passion” among the old Spanish Conquistadores was not so closely allied to soap and tooth-powder as in our own days. Short and sturdy—especially the women, who do not wear themselves out with dissipation—with quick little eyes, the cholos have much of the independence of the Aymará character; they are quite the oppositeof servile, and somewhat despise both the whites and the aboriginals.

No country of South America has so large a percentage of pure Indian population as Bolivia. The Aymará is by nature silent and aloof, more sullen and cruel than the Quichua, and by no means so obsequious as the aboriginals of Cuzco. He never touches his hat to a passing gringo; unlike the Indian of Quito he crosses the main plaza in any dress he chooses, even carrying bundles and sitting on the benches; in the region roundabout, the race has inner organizations under their own chiefs which are virtually independent of the Government; yet in town he does as he is ordered, though sullenly, and shopkeepers drag him in to perform any low task at whatever reward they choose to give him. Aspongo, or house-servant, he is farmed out as a child and becomes virtually a slave,—though that condition worries him little. A frequent “want-ad.” in the papers of La Paz runs: “Se alquila pongo con taquia,” that is, there is for rent an Indian servant with necessity of gathering for his master llama droppings as fuel. Festivals and fire-water are his chief amusements. Sunday he reserves as a day to get drunk, and couples are reputed to take turns at this recreation, so that one may be in condition to lead the other home when it is over. His music is melancholy beyond words. As a Bolivian puts it, “He lives without inquietude and without remorse, being dangerous only when he is full of liquor or religion. He is a beast of burden, uncomplaining, desires nothing, is apparently content with his fate, and looks with supreme indifference on all the rest of the world and its people.”

The contrasts of life in La Paz are striking. Here an ancient scribe sits before a typewriter agency; there a group of Indian women squat before the crude products of the country, in front of the electric-lighted emporium of a foreign merchant; electric tramways thrust aside trains of llamas even in the principal streets. Speaking of these street-cars, they crawl back and forth across town, sometimes zigzagging whole blocks for every street; and the dishevelled carriages for hire are generally drawn by four horses. For La Paz is broken and steep, often held up in layers by retaining walls, while the sidewalks are often toboggan-steep and always slippery. Houses which from the “Alto” seem on the level are found to be a hundred feet or more one above the other. It is one of the easiest cities to get lost in without being really lost; for one always comes out finally on some corner where a familiar landmark or half the city stands forth toorientate one at once. Many a street is crowded with Indians from the country, and especially with chola vendors who, there being no regular market-place, spread their wares where they will, squatting in unbroken rows on the sidewalks and driving the uncomplaining pedestrian into the slippery cobbled streets. One does not hurry in La Paz; the air is too scanty. A bogotano complained that he could not sleep there on account of the altitude! The temperature ranges from 6 degrees Centigrade in June to 18 in this mid-summer month of December. Yet even then it was somewhat wretched after sunset, and no one would choose to sit in pajamas in the central plaza at night. From eleven to three it grew almost uncomfortably warm for climbing about so up-and-down a place, and the brilliant unclouded sky was hard both on eyes and nerves at noonday.

It is difficult for the stranger to get accustomed to seeing droves of llamas, with drivers dressed in the style of Inca days, soft-footing across the main plaza or patiently awaiting their masters, with the modern congress building as a background. Congress, by the way, was in session during my days in La Paz. The visitors’ gallery is high up above the perfectly circular chamber, giving the half-hundred representatives the appearance of being down at the bottom of a deep well. They smoked frequently, spoke sitting, were largely white, though the cholo class was by no means unrepresented, and among them were two priests in full vestments, their tonsures shining up at us like rays from the Middle Ages. There were also several who strangely resembled Tammany politicians of the popular cartoons, and nowhere was there any outward sign of genius, legislative or otherwise. While the man who had the “floor” kept his seat and droned endlessly through something or other, the presiding officer sat motionless and openly bored, and members slept, smoked, read newspapers, wrote letters, and otherwise busied themselves with the vital problems of the nation, after the fashion of legislative bodies the world over.

There is a distinct gradation in the costumes of La Paz, especially among the women. The men of the “gente decente” class, the whites and the consider-themselves-whites, ape Paris to the best of their ability, as in all Andean capitals. The higher-class cholo, ranging from shoe-makers to clerks—in both the American and English sense—wears more or less countrified and ill-fitting “European” garb, even to gloves and a cane on Sunday, if he can get them; for social standing depends chiefly on dress. The less ambitious half-caste wears the same leather sandal as the Indian, a coat showing a bit above or belowhis more or less crude-colored poncho, a coarse shirt without collar, and a heavy felt hat. A peculiarity of thepaceñocostume, as universal among the Indians and poorer cholos as the cord around the knee of British workmen, is a slit in the back of the trouser-leg, showing a white, pajama-like undergarment above the bare brown ankle. The Indians, conservative as all their race, are slow to adopt the slightest change, and still dress much as in the time of the Incas. The men wear peaked knitted-wool “skating-caps” of gay colors, with earlaps, like clowns in a circus, often with a felt hat of varying tones of gray on top of it. Their ponchos of alpaca-wool are of solid colors,—orange, scarlet, purple, magenta—with some tone of red always the ruling favorite. Much of this cloth has for years come from Germany, though there is still considerable native weaving. Some go barefoot; more often they wear the heavy, well-made leather sandals that are displayed in large quantities in the market-stalls.

But the men of La Paz lend it little color compared to the women. These may be roughly divided, following the local phraseology, into “señoritas,” “cholas,” and “indias”; though these in turn subdivide, until there are six rather distinct costume classes, all shading somewhat into one another. First: The foreign women and a small number of native white ones copy the styles of Paris with more or less success. Second: The moderately well-to-do woman—and all those of the “gente decente” class during the morning hours of mass; it being against the rules to wear a hat in church—wrap themselves from head to foot in the jet blackmantothat gives them the appearance of stalking crows. These commonly powder their faces with what seems to be cheap flour, and are rarely startling in their beauty, though many are physically attractive between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three.

Arequipa, second city of Peru, in its desert oasis, backed by Misti Volcano

“Suddenly the bleak pampa falls away at one’s feet, and La Paz in its hole in the ground, 1,200 feet below, spreads out at the foot of Illimani and its sister peaks”

Third (to be marked Baedeker-fashion with two stars) comes the most picturesque figure in Bolivia, if not in South America,—la chola de La Paz. Her mate may blossom out in all the atrocities or “European” attire, but la chola clings tenaciously and wisely to the costume of her ancestors. Moreover, in this case the picturesque is not attended by its usual handmaid, uncleanliness. La Paz is not immaculate by modern standards, but at least la chola does her share toward making it seem so. She wears the usual multiplicity of skirts, but of a finer material and better fit than elsewhere, so that while she is still somewhat bulky about the hips, she is not disagreeably so. Her outer skirt is always of a solid color, distinctly gay, but never ofthe crudeness this garment attains among the Indian women. Of well-woven cloth, it stops just halfway from foot to knee, never high enough to suggest immodesty and never low enough to drag on the ground, as is the distressing custom among many of the middle-class women up and down the Andes. Above this she wears two shawls—at least that is the nearest English equivalent in a male vocabulary—of some excellent material closely resembling silk, with perpendicular stripes of varying width and color, the whole gay in the extreme, yet never clashing with the rest of the costume so far as the mere male eye can detect. These being large, they are folded in the middle and thrown about the shoulders, a glimpse of the inner one adding to the gaiety of the ensemble, the fringe of both sweeping her ankles. Her hair, jet black, and coarse as a horse’s mane, she parts in the middle and combs flat on either side, the ends of the braids, without the suggestion of a decoration of ribbon or flower, hanging sometimes inside, sometimes outside the shawls. From her ears swing heavy earrings of fantastic design some two inches long. Most striking of all is her unique hat. This is of straw, of “Panama” texture, with the general form of our derby or the Englishman’s “bowler,” lacquered or glazed over with something that causes it to reflect the brilliant sunlight of these heights like a mirror, and seeming at first sight as absurd and out of place as our own “’ard ’at” might to a visitor from Mars.

But one soon gets used to it, and even to like it, especially as la chola wears it at just the suggestion of a rakish angle, ever so slightly inclined over the right eye, though the near-certainty that she is wholly unconscious of that fact only adds to the attractiveness. When she grows excited, as in arguing the price of a nickel’s-worth of beans in the market-place, she has a way of giving the front rim a flip of the finger that knocks the hat back from her brow, under which circumstances she so vividly recalls a Western “drummer” in a heated but friendly argument in a bar-room, that one sighs with regret that she has not a half-burned cigar protruding at an aggressive angle from the corner of her mouth to complete the picture.

There remains but to speak of her footwear. This consists of a high shoe, native-made, on a very Parisian last, with high, slender “French heels,” of every color a shoe could be by any stretch of propriety, but with cream or canary-color the favorite, a bow of the same material—it seems to be kid—down near the toe and a bundle of tassels at the top. Occasionally the shoes are high enough to join company withthe halfway-to-the-knee skirt, below which peers the white lace of an inner petticoat, but even then when she stoops over in arguing a purchase, one notes a “clocked” stocking, that adds still more to the debauch of colors, going on up—at least to where it is fitting for a stranger to cease investigation.

Astonishment grows that la chola can afford such garments. The shoes alone cost as high as $10, and every stitch in sight is of a grade and workmanship that come high in Bolivia, that would not, indeed, be cheap in a far more productive country. Yet the chief wonder is the specklessness of her entire garb—doubly wonderful to one of long Andean experience. The glazed hat shines like the polished dome of a mosque, the skirts and shawls always look as if they had just that moment come out of a Parisian shop, and the cream-colored shoes have not a fly-speck upon them; yet la chola wears this costume at any hour and under all circumstances—in the street, at least—and carries on her often soiling business in all parts of town. Some assert that she starves herself to dress; but her appearance does not uphold the contention. However she affords it, it is to be hoped that the means will continue, and that she will not some day abandon in favor of the atrocities of foreign fashions the most picturesque costume in South America, and the chief decoration of every outdoor scene and public gathering in La Paz.

The chola is not exactlychic; the thick-setness bequeathed her by Indian forebears makes that word fail. But she is as nearly so as the Andean Indian type can become; and as she trips along at a “snappy,” energetic stride up and down the break-neck cobbled streets of La Paz, in her slender-waisted “French heels,” and not only doesnotbreak her neck but does not even jar from its angle her “stiff ’at,” the eye is as certain to note her passing as it would that of a meteor in the sky above. She is always full-cheeked and plump, often good to look at in spite of her rather bulky Indian features, and aggressively independent, going anywhere at any time she chooses in complete indifference to the oriental seclusion that still clings about the upper class women. She treats the rest of the world with a manner midway between sauciness and impudence, scorning anything on the plane of reading and writing with the disdain of her Indian forebears. She holds most of the places in the market and thepulperías, or little liquor and food shops, and ranges all the way from small shopkeeper to unservile serving-maid to well-to-do women. One gets the impression from a brief acquaintance that she is as superior to her mate, the shifty-eyedcholo, as are the women of Tehuantepec to their men. She speaks Aymará by choice, but will use Spanish when necessary; and she is always at least comparatively young. One sees cholas up to thirty or thirty-five, but as they do not look as if they died off at that age, the natural conclusion is that they fall into a more somber and less agreeable costume. La chola is seldom married “legally and Catholicly,” but if she has a baby, a mishap that not infrequently befalls her, she wears it as all Andean women wear their babies,—on her back. Instead of being carelessly slung in a blanket tied across mother’s chest, however, this fortunate mite sits in a whole nest of clean, gay garments, the spotless white lining hanging down a foot or more on all sides of it, ending in a lace fringe. Indeed, this better care of baby is notable in La Paz, and has its influence even among the Indian women.

But I set out to give a half-dozen female classes. The fourth is the same chola, just a shade lower in the scale. She also wears a little round hat, but of brown or black felt. Her skirts and shawls are less gay and of coarser texture, her stockings are dark, and her footwear a shining-black, low slipper without heel. The fifth is usually a common servant, almost touching on the Indian woman, her garments sometimes descending to the plebeian, crude-colored, made-in-Germany-and-in-a-hurrybayetain which the higher grade chola would scorn to be seen, though it is almost universal to her class elsewhere in the Andes. She wears also a shiny black slipper, but no stockings, though her brown plump leg looks almost like finely woven silk. There is no suggestion of immodesty in this absence of nether covering, yet when one of this class, for some sojourning-gringo reason, suddenly appears in the bare white legs of what at first glance seems a lady of our own race, the sight brings something of a shock. Of the three types of chola, the third and fourth may blend a bit, sometimes to the extent of coiffing the latter in a glazed hat; but only the first ever falls into the foolishness of the “upper” class in flouring her face a bit, and at worst it is confined to a few sporadic cases.

At the bottom of the scale, as everywhere in the Andes, comes the Indian woman, varying a bit in garb, according to the degree of her poverty. She wears the round felt hat and endures the chill highland winds by wrapping several thick bayeta skirts of clashing colors around her waist in bunches, until she looks like—I am at a loss for a comparison that is ugly, awkward, and bulky enough;—may I say, like a very badly packed sack of assorted hardware with the looser and lighter things above the compressed middle? She likes red best, andas the day warms, every second or third of the skirts she removes one by one is of some shade of that color. Below them are bronzed legs and either bare feet with hoof-like soles, or, as La Paz and vicinity are distinctly stony, as well as cold, with a flat sandal of a single piece of leather, with thongs over the heel and between the large toe and the others. Solidly built as she is, one wonders how the Indian woman’s waist can support the weight of six or eight heavy bayeta skirts. Yet always, in addition to these, night or day, young or old, drunk or sober, filthy or only dirty, she carries a bundle on her back in the colored blanket tied across her chest, with, whenever possible—and her possibilities in this line are infinite—the head of a baby protruding somewhere from the load, now gazing earnestly at the road ahead, now dancing a crowing hornpipe on the broad back of the utterly unresponsive mother.

Now, mix all these types; put at least half the male population in gay ponchos, with every known shade of saffron, red, orange, purple, and the like; sprinkle among them youths with long hair tied in queues, wearing gay-striped ponchos that conceal all but their sturdy brown legs, who straggle up out of the tropical coca-country to the east to mingle with the city life; add a distinctive costume for each surrounding village, the noiseless llama-driver in his absurd cap, a number of Germans in Bolivian army uniforms, monks in black, brown, and white, nuns in gray, soldiers in light-gray uniforms, policemen in brown ones, hundreds of personal idiosyncracies in color and style, and it will be more easily understood why La Paz is justly entitled to that overworked word “picturesque,” and why the aboriginal name of Chuquiyapu would still be more fitting than the trite Spanish one by which Bolivia’s unofficial capital is known to the world. Moreover, children dress exactly like father or mother as soon as they can walk. La chola’s little girl is her mother’s exact miniature, glazed hat, gay shawl, fancy little high-heeled shoes and all, as likely as not with a doll in fancy garments on her back; the cholo’s son paddles behind his father in long breeches slit up the back, gay poncho and felt hat; the little Indian girl trots after her mother in the selfsame red, green, or magenta skirts of bayeta, the round felt hat on her head, and always a bundle on her back, though she be barely three years old and the burden only a bundle of yarn—as if to accustom her early to the life she must lead to the day of her funeral.

Llamas of La Paz patiently awaiting the return of their driver

Down the valley below La Paz the pink and yellow soil stands in fantastic, rain-gashed cliffs

There are many fine walks in and about La Paz. On a sunny afternoon, brilliant-clear as an afternoon can be only at this height, it is ajoy to follow a muddy little creek, known as the Chuquiyapu, down through the broken and tumbled gorge below the town, where the clay soil, now sandy white, now soft red, is rain-gashed into a hundred fantastic shapes. The slender, always-at-home eucalyptus and a species of weeping-willow line the way. Illimani raises its hoar head higher and higher into the sky above, seeming to calm the spirits with its majestic serenity and promise of perpetual coolness. So imperceptibly does the valley descend that one could drift clear down into the languid tropicalyungasthat draws one on like a lodestone, like the “spicy garlic smells” of the Far East, until suddenly realizing how far the city has been left behind, one takes oneself figuratively by the neck and turns back to the town.

Or there is the climb out of the cuenca itself, a stiff hour to the pillar above. Once on the bleak puna, I wandered along the edge of the chasm to get a view of the city below from all angles. Near the station my eye was caught by the private car of a railroad superintendent. Fancying it might be that of my host on the journey up from Arequipa, I strolled toward it. A dishevelled fellow, his ragged coat close up around his neck, his long hair protruding like straw from a scarecrow, a two weeks’ black beard bristling, sat on the back platform, peeling potatoes.

“Está aqui el Señor——?” I asked casually.

A cloud of incomprehension seemed to pass over the scarecrow face. I repeated the question, thinking he might be one of those weak-minded natives so often found at large in South America.

“English! English is all I talks,” came the startling reply out of the depths of the unshaven one, not only the accent but the presence of a few blackened stumps in lieu of teeth betraying both the nationality and the caste of the speaker. As I had never since leaving Panama seen a white man, much less an English-speaking person, doing manual labor my mistake was natural.

Thanks to the pleasure of having a hearer who could understand him, the exile’s sad, not to say jumbled, story was soon forthcoming.

“I ’ad a good iducation, d’ ye see,” he began, “sent to collidge an’ all that; but I tykes it into my ’ead t’ go t’ sea. An’ I was first-cabin steward on the ‘Dinkskiver’—I’ve my papers an’ discharge, an’ ready t’ show ’em t’ any man—an’ we runs int’ Australy, an’ I goes t’ the —— Club there, an’ a gentleman he introdjuces me t’ the club, which is where all the best gentlemen belongs, d’ ye see. An’ ’e says, ‘Look ’ere, if you’d like t’ stop ashore we’ll get the captain t’ sign y’ off an’we’ll put y’ up as steward t’ the club,’ d’ ye see—I bein’ a first-class cook an’ can bake an’ do any kind o’ cookin’—an’ I got me papers an’ discharges right ’ere with me t’ prove it. An’ it was a right-o job, one o’ the best jobs I ever ’ad, s’ elp me. So I was steward t’ the —— Club, d’ ye see—an’ I’ll show the papers provin’ it t’ any man interested—but fin’ly one day I blew that job, d’ ye see; an’ I was three years out in Australy. But finally one day I says t’ myself, ‘I might as well see America, too.’ An’ I ’ad my passage pyde clean ’ome t’ Liverpool, d’ ye see, on the Roossian steamer ——, an’ we come across t’Ayquique first, she bein’ bound round the ’Orn ’ome t’ Liverpool. But three of us gets ashore inAyquique, d’ ye see, an’ we was messin’ about there an’—an’—lookin’ about, d’ y’ understand, an’ fin’ly we was left ashore there inAyquique, d’ ye see, not ’avin’ got on board again before the packet sailed. An’ the British Consul ’e says, ‘Well, I’ll do anything I can fer ye, boys.’ An’ I ’ad money too, d’ ye see, an’ my passage was pyde clean ’ome t’ Liverpool on the Roossian, only she slipped ’er ’ook while we was ashore an’ there we was stranded inAyquique.

“So then I gets up t’ this ’ere Arequeepy” (It turned out later that he meant Arica) “an’ I ’ad money on me, d’ y’ understand, but I was lookin’ about an’ seein’ if I couldn’t get work, d’ ye see, an’ messin’ about ’ere an’ there, an’ fin’ly I ’adn’t no money left an’ was on the beach there in Arequeepy. An’ so I tykes on with the boss ’ere as cook—I bein’ a first-class cook an’ steward—an’ the boss ’e likes me all right, too, d’ ye see. Only d’ ye know what ’e’s pying me? Sixty bally paysoze a month! That is, I sye ’e’s pying me that, but not a blightin’ tanner ’as ’e give me yet, an’ s’ elp me, I ayn’t so much as ’ad a shave since I took up with ’im. So finally I says, ‘Well, ’ere, sir, I wants me money.’ An’ the boss says, All right, ’e’d pye me all right, only ’e ’adn’t nothin’ with ’im t’ pye me then, the banks bein’ all closed on a Sunday; an’ ’e says, ‘Well, I’ll tell ye what I’ll do. If you’ll go up t’ Bolivy on this ’ere trip I’ve got t’ make, I’ll pye ye soon as ever we get down again,’ d’ ye see. So I says, ‘That’ll do me,’ an’ we come up ’ere. An’ I ayn’t ’ad my clothes off on th’ ole bolly trip, an’ cookin’ all the time. The boss ’e likes me all right, d’ ye see, but I don’t know ’ow about this ’ere Peruvan in the ki’chen with me, seein’ as ’ow I can’t understand ’is bloomin’ lingo. An’ I only jus’ left a good cookin’ job account o’ a black feller. ’E was always pickin’ up with me, an’ fin’ly one day ’e calls me a —— —— ——, an’ I says, ‘You’re another, ye —— —— black ——,’ an’ so I quit an’ got this’ere job with the boss—anythink at all t’ keep y’ afloat when y’re stove in, d’ ye see. An’ yesterday mornin’ we stops at a place, d’ ye see, an’ the boss says, ‘Well, now, Joe, rustle out an’ buy some pervisions’—an’ me not knowin’ a word o’ the bally lingo! An’ then las’ night when I’d served ’em coffee at ’arf past midnight, the boss says, ‘Well, ye might as well turn in an’ do a wink o’ sleep, Joe.’ So I turns in under the dinin’-room tyble; only I couldn’t sleep any all night fer the cold. Nobody ’ad took the trouble t’ tell me it was cold up ’ere, d’ ye understand, an’ bein’ in the tropicks I didn’t see ’ow it could be—an’ me been livin’ in North Australy where it’s a ’underd an’ twenty in the shyde. But I says t’ myself, d ’ye see, I’ll tyke one blanket along in cyse I ’ave a chance t’ turn in on the trip. Only one blanket don’t stop the cold at all ’ere, d’ ye see, an’ when the boss comes int’ the dinin’-room this mornin’ an’ says, Well, Joe, let’s ’ave some coffee,’ I ’adn’t slept none whatever. An’ I ’ave that funny feelin’s, my legs all ’eavy an’ achin’ an’ feelin’ that bad in the back o’ the neck I don’t know but I’m took with somethink. I’ll tell ye this ayn’t no white man’s country, tyke it from me. When I gets down again, if the boss’ll give me my money, I’m goin’ t’ make fer ’ome full speed a’ead, I’m tellin’ ye an’ not ashymed of it. It’s all right-o fer you that talks the lingo an’ as got ’ardened t’ the cold. But fer me that couldn’t sleep a wink all night fer bein’ that cold—’ere in the tropicks, too—an’ that busy cookin’ day an’ night I ayn’t ’ad my clothes off On the trip, an’ this ’ere achin’ in my legs, d’ ye see, as if I’d been took with somethink.... No, I ayn’t been down t’ the city, though o’ course I see it from up ’ere, an’ I was wonderin’ what place it would be, bein’ a moderate fine lookin’ town fer these ’ere foreign countries. But we’ll be goin’ back t’night; the boss’ll likely be ’ere any minute. An’ I comes of a good family, d’ ye see, an’ they’ll be ’appy t’ see me ’ome again, they will. They give me a good iducation an’ sent me t’ collidge an’ all that, d’ ye see; only I took it int’ me ’ead t’ go t’ sea an’ come out t’ Australy, an’ I’ll show any man me papers—”

But the bitter night air that was beginning to sweep across the plateau was not the only reason I decided to be on my way.

As the sun sets gradually down through the cuenca of La Paz, so it rises, gilding first the western precipice far up near the edge of the plateau, plainly seen from my pillow in the “Tambo Quirquincha,” then slowly crawling down into the valley until, long after its first appearance, it finally floods in upon the city itself and lights up itsstreets and eastern house-walls. On such a cool, sun-flooded morning, known to the calendar as December fourth, a cholo boy of eleven presented himself to carry my baggage to the station, and did so easily, though I should have groaned at the load myself. The second-class coaches, here tramcars, left first, and slowly corkscrewed up out of the valley, the motorman, once we were started, coming inside where it was a bit less frigid, closing the door behind him, and giving all his attention to two comely cholas whose little black eyes jumped about like those of guinea-pigs.

On the “Alto” a brilliant sun somewhat tempered the biting cold of the puna at this early hour. At Viacha a better train awaited us, her engine turned south,—big vestibuled cars, marked “Ferrocarril á Bolivia” and plying to Antofagasta, a smooth, well-built roadbed that spoke of Chile and more modern countries, a diner ready for those who did not choose to buy boiled goat and frozen potatoes of the skirt-heaped Indian women squatting at the stations. Once off across the sandy, bunch-grass wilderness, flat as a sea, with herds of llamas grazing here and there, and little farms of all shapes hanging on the slopes of far-off and gradually receding hillsides, the train sped on as if it never intended to stop again. In truth there was little reason to do so, for it was as dreary a region as the imagination could picture. The few stations at which we halted briefly, single, wind-swept huts on the edge of salt marshes, bore names fitting to the landscape,—Silencio, Soledad, Eucalyptus—here a lone tree afforded the only feature to which a name could be attached. Now and then mirages across the dismal desert gave thelomitasthe appearance of islands, the heat waves seeming to be water lapping their shores.

Cholas of La Paz, in their striking costume

In mid-afternoon Oruro arose across the brown pampa, as Port Saïd rises from her muddy sea, and we rumbled into a flat, miserable, if from the miner’s point of view important town, gloomy, bleak, perhaps the most desolate city my eyes had ever fallen upon. The squat adobe buildings, chiefly one-story, were in many cases thatched over tile roofs, giving them the appearance of wearing a weather-worn hat over colored caps, like the Indians of La Paz. Reddish-brown, utterly barren desert hills, with mine openings, formed the background. The wind drove the sand like needles into our faces and seemed bent on cutting our eyes out. Cholas ostentated themselves in somewhat the same costume as those of the seat of government, but dulled and soiled by the all-pervading dust. Siberian, dreary, comfortless, the place seemed, yet its stores were well-stocked, and there weremore gringos per capita than I had seen in many a day. Seeming to hate themselves and life in general, even the Americans had a haughty, unapproachable air, as in so many mining towns of the Andes, the unconscious result no doubt of caste treatment of Indian workmen.

I was only too glad when the train on a newly-constructed branch-line carried us off northeastward late next morning. A long string of mud monuments still marks the centuries’-old route across the trackless desert. Beehive-shaped huts of mud huddled in the sunshine here and there. We climbed in long zigzags over the crest of the Cuesta Colorada, drear hills of broken rock where only a scant brown bunch-grass finds foothold. Below the divide hearty gringo faces, more cheerful in this lower altitude, broke in now and then on the monotony of Latin-American features. Many tents marked with large letters “F. C. A. B.” lined the way, interspersed with the stone kennels of workmen and their women, and the swarming natural consequences. There is something about a railroad construction-gang more suggestive of the world’s progress than almost any other labor of man.

The new line petered out in the stony village of Changolla, some sixty-five miles from Oruro and halfway to Cochabamba, which it is in time due to reach. A stage-coach offered accommodations for the rest of the trip; but the joy of jolting all day in the thing was not commensurate with the pleasure of a new experience, even had the fare for both passengers and baggage not been prohibitive to a scantily supplied wanderer. “See Sinclair there,” suggested the gringo chief, pointing to a sandy, unshaven Scot of more than six energetic feet, who was superintending the loading of all manner of railroad material into ponderous two-wheeled carts; and the hint was sufficient.

Changolla would have been excited that night were it possible for railroad constructors of long experience in many wild regions to become so. A fellow-countryman and predecessor of the New Zealander in charge of the camp had gone on a rampage with an American youth and turned bandits, in dime-novel style. Filled with distilled bravery, they had “held up” a nearby camp under the impression that the paymaster had arrived, and disappointed in this, they had shot a harmless Chilian employee. It took some time and all my papers to calm the suspicions of Changolla before I was offered lodging with the New Zealander. The “bandits” had sworn to shoot him and his assistants on sight, and a cardboard had been fastened over the window to preventthem from carrying out the threat by lamp-light as we ate, though none of the group showed any nervousness at the prospect.

But the highwaying of the pair was amateurish at best. They had made no plans whatever for getting out of town, had even to ask the way, and had as provisions—two bottles of whiskey. Thus it was not strange that they were rounded up before morning, and my hosts showed no surprise when dawn disclosed the prisoners shackled in one of the box-cars. They had been taken, asleep, some ten miles from the scene of the crime, with a bottle in one hand and a gun in the other. The chief looked his fellow-countryman over, expressed his sentiments with a “You’re a hell of a bandit, you are,” lit a cigarette, and went on about his day’s work. Mounted on asses, with a stick through their elbows behind them, the pair set out for Cochabamba guarded by a score of soldiers. The punishment for murder in Bolivia is to be taken back to the scene of the crime and shot, though there is many a slip between the law and its execution, and judges, according to my hosts, must be properly “greased” before they will even indict a criminal, particularly when the complainant is a rich foreign company.

Meanwhile nine enormous carts, each drawn by six sleek and mighty mules, laden with all the bulky material required for railroad construction, to say nothing of my baggage, and covered in Forty-niner fashion, got under way. I set off ahead. The trail followed a broad, stony and sandy river-bed across which serpentined a yellow brook of brackish, luke-warm water which it was impossible by just two steps to cross dry-shod. The unfinished railroad flanked the barren, stony hills on the left, the embankment carved out of them being broken by unbuilt bridges and incomplete cuts and tunnels that cost me many a steep scramble. In the river-bed below passed a broken stream of Indians and cholos driving donkeys and mules, heavy-laden, as were most of the drivers themselves, their ponchos, chiefly of red with narrow perpendicular stripes, standing out against the barren brown landscape. Every little green patch on its edge was well-populated; many a hacienda or small village having become a railway construction camp where haughty young Englishmen gazed coldly and suspiciously at one of their race sinking his caste to travel on foot. The Briton who has “knocked about” the world until the corners have been blunted is an agreeable fellow; but in his youthful, fresh-from-London days he is best avoided.

The embankment gave out, and we struck a gorge where the cartswere saved only by the vigilance of “Sandy,” astride his splendid macho, and the mules, as by a miracle. In the blazing, dusty, river-bed, sweat poured profusely as I plodded, clinging to the tail of a cart to be snatched across the ever-recurring stream. The towns were miserable, yet misery seems far less pitiful in perpetual summer. Worst of all, there was no water a man dared drink. The banks of the river were lined for broken spaces with large quantities of cobbles inside wire nets—an Argentine idea, according to the Scot—to keep the river from undermining and washing away the coming railroad. It seemed absurd to have to take such precautions against a tiny meandering brook, but in the rainy season this increases to a rushing torrent filling all the valley.

It was starving mid-afternoon before “Sandy” called a halt for “breakfast,” and the peons prepared achupe,—a stew of potatoes, charqui, rice, and anything else that it occurred to them to toss into the pot. At sunset we camped like gypsies in the stony, wind-blown, waterless river-bed; the mules were turned loose among several heaps of straw carried in one of the carts, and we rolled up in blankets on the sand. The drivers were a motley gang of Bolivian, Argentine, and Chilian cholos, each with the accent peculiar to his nationality. All had long knives in their belts and were inclined to use them on slight provocation. Several carried their wives, or at least their women, with them in the carts, sometimes with a child or two in addition.

Next day as I plodded beside his long-legged mule, “Sandy” whiled away the long, hot hours with reminiscences.

“Did they tell you in Juliaca how I cleaned out their damned hotel,” he asked.

They had, but I wanted “Sandy’s” own version of the affair.

“Well, we were playing billiards, when some greaser said something about gringos, and I told him to shut up. The crowd was too drunk to know better, so I had to take a bunch of billiard-cues and clean out the thirty-two of them. It cost me just a hundred and twelve pounds—twelve for the greasers’ doctor-bills and a hundred to get my friend the subprefect to lie low until I could get over the line.

“Before the railway came I used to transport across the desert from Arica,” he went on, steering his mule around a hollow of broken rock, “and I had a little dog named Bobbie Burns. He was a wise little dog, and as the desert sand burned his feet he got still wiser, and used to run way ahead of me, a mile or so, so far he could just see me, and then dig a hole in the sand and lie in it until I was amile ahead and almost out of sight again; and then he would race by me with a ‘how-d’-do’ yelp and dig another hole. A chileno greaser killed that little dog,” said “Sandy,” gazing dreamily across the mirage-flowing landscape, “and I never got a chance to do as much for him.”

The Capinota river we had been following, or rather criss-crossing, for two days came to an alfalfa-green village, exceedingly restful to eyes that had been gazing unbrokenly on the sun-flooded desert, and the trail struck off at right angles up a branch of a stream milky with dust. That night we camped again in the sand at the end of the haul, in celebration of which “Sandy” shaved and put on a purple neckcloth to scream at his red hair. There I took leave of him, with seventeen miles still separating me from Cochabamba. It was not the problem of transporting myself, but rather my baggage, that forced me to trot several times into blazing-hot Parotani in quest of a donkey—all in vain. At length—strange chances one takes in South America—I caught a total stranger bound for the city, and he was soon lost in the dust ahead, with all my possessions on the crupper of his mule. The sweating trail with its plaguing brook grew in time into a road on the left bank; huts, then entire villages sprang up beside me; troops of pack-animals increased to an almost steady stream, and at four I overtook my baggage in Vinto, recovered it by payment of aboliviano, and was soon screaming in a little toy train on a 75-centimeter-gage track, at the terrifying speed of an hour and forty minutes for the twelve miles, into the second city of Bolivia.

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