Thetipoy, a single loose gown, constitutes the entire garb of most of the native women of tropical Bolivia
Thetipoy, a single loose gown, constitutes the entire garb of most of the native women of tropical Bolivia
Thetipoy, a single loose gown, constitutes the entire garb of most of the native women of tropical Bolivia
A girl of Santiago de Chiquitos selling a chicken to the cook of “los americanos”
A girl of Santiago de Chiquitos selling a chicken to the cook of “los americanos”
A girl of Santiago de Chiquitos selling a chicken to the cook of “los americanos”
Each cart was drawn by twenty oxen, gaunt, reddish, long-horned animals that seemed Patience done in flesh and bone. Their pace averaged perhaps two miles an hour. Now and then “Hughtie,” like the other drivers, sprang noiselessly into the sand and, racing ahead, lashed each yoke in turn, with insulting words of encouragement, and the entire team crowded into one of the close-set jungle walls until the massive two-wheeled cart was dragged over small trees and head-high bushes at a slight acceleration of pace. A dozen strange cries were used in urging the phlegmatic animals forward.When a halt was ordered, the drivers sprang to the ground and ran alongside them, voicing a long, soothing wail of peculiarly mournfultimbrethat often lasted a full minute:
“So-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o.”
Once, in the thick black night, the train halted to boil rice and make “tea” of a willow-like jungle leaf, then dragged drowsily on. At daylight we broke out into the pascana of Motococito, where the animals were turned loose to graze for the day, each pair still yoked together by a beam that was almost a log, fastened across the front of their horns with rawhide thongs, while the peons swung their hammocks under an ancient thatched roof on poles. We had made four leagues, or a scant twelve miles, during the night.
I made my way to the home of “Don Cupertino” nearby, for no traveler across Bolivia misses the opportunity of at least one meal with this best-hearted of Bolivians. Outwardly ugly, he was a man of fascinating personality, before whom one could sit for hours listening to well-told anecdotes, frequently emphasized in his excitement by the snapping of his long forefinger, and marveling at the grasp of mind of a man who has never emerged from this inland wilderness. So great was his magnetism that he had imposed on all those about him a degree of human kindness and common decency rare in the region. The education of this corner of the republic, wholly neglected by the government, he had taken upon himself; had turned one of his thatched buildings into a school for the children of whatever cast roundabout, and drafted as school-master a Spanish shoemaker who had drifted in upon him. Motococito is frequently favored with attacks by the wild Indians, and not the least dramatic of “Don Cupertino’s” stories was that of the routing of a band of “los bárbaros” the night before.
The pace of the ox-carts was so slow that I pushed on alone. The sky was incessantly growling off to the southwest, banks of jet-black clouds frequently wiped out the brilliant sun, and many a roaring tropical deluge set me slipping and sliding at every step. Swamps of varying length and depth continued monotonously to intrude, until I became amphibious, with water almost my natural element.
Where the road forked one afternoon I took the fainter, left-hand trail for a side-trip to the town of Santiago de Chiquitos. The rumor was persistent that “americanos” lived there; moreover, it was said to be situated on a ridge unknown to insects. The heights to be surmounted were not piled into the sky ahead, as in the Andes. I knewI was rising only by the changing character of soil and woods, the former increasing in rocky sandstone formations, the latter more open, with diminishing undergrowth. After the first few miles up, the forest opened out now and then on little grassy pampas, with V-shaped gaps in the wooded hills through which one could look back upon tropical Bolivia spreading away sea-flat, humid blue to infinity in every direction, with a vast sense of relief after weeks of never seeing the woods for the trees that had shut me in.
The trail split at last into several branches. The one I took at random led me to a thatched hut, then suddenly broke out upon the grassy plaza of a great, or a tiny town, according to the point of view and the immediate previous experience. A native lolling in a hammock answered my question with a “sí, hay” in the impersonal monotone common to the tropics, languidly nodding toward one of the huts facing the plaza. Jungle-worn and all but shoeless, my reddened knees protruding through the remnant of my breeches, my shirt lacking a sleeve and otherwise mutilated beyond recognition, unkempt and sun-scorched, showing many a patch of my insect-arabesqued hide, my face bristling with four razorless weeks, unquestionably the most disreputable sight in all that disreputable region, a hunger like the Old Man of the Sea riding my shoulders, I strode across to the building indicated and paused in the doorway. Inside, seated about a snow-white table, backed by a butler of African dignity, sat five “gringos” in speckless white, dipping their soup noiselessly and without haste with a calm backward motion.
Santiago was the headquarters and place of recuperation of the employees of the Farquhar Syndicate, engaged in surveying the 1500 square leagues of territory recently conceded the company at a nominal price. There I slept in the first bed since Cochabamba. The chickens that died for us were countless, the inevitable phonograph was in full evidence, there were lamps to read by even at night, and books to read by them. When the sun touched the jungle sea to the west “los americanos” strolled homeward from the office, pausing to play ball until dark, with real gloves, but picking green oranges from the plaza trees as often as they needed a new “ball.” Great bands of deep-green parrakeets flew by high overhead, screaming and gossiping deafeningly, but with no suggestion of stopping in a place so high and cold. From this “mountain” top the sunsets across the humid-blue, flat jungle were indescribable, particularly after a rainy day. The enormous conflagrations blazed for a brief time across all the westernworld, faded to red, to pink, then into the steel-gray of a tropical evening; the distant hills turned from deep blue to purple, banks of white clouds floating up out of the wilderness below; the sky above faded through all the shades of pink to lilac and to purple, until even the flecks of clouds tinged with the last reflected rays were wiped out entirely. At night, looking south, we could see the fires of the wild Indians of the Gran Chaco.
Besides the Anglo-Saxons, there were the managers of two “Belgian” houses—the only stores for some hundred miles around, mere thatched huts like the rest, with no distinguishing signs—an odd German or two, an argentino who wore shoes; and the rest were barefoot natives, except for an occasional sun-faded passerby. Like San José, Santiago de Chiquitos, set almost exactly in the geographical center of South America, was a “reduction” of the Jesuits, with more than 1500 inhabitants at the time of their expulsion. To-day it is a sleepy little hamlet of some two streets of one-story huts among gentle andfrondosohills, with a constant breeze and no insects, lolling through an easy, barefoot, loose-gowned existence, chiefly in hammocks. Coffee bushes fill every back yard, the coffee of Santiago being famous through all Chiquitos. A languid commerce in cattle, sugar, and alcohol is carried on intermittently; the region round about is rich in timber. High above all else a wonderfully beautiful palm-tree stands out against the cerulean sky.
The inhabitants retain many of the customs bequeathed them by the Jesuits. Only a wooden church was built here, with four bells in a wooden tower on legs some distance from the main building. Into this an Indian climbs several times a day, and more often by night, to make life hideous. Why the Loyalists were so fond of the continual hammering of these instruments of torture was a mystery to me at the time, but in the library of Asunción I ran across an old volume that explained the matter. The writer, a European member of the brotherhood, visiting a “reduction,” asked the superior why the Padres saw fit to keep themselves awake most of the night for no apparent reason. The Jesuit answered: “Brother, we keep our faithful flock toiling all day in the fields. After the evening meal they drop at once to sleep without remembering their marital duties. Their first fatigue worn off, we remind them of those duties now and then during the night, waking them up with the noise of drums and bells, to the end that the succeeding generation may be larger, to the glorification of the Sacred Church and our Holy Society.” And to think that I hadfancied the jangling of church-bells all down the length of the Andes to be a mere caprice of the holy fathers!
The fiestas of Jesuit days are religiously preserved. Several nights we were kept awake by the monotonous, heathenish beating of a drum, often accompanied by a shrill fife. By day, to the “music” of these, most of the population marched round and round the town, holding hands and swinging them high before and behind them in a kind of shuffle and whirl on their bare feet in the silent sand streets, getting ever drunker on chicha of maize or the strongertotay. They danced also thechobena, to the accompaniment of themanais, a hollow calabash with seeds inside it. There was no resident priest, but an old Indian who had assisted the former cura conducted a service each Sunday, always ending it with a debauch that hung over into the middle of the week. There is one custom, however, which even the Jesuits could not bequeath them,—that of industry. In the olden days the entire population was sent to work each morning with drums, prayers, and processions; to-day only the processions, prayers, and drums remain.
As in all Chiquitos, the women and girls of Santiago, chiefly Indian in blood, with now and then a trace of the negro, solidly built as ananta, wear only the loosetipoy. Their customs are, if possible, even more easy-going than those of San José. Yet they are by no means forward, being rather bashful, indeed, with little sense of wrong-doing, and are said to yield more easily to blandishments and trinkets than to money. The former priest demanded fabulous sums for his services, which is no doubt one of several reasons why virtually none, even of the “best families,” are married. The moral attitude of the place may most easily be gaged by an episode that occurred during my stay. A shoemaker living in the other half of the thatched hut occupied by “los americanos” learned that the young woman who passed as his wife had yielded to the entreaties of one of the foreigners. He beat the girl until her cries could be heard in the office across the broad plaza. But when, next day, he met the offending American, he bowed respectfully with a polite, “Buenos días, señor. Y cómo está usté’?”
The shoemaker who lived next door to “los americanos” in Santiago de Chiquitos, and his latest “wife”
The shoemaker who lived next door to “los americanos” in Santiago de Chiquitos, and his latest “wife”
The shoemaker who lived next door to “los americanos” in Santiago de Chiquitos, and his latest “wife”
A birthday dance in Santiago de Chiquitos, in honor of the German in the center background. The man dancing with the latter’s “housekeeper” is an Englishman born in the Argentine
A birthday dance in Santiago de Chiquitos, in honor of the German in the center background. The man dancing with the latter’s “housekeeper” is an Englishman born in the Argentine
A birthday dance in Santiago de Chiquitos, in honor of the German in the center background. The man dancing with the latter’s “housekeeper” is an Englishman born in the Argentine
The distance from Santa Cruz de la Sierra to the Paraguay turned out to be 135 leagues, something over 400 miles, divided as follows: Santa Cruz to San José, 56 leagues; to Santiago, 32; to Santa Ana, 25; to Puerto Suarez, 22. The last stage of the journey I covered astride one of the company’s mules, hardly an improvement in comfortover walking, on such a route. Luckily, the rains were delayed that year, or the difficulties of all this trans-Bolivian journey would have been quadrupled, and I might have been held for months in the hilltop hamlet of Santiago until the floods common to the twenty-leagues or more west of the Paraguay subsided. Day after day we rode through the endless forest that crowded us close on either hand, with no other sign of humanity than the sulky mozo trotting behind me, sleeping in some tiny pascana where a moon so bright one could have read by it looked down upon the crosses of soldiers and travelers who had died on other journeys, or peered dully in at me through the mesh of my mosquitero.Palmares, quagmires thick-grown with hardy palm-trees, in which we plunged to the saddle for long distances, alternated with thirsty stretches of waterless sand. In places the heavier woods gave way to dense brush, head-high and always thorny. Across these, to the right, lay the vast Bolivian Chaco—or the Paraguayan, according to how the dispute shall finally be settled—in which the sun set so blood-red that the painter who dared put half the reality on canvas would be accused of gross exaggeration. A strip of delicate pink sky blended quickly into the wet-blue of the endless jungle, darkness settled quickly down, and we rode noiselessly on, the sky an immense field of stars, bats circling around our heads and alighting again and again in the sandy road ahead, to spring up with a peculiar little squeak when the mule’s hoofs had all but touched them. No other sound was heard, except the chirping of the jungle, chiefly the long-drawn creak and short staccato of two species of crickets, and occasionally the noise of some wild animal fleeing unseen at our approach. On such a night we came to the Tucabaca, the only river of size between the Guapay and the Paraguay. I ordered a halt until the moon appeared, but clouds hid it, and we came perilously near losing a mule in forcing the frightened animals across. Frequently the Tucabaca rises in a few hours to a raging torrent that can only be crossed in apelota, or in the dugout of a surly old Brazilian negro living in a cluster of huts on the further bank.
At Santa Ana, eighteen waterless miles beyond, we were overtaken by two of the gringo colony of Santiago. Calling itself a city, the place is merely a row of thatched huts around a grass-grown space, with a mud-hole to keep it alive, saintly in its customs as all the towns of this saintly route. Its corregidor takes orders, not from the subprefect of San José, but from thedelegadoat Puerto Suarez, sent out from La Paz by way of Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, andBrazil! The place is a headquarters ofjejenes, and the wild Indians descend upon it periodically. At the very edge of the hamlet lies abarrizal, a mud-hole three miles long, famous for its victims. But beyond, territory which the year before had been an almost unbroken lake was for long stretches without water to drink, though we wallowed in more than one swamp and slough. Near the corrals of Yacuces, in a low, humid region where rain often falls, we came upon telegraph-poles, old and sagging, heavy with parasites and creepers. The line planned by the government from Puerto Suarez to Santa Cruz had been abandoned some forty miles out, and cart-drivers now cut down the poles and use the wire to repair their wagons.
On the last morning we woke at two to find the moon brilliant, and pulling on our soggy garments, pushed eagerly forward. On the right the Southern Cross stood forth brightly whenever a fleck of cloud veiled the moon. Away in the forest monkeys wailed their everlasting plaint. Great masses of green vines, covering irregular giant bushes, looked like German castles in the moonlight. The first flush of day showed in the V-shaped opening ahead the shoulders of the advance horseman, cutting into the paling sky and blotting out the bright morning star. Then dawn “came up like thunder” out of the endless wilderness, and somehow it seemed wasteful to keep the moon burning after the tropical sunshine had flooded all the scene. Tall, slender palms, and all possible forms of trees, festooned and draped with vines in fantastic web and lace effects, stood out against the sky. Masses of pink morning-glories quickly shrunk under the sun’s glare; brown moor-hens, flicking their black tails saucily, foraged about mud-holes and flew clumsily, like chickens, with little half-jumps, as we passed. Beyond the pascana of Tacuaral, with its myriad of slimtacuarapalms, the country that should have been flooded at this season was utterly waterless. Hour after sun-baked hour we jogged on, our thirsty animals stumbling in the enormous sun-dried cart-ruts. An occasional hut with a banana-grove appeared in a tiny space shaved out of the bristling forest. In mid-afternoon we sighted through the heat rays ahead a wide street, with red-tiled buildings and open water beyond, backed far away by low wooded ridges, and the Port of Suarez and the end of Bolivia was at hand. It was two months to a day since Tommy and I had set out from Cochabamba.
Dawn was just beginning to paint red the humid air between jungle and sky across the lagoon of Cáceres, a backwater of the river Paraguay,when I descended to its edge and, by dint of acrobatic feats of equilibrium, managed a bath and left behind in the mud and slime, like fallen heroes of many a campaign, the remnants of my tramping garb. As I climbed the bank new-clad, there persisted the feeling that I had heartlessly abandoned some faithful friend of long standing. The gasoline launch chugged more than two hours across the muddylagoabefore there rose from the jungle, on a bit of knoll, the modern city of Corumbá, in the Brazilian State of Matto Grosso, to the residents of which the appearance of a lone traveler from out the ferocious wilds and haunts ofbugresbeyond the lagoon that ends their world was little less wonder-provoking than the arrival of one from a distant planet. Here at last was civilization,—expensive civilization—and steamers every few days to Asunción and Buenos Aires.