Across the Andes

Now and again an Aymará shrine loomed through the mist beside the trail, in its niche an offering of wilted flowers and some cigarette pictures, and above, in a crevice of the stones and dried mud, a crooked twig cross. Sometimes we met an Aymará, with a bundle of reeds, sitting in the shelter of a rough stone wind-break making and testing his reed flutes. He whittled the reed and tested each finger-hole as he scraped it larger. He looked up, and again we were saluted with the respectful “Tata!” for in order to reach the last stage of the mountain pass we had swung back on the main trail, where the Indians were more sociable. More stone and mud shrines appeared, each with its offering of propitiation to the gods of these higher places and each with its twig cross above.

Higher, rougher, and steeper grew the trail, often in a zigzag up some precipitous gorge. A tiny, scattering Indian village came in sight, Huaylata, perched on a high, rolling part of this Andean pass. Its mud huts were smaller, grimier, and drearier, if possible, than those that we had passed on the great plateau. A few Aymarás appeared and tried to sell us cebada, or barley, for the mules; an old woman, squatting on the ground, weaving a poncho on her log loom, stopped long enough to look over our cavalcade curiously out of her bleared eyes red with smoke. Through the little door of her hut the interior was visible, stacked with chalona half prepared and waiting for the sun to shine before it was moved out into the open ground for further drying.

Indifferently she watched me extract the camera from my saddle-bag, but when the brass lens pointed in her direction, she clattered vigorously in her dialect and scuttled into the house to hide. The other Aymarás were instantly hostile, and I worked a scheme that had often succeeded. I turned my back to them and reversed the camera, with the lens pointing backward under my arm. This would almost invariably get the picture. If it did not, I would stand behind the broad shoulders of one of the party while I adjusted the camera, and then have him step suddenly to one side as I pressed the button. Otherwise they would scatter like a flock of Chinamen under similar conditions, and with angry mutterings.

CHAPTER IX
OVER THE FIRST GREAT PASS

The intermittent fog and mist turned to a cold rain that drove in stinging gusts square in our faces. Slowly we climbed, and went a few miles beyond the divide. A huge pile of loose stones marked the spot, a tribute to the particular god of this high place that had slowly accumulated with the offerings of Aymarás that had passed the spot. The pile was larger than an Aymará hut, and on the summit was a little cross of twigs from which a few strips of calico fluttered in the gale. At the base were curious little altars made by two flat stones laid edge up, and with a third long, flat stone across them. They symbolized a house and were erected by some prospective Aymará bridegroom or house-builder in propitiation for his enterprise. The cross that surmounted all of these shrines and piles of stone has been readily adopted by the pantheistic Aymará, who is only too fearful lest some unknown god may have escaped his efforts at placation. Around the base of the cairn were the withered and frost-bitten remains of floral offerings and also the scraps of cigarette pictures, the latter, from their invariableness, apparently one of the chief delights of the gods.

At rare intervals some eddying rift would be blown in the mists, and for a brief moment Mount Sorata would stand clear and sharp against the blue patch of sky, with its great white shoulder scarcely more than five miles away across a precipitous gorge. High above our world it seemed to rise, a titanic, bulking, cataclysmic mass, magnificent in its immensity. Enormous cliffs of snow towered above the scarred, black gorges of its flanks, glittering in the flash of momentary sunlight and iridescent in the purple shadows. High against its face clouds were born and were shredded in the blast of an unseen gale; now and again an avalanche of snow broke from some slope and was whirled in a feathery spray into the shadows of a gorge thousands of feet below. It could blanket a dozen villages, yet it was diminished on the tremendous slopes until it seemed no more than the tiny avalanche on a tin roof at home; before it can fall to the depths of the gorge a gale has caught it and it is blown in a stinging blizzard half way across the mountain’s face. Vertically, nearly two miles above the trail across the divide, rose the white fang of the summit, that has still defied all efforts at scaling; there, according to the Aymará belief, is the chief treasure of the god of the mountain, a great golden bull. The generous pantheism of the Aymará has given a similar golden treasure to the summit of Illomani back near La Paz, but in that case, in order that the balance of conflicting religions might be kept, it is a huge cross of gold.

The difficulties and inaccessibility of these mountains conveys, to the Aymará mind, the idea that they are inhabited by the most powerful and exclusive of the gods. That hint of exclusiveness is enough for them and only with the greatest difficulty have they been prevailed upon to accompany the few climbing expeditions, while weird stories still circulate among them as to the howling and malignant devils that ride the storms in the great gorges high up. The Aymará is already supplied with enough lesser deities that require continuous and troublesome propitiation so that he does not care to go out of his way up into Sorata and incur another, and possibly hostile and irritated theistic burden.

After the cairn that marks the divide is passed, the trail leads abruptly downward. At first it is a relief to lean back in the saddle and feel the strain come on the crupper while the breast-strap flaps loosely once more, but hour after hour of constant descent and the constant straining back in the saddle become more irksome and monotonous than was the leaning forward on the upward climb. The mists and cold rains blow in lighter patches and with a softer touch; even occasionally the deep valleys below can be seen marked out in irregular surfaces of soft green where the Aymará farms are budding. The descent is rapid; the pack-train coils about among the buttresses of the mountains along a broad shelf that is often cut into the steep slopes, and always plunging downward. We were almost below the line of clouds, and a few moments later they were drifting past just overhead, and there, far below us, stretched the deep, crooked valley of Sorata.

It was the very heart of the Andes. In the wedge-shaped channel of the tortuous valley a slender thread of white torrent narrowed and disappeared in the haze of depth and distance; the huge mountains swept upward like the sides of a great bowl, while delicately floating strata of fleecy clouds seemed to mark off and measure and then accent their enormous altitudes. Beyond and above them rose other peaks and the jagged fangs of interlocking mountain-ranges that formed this colossal Andean maze; there was no sense of distance; even the feeling of space seemed to be for the instant gone, and under the long, mellow rays of the afternoon sun, with this vast, shattered universe spread before us, it was as though we had been suddenly translated and left dizzy and bewildered in an opalescent infinity.

The Aymará huts that clung to the steep slopes with their little patches of corn were shrunk to miniature; the single bull plowing with a crooked tree-trunk was a diminutive bug, prodded along the furrow by a microscopic insect. All the air was filled with the low roar of cascades; every slope and valley was scarred with the slender, white threads of torrents from the melting snows above. Far ahead, where the buttress of a mountain projected like a hilly peninsula into the Sorata valley, a toy village of scarlet tile and thatched roofs was compactly lodged on the flattened crest. It was the village of Sorata, clinging like a lichen to a spur of the huge, overhanging mountain from which it takes its name.

Late in the afternoon, although the gorge had long since been cool in the shadows of the inclosing mountains, we crossed the old Spanish stone bridge that still spans the torrent of melted snows, where an ancient mill remains to testify to the enterprise of the early Spanish adventurers. A short climb up the steep promontory to the village, and we clattered over the paved streets and on into the patio of the sole posada, the old bell-mule leader trotting in with the easy familiarity of many previous trips.

The proprietress, a plump Cholo lady, made still plumper by the many skirts of her class, all worn at once, so that she swayed and undulated like an antebellum coquette, fluttered about in welcome. Her pink stockinged legs—the skirts come just below the knees—and fancy slashed satin shoes, with the highest of high French heels, teetered about the patio and over the rough floors, giving orders to a drunken Aymará cook and a small Aymará boy, who proved to be the chambermaid. Gracefully she joined in a bottle of stinging Chilean wine and bawled further orders for our comfort out into the shuffling kitchen. At supper we had soup—chicken soup, with the head and feet floating with the chalona and chuño. There followed a kind of melon, scooped out and loaded with raisins and scraps of pork and whatever other scraps and vegetables were at hand, blistered with aji, the fiercest and most venomous pepper known to man.

A real lamp and some flowers graced the bare table and, after the filthy mud huts and smoke-impregnated tambos, with their acrid smoke ingrained in the walls and thatch, the tinned food warmed by the futile flame of an alcohol lamp, this posada glowed with a gaiety and cheer that could not be duplicated. Damask and cut glass could have added nothing to the table; even the smelly lamp glowed with a seductive radiance in the balmy atmosphere, and reminded us, by contrast, of the tallow candles on the plateau above, where the icy wind blew them to a thin spark of incandescence.

Here it was necessary to stop and rest the mules for the second and hardest stage of the journey over this Andean pass. Besides, with the more difficult trail ahead the loads of the mules must be lessened. More mules were needed, and more supplies—the staples—corn, chalona, chuño, and rice, and those to be soldered in tin cans where the storms of the mountains and the rapids in the cañons of the interior could not spoil them. Rodriguez pastured the outfit somewhere up the valley until it was again ready; then one day the arrieros were busy weighing the packs, balancing them and lashing them in the nets of rawhide for the easier packing and adjustment.

Again it was in the pitch blackness that precedes the break of day that we climbed into the saddles for the long pull over this highest and hardest pass that leads into the great tropical basin, the heart of South America. Salmon, a huge black who had drifted in from Jamaica and who baked Sorata bread and attracted the Aymará custom in the plaza on fiestas by whirling in a grotesque dance of his own devising, shuffled down the steep street from his oven to see us off. The huge muscles of his half-naked body rippled in massive shadows in the fading darkness; heavy silver rings dangled from his ears against the black, bull neck and matched the brass and silver with which his fingers were loaded.

He spoke no connected language, for his wandering had left him with a scanty and combined vocabulary of English, Spanish, Caribbean French patois, and a sprinkling of Aymará. He was nothing more than a pattering savage, although never for an instant did he forsake the proud dignity of his British citizenship. Once, as a gift, he prepared for us a salad; but as there was no oil to be had in Sorata, with sublime unselfishness he dedicated one of his own bottles of heavily scented hair-oil to the salad dressing!

He stuffed a bottle of atrocious brandy into my saddle-bag, and added a pious “Lord bless ye, sar!” for he was a Methodist, and on Sunday afternoons, in support of his orthodoxy, appeared in the plaza loaded down with massive silver ornament, a frock-coat, a battered silk hat balanced on his shaven, bullet-head, a heavy, silver-studded stick, and a black volume under his arm. As there was no chapel, this illusive church stroll was purely a surviving symbolism.

The jam of pack animals in the narrow street straightened out under the stimulus of the arrieros’ rawhide thongs and we clattered by the little plaza and on up a narrow, rain-washed gully flanked with the thatched mud huts of the Aymarás, on past the walled cemetery and into the steep trail that led up the mountains. High above us the peaks were still hidden in soft masses of clouds that were already golden under the first rays of the morning sun. The trail wound in and out, following the trace of the steep foothills that buttress Mount Sorata, but always rising, sometimes abruptly, and then again in a series of steadily ascending dips along a succession of narrow ledges.

On one of these narrow ledges we came around a corner suddenly on a large pack-train of llamas and on the instant they scattered in hysterical fright up and down the precipitous slopes with the sure-footedness of mountain-goats. An hour later we could still see their Aymará drivers, far below us, crawling over the slopes with the slings hurling pebbles at the stupid beasts in their efforts to collect them on the trail.

Rapidly the semi-tropical vegetation that flourished in the lower altitude of the village of Sorata disappeared; more rugged and hardier shrubs succeeded, and these, too, in their turn disappeared and nothing was left but the storm scarred patches of high pasture. Above these the wet, black rocks of the Andes thrust their jagged masses into the air in sullen cliffs surmounted by snow-capped minarets and pinnacles. Only once I saw a condor, for they are not common, sailing lazily a couple of hundred feet below us. It was a distinct disappointment. The white puff of downy feathers about the neck identified it, but amid these impressive surroundings it seemed no more than a sparrow flitting about in a down-town city street.

For miles we skirted the base of an unbroken cliff that rose three hundred feet sheer from the trail, and then suddenly came upon a ragged break in the wall that accommodatingly opened a passage where the trail climbed to meet it. The narrow passageway was as dim as the dusk of evening; it zigzagged through the cliff in a series of high steps cut or worn in the rock; the high walls on each side and its tortuous turnings shut out all light except such as fell from the illuminated strip of sky above. Here and there tumbled walls of stones suggested the possibility of ancient barricades, and no more weird a setting could be devised to set a fanciful adventure afloat in fiction.

That night we made camp in the open in a little gorge, and sheltered ourselves in the lee of an enormous boulder. The packs were piled in a wall, and over this the tent was thrown and held down by heavy stones. A blinding snow-squall roared through the narrow gorge as through a pipe; later it changed to a stinging blizzard, where the tiny particles of ice stung like a sand-blast. There was no fuel for a fire, and only by carefully barricading the alcohol lamp could a little thin tea be warmed. That, together with cold tinned things and a nip of Salmon’s effective brandy made shift for dinner.

The tough little mules, hobbled and turned out to graze among the shale and thin, snow-covered grass, made no effort to seek a lee shelter and wandered about, indifferent to the gale. An Aymará family, driving a few burros packed with rubber, spent the night in the lee of a small, overhanging rock. There was a baby not two years old in the family, yet, without a fire and with nothing but raw chalona, they made their customary camp. Their heads were heavily muffled as usual, but the dawn found their bare legs drifted over with five inches of snow, and apparently comfortable and indifferent to the fact.

CHAPTER X
THE TOLL GATE AND MAPIRI

Packing the mules in the bitter winter dawn was slow work. The rawhide lashings were frozen stiff; our saddles were covered with sleet, before we could mount and swing into them; two arrieros were drunk together with Agamemnon, but the latter alone was helpless and useless after the tender care he had bestowed on a secreted bottle of alcohol. His usual chocolate grin was lost in the agonies of “de mis’ry in de haid, sar,” and, utterly dejected, he rode along with his wooly skull naked to the sleet and with an ice-coated sock as a bandage to keep it within the normal circumference.

Whatever course the trail turned, the blizzard seemed to shift to meet us again square in the teeth. The shale and débris along the narrow ledge of trail was treacherous with an icy glare. The saddle buckles were knots of ice, and every now and then we beat our hats against the mule to break the ice that encrusted them; on my poncho the sleet froze in a thin sheet that would crackle with any movement and rattle off. The particles of ice and snow did not fall as in a self-respecting gale, but were whipped along in the blast in streaks that never seemed to drop. In the high, thin air, the bitter cold of the storm seemed to bite like an acid. Even though the mules were mountain-bred, the rare air of this high pass affected them and as we climbed higher, they began to halt every fifty yards for breath, with their icicled flanks heaving in distress. In a moment they would start on again of their own accord, yet sometimes in the fiercer blasts of the storm only the constant spur would keep them in the trail and headed for the pass above.

At last there was the feel of a level stretch under hoof, and there loomed the big mound of stones, with a twig cross on top and its strips of calico whipped to shreds; the summit of the pass had been reached. The small house-builders’ altars at the base were drifted over with snow; a few twig crosses sticking out of the snow marked the Aymará graves of some who had been of mark among their people, for it is a great and desirable honor to be buried high up among the mountain gods. The lesser Aymarás, dying on the trail, are left, or rolled over a convenient steep slope. In the lee of the stone cairn a solitary Aymará was resting; his coarse, woolen trousers rolled above his knees, his feet bare. His eyes grinned at us from out the poncho mufflings, and I recognized him as a little Indian who was picked out to carry for us a long cross-cut saw that was too awkward to be lashed on a mule. He dug the saw out of a drift to show us that it was still safe, and for less than two dollars he delivered the saw after a six-days’ journey across the pass and into Mapiri, his only equipment for the trip being a small bag of parched corn, a chalona rib, and the invariable pouch of coca.

Late in the afternoon we rode into the Aymará village of Yngenio. There had been but a slight drop since leaving the summit and the rocky pocket in which the village exists was covered with a light snow. The Aymarás here are miners and looked with unfavoring eyes on the outfits passing through. There was an empty house of dry-laid stones with a tattered roof of blackened thatch that was used as a public shelter by any passing party, and a walled corral into which the mules were driven.

In this village the huts were chiefly of stone chinked with mud and grass; some even rose to the dignity of two stories with a rough ladder leading above. Three mountain torrents joined in this gulch to form the Yngenio River. The Aymarás bed these torrents with flat stones in the dry season and after the next high water has passed, wash the fresh gold brought down in their wooden pans. But all about were the ruins of elaborate ancient gold workings that indicated that this was one of the centers from which the Incas drew their enormous golden treasure. All along the gulch as we rode in there were the broken openings of tunnels and drifts high up on the mountain-sides. Some had been concealed by walling up and this had been torn away by some later Spanish prospector or had tumbled in during the course of time.

There were the remains of a great flume and of the stone-laid troughs where the streams were diverted and laid their nuggets in the crude riffles—even as they still do in other Aymará workings. Near the junction of the three torrents there was an immense rectangular pile of carefully laid stones, with carefully constructed ramps leading from one level to the next. Throughout this district there were also many little, low, round stone huts that reminded one forcibly of the Esquimaux igloo; they were of great age, their arches had fallen in, and the stones were black with the centuries of aging.

The present day Aymarás raise a little corn and potatoes for chuño, some sheep for chalona, while a few muscular pigs make the razor-back seem fat by comparison. The arrieros foraged among the huts for cebada for the mules and a chicken or some eggs for us, but the Aymarás either had none or else surlily refused to sell, but there was fuel and with that a fine hot tinned dinner was prepared.

The following day the pack-mules filed from one hog-back mountain ridge to another, crawling up the steep ascents or gingerly picking their way downward over an intricate system of connecting mountain series. Hour after hour the bitter winds blew without rest. At times we would be a long column on some ridge that dropped away on either side in a steep declivity; the great depths, whenever they became visible through a rift in the clouds below, gave the valleys beneath the blue haze of distance, while a glass revealed the heavy vegetation, the palms, and the mellow glow of warm sunlight. Farther on the trail would cling, a mere ledge, to the side of cliffs where the melted snow, dripping from the stirrup, would fall a couple of hundred feet sheer.

On the narrow ledges of the trail there were the most abrupt turns and sharp angles and often a rough series of steps up which the mules would clamber in plunging jumps. There was no danger as long as one put faith in the mule and did not attempt to over-balance him by leaning too far to the cliff; those sure-footed animals have no desire to kill themselves or slip carelessly and they may be implicitly depended upon. In one particularly bad descent known as the “Tornillo” no one rode down. It was a zigzag trail apparently cut in the face of an almost perpendicular cliff, and the arrieros took the pack-train down in sections, so that, in the event of one mule stumbling, it would not bump half the others over the edge.

Just beyond the “Tornillo” we passed a llama train. One of the Aymarás came toward us, one arm supporting the other at the wrist and his face drawn with pain and fright, chiefly fright, out of all proportion to the simple sprain. He stopped uncertainly, a short distance off, and repeated, “Tata! Tata!” over and over, plaintively pointing to his injured wrist. It was a simple matter to bind it up and throw in a few impressive and magic gestures, and with a distinctly beneficial effect, for he began to grin cheerfully. The pain was nothing; it was the fact that he had fallen that had worried him. The Aymará, as sure-footed as a goat or one of his own llamas, a mountaineer by birth, is worried when he stumbles and falls; it is one of the very local gods clutching at him, and every one knows the powerlessness of a mere mortal when a god gets after him.

Months later, in a little interior village in the montaña, I met this same Aymará. He came forward grinning and beaming and then, about ten feet off, shuffled from one foot to the other in respectful and embarrassed gratitude. Evidently the magic gestures had done their work well and had so far frustrated the peevish god who had been after him. In bandaging him my hand had slipped over the muscles of the arm and, although they lay without tension, they were like bundles of steel cables; in that stubby, squat figure lay the strength of a gorilla. In La Paz I had seen the Aymará cargadores walk off with three hundred pounds of flour—sometimes more,—and carry it with ease half a mile in that rarified atmosphere. Another time, at Guaqui, a cargadore picked up with his shoulder rope a piano in its case, and carried it across the tracks of the railroad yard.

That night we camped in a tiny stone hut built by the government on a high, mountain promontory where the clearest weather known is a dull, depressing, drizzling rain. An outfit of Aymarás were already crowded in and Rodriguez hustled them out again, in fact, they were already packing up their scanty outfit preparing to move when they saw the mules coming. Outside in the mud, there were the remnants of a human skeleton, picked clean by the eagles and tramped carelessly in the mud. The skull hung from a stick jammed into the wall of the hut.

“Aymará!” remarked Rodriguez contemptuously, as he pried it out and tossed it over into the cañon below. That was his delicate tribute to the sensitiveness of the gringoes who, he thinks may not fancy a skull as a wall ornament.

With this camp, the last of the high pass was over and in the gray dawn we began the long descent out of the clouds, the sleet, the snow, and the bitter rains. The bare cliffs and slopes gave way, and stunted shrubs appeared now and then even a gaunt tree reared itself, and, perched on a dead branch, an occasional buzzard or eagle looked with a speculative eye at the mules and the steep descents. We dropped through long distances of sunlight that glowed with a grateful and novel warmth, and once in a while a brilliant little bird flashed past, while gorgeous butterflies began to flutter about the mud-holes. The eastern side of the Andes drop in a succession of forest-clad cliffs; looking up and back, it seemed at times hardly possible that a trail could cling to the steep face. Many of the hardest have names—Amargarani, the “hill of bitterness”—Cayatana-y-huata, the “place where Cayatana fell” are directly suggestive.

There is no more telling strain than leaning back hour upon hour as the mule picks his way downward, but it is forgotten in the relief of basking in the mellow rays of the long afternoon sun, and it was grateful that night to be able to undress in place of turning in “all standing,” except for spurs, and in place of the howling gale and the snow that sifted through the crevices, to hear the soft rustling of the night-blown palms. An open-work hut of split palm and cane was kept here by a Bolivian who was under some kind of vague government subsidy, and under his palm roof we slung our hammocks.

His Aymará wife was stolidly indifferent to our presence, but a little daughter—a mere baby she would be considered back in the States—had an unbounded curiosity in the white men—white men especially who wore queer, transparent stones set in glittering frames before their natural eyes. A watch was even more mysterious, “Ah,” she announced, “there is a bug inside!” Following the matter up, she decided that the watch was a bug itself and marveled greatly that a full-grown man should bother to carry a bug about on the end of a little string, unless—aha! it was a magic, and she dropped the watch, nor would she touch it again. Thereat she showed me a scapular and offered to take me up the trail a bit where there were some graves and I could see some ghosts, and perhaps talk with them, as she did. Not among any of the Aymarás was I ever able to notice any particular interest or fear in regard to their dead. Their trails are scattered with graves and mountain tragedies, they believe in spirits, but the almost universal fear of ghosts, dead spirits, or cemeteries after dark is apparently lacking. In fact, in Sorata, it was no common thing to hear them drinking and celebrating under the cemetery walls far into the late hours.

Pleasantly from here the rest of the trail ran on down into Mapiri. The giant foothills of the Andes surrounded us, but they were covered with forest and jungle, and for miles we would ride in the cool shade where the trees were matted overhead by the interlocking jungle-vines. Little trails opened off now and again from the main road, and often would be seen the cane hut of some pioneer. Down the valleys were patches of sugar-cane, with the smoke of a falca, alcohol-still, rising close by, and as we rode closer, the smell of burned sugar where chancaca, something like maple-sugar in appearance, was being poured into molds gouged out of a dry log.

Occasionally, in the forest, a thin column of blue smoke showed where some rubber-picker was smoking his morning’s collection of rubber milk. On all this the sun beat with its full, tropical strength, and the raw fogs and blizzards of the high pass seemed to be months behind us. Coffee, tea, and tinned things, but now comfortably warmed or gratefully cool, were served alongside the trail at the brief noon-day halt and what was left of a bunch of bananas cut from the patch in the camp of the previous night added the final touch. In the cool of the early evening we rode into the village of Mapiri, and the saddles were taken off and oiled and packed for the last time. From here on the journey would be by raft and batalon on the rivers. The mountain trail was ended.

The village has a long, grass-grown plaza on two sides; toward the muddy Mapiri River the plaza is open, and the entering end is blocked by a mud church with a mud-walled yard, loopholed and battlemented. Once a year a priest makes the trip to Mapiri and down the river, performing his offices as they are needed. He blesses the graves of the dead, christens the living, and performs canonical marriages for those who desire, and can afford, the luxury.

A squat Cholo welcomed us; he was the head man of the settlement and gave us one of his houses for our headquarters. While he talked with us, a monkey climbed up his leg and coiled its tail affectionately about his neck. A pink-faced little marmoset, with a black-tipped tail, overcame his first nervousness and chattered at us from the refuge of the eaves, while a thin, waving spider-monkey cooed with weird, sprawling gestures at the end of his tether, and from the high, peaked roof a dozen parrots shrieked their evening songs to the sunset. The Cholo’s wife, a thin, shrewish Aymará, viewed us with disfavor; for days she refused to sell us eggs while we were waiting for the rafts to arrive, and then she threw away five dozen that had spoiled on her hands. When her Cholo husband saw this lost profit he said nothing, but that night sounds that suggested a primitive family discipline arose in his household and pierced the little village.

CHAPTER XI
WAITING FOR THE LECCOS

FOR a month we waited in this tiny straggling rectangle of thatched huts before the balsas or callapos could get up to us to move our outfit down the river. Somewhere below us on the turbulent river Lecco crews were toiling up against the current, dragging and clawing their way through narrow cañons, hanging fast in places to the bare rock, and again helped by the long, tropical vines that drooped to the swift water. Twice they had been beaten back by sudden rises in the river; the third time they got through, although two balsas had been wrecked and for the past two days they had lived mainly on the berries and leaves along the jungle banks.

A splendid lot of half-civilized people, tremendous of muscle and capable of prodigious feats of strength and endurance on their rivers; ashore sober and diffident, afloat on their rafts, by right of an immemorial custom they are always drunk and serenely confident in their intuitive skill.

For twenty-four hours after they arrived on the hot stone beach below the bluff on which Mapiri lived they drank and feasted and slept and then their head man, a Bolivian refugee, announced that all was in readiness. The gang of workmen we had chartered were collected and counted and then assigned to the three callapos, a queer lot, but in the main fairly promising for our purposes.

One was a negro who had been a rubber picker down the river before. During his absence his wife had left him preferring a gentleman of lighter color, but who had only one eye; some frontier mechanic had hammered a patch out of a silver coin and then engraved with a nail the ragged outlines of an eye, which the owner proudly wore as a most elegant makeshift. Both of these gentlemen were in the outfit and ordinarily both would boast in the utmost good nature of their fascinations with the ladies—except when they were in process of getting drunk. And on the Bolivian frontier getting drunk is recognized as a perfectly legitimate pastime. There are no games, no concerted forms of amusement, the montaña offers nothing except these little gatherings with some childish hopping as a dance and then the tin cans of cañassa and the ensuing drunkenness.

There was another man in the gang, a stocky, loose-jointed fellow, Segorrondo, who was never sober, except during his working hours, but during that time he was worth any two of the other men—and he never failed to turn up sober for that allotted period. His capacity was nothing; three times in one afternoon in Mapiri he was sober and drunk, with the lines of demarcation startlingly distinct. He rarely joined in the little hoppings to the reed whistle with his face daubed with clay or charcoal and decorated with bits of twigs or leaves, yet he was perfectly sociable and never dangerous. Later, in the established camp down the river, there came a three day fiesta for which he prepared in advance. There was a falca—a still for making the cañassa from a half-wild sugar-cane—up the river, and he drove his bargain before the fiesta began. He was, for the sum of one Boliviano—about half a dollar, gold—to be allowed to drink all he chose during the three days, but was to carry none away.

Long before dawn on the first day he was at the falca; for three days he never moved from the litter of crushed sugar-cane, lying in a stupor from which he only roused himself to reach out shakily for a tin cup of warm alcohol as it dripped from the still-worm. We expected a wreck to show up, but on the morning of the fourth day he returned, grinning cheerfully, and worked as though nothing had occurred.

Also there was Nosario, a stocky boy of about twelve or fourteen, who had been added as general utility around the cook or camp. He was worthless and it later developed that his wife, a Cholo lady of some thirty or forty years, had prodded him into the effort in order to add to her matrimonial support.

Agamemnon viewed the whole collection with great scorn. “These yer pipple ain’t noways fitten, ba’s,” he would remark. The other darky was included in his disfavor.

Agamemnon always swelled with pride at the thought that he was a Britisher by birth—born in Barbadoes—and he counted Americans as being too subtly differentiated to be separated; humbly accepting his place as assigned in their eyes, he looked down with scorn on these shambling, good natured animals.

During the four weeks of delay in Mapiri we had seen much of a neighboring rubber baron, old man Violand, whose barraca was a half day’s ride over the steep trails. The old man was as typically Teutonic as though he had but just pushed his mild, blue-eyed way into the jungle. His headquarters—a square of palm-thatched and palm-walled buildings—was self-sustaining from the coarse flour that a row of Indian women were grinding between heavy stones in one corner of the patio to his coffee and also a superior brand of cañassa distilled in a wooden worm, cooled in a hollow palm log, which really had the flavor of a fine liqueur. He had been the chief figure in a couple of rubber wars over disputed territory with his nearest neighbor some thirty miles away and he showed a spattering of bullet holes in every room of his house with delighted pride. The dispute was a trifle complicated, but as the result, his opponent was a fugitive from Bolivia while Violand himself tiptoed into Sorata or occasionally La Paz with some caution.

Often during the month we rode down to see him—he would have had us stay there for life. No sooner did our mules round the shoulder of the hill than we could see some small Indian boy darting off with the news. The familiar figure of the old man would bulk in the doorway to confirm the news and then his voice would begin booming out orders; chickens squawked, sheep blatted, and at once the place was a turmoil of pursuit. From an outbuilding would come the blue smoke of fresh fires and the shrill clacking of the well-grimed Aymará cook summoning her family help. Always were we greeted thus and always there was a ready crowd of Indians at our heels on the crest of the boom to take the mules when we arrived and feed and water or put them up for the night.

The formalities over or properly supervised, Violand would seat himself at a huge table with the top a single plank of solid mahogany three inches thick and before the ingredients for a gin cocktail. At his elbow a tiny little girl, one of the daughters of the Aymará cook, took her position to trot out for anything lacking in the first array. A gin cocktail is sugar, Angostura bitters, and gin—and I have seen it served in full goblets. All the rest of the forenoon the host would busy himself compounding this. It made not the slightest difference whether anyone else in the party joined him or not, genially he would attend to it himself in little sips whose cumulative effect was prodigious. As the midday breakfast hour approached he would roar for pisco, a species of Peruvian brandy, and then, as the little Aymará maiden announced the final hour of nutrition, champagne.

And then the dinner, half a sheep, or a whole pig and once the head of a young bullock to whose cooking the old man had given personal attention, waddling back and forth from the mahogany table to the cook house accompanied by the little Aymará girl fluttering in a state of ecstatic excitement. For the rest there were the chickens and the native foods, the chalona slowly simmered for a day to make it taste like food, with the chuña floating in it like so many old medicine corks, the chickens, the platanos, boiled green and pith-like or better in their black, melting over-ripeness and to be eaten with a spoon, baked and delicious, native bread from home made flour, and imported preserves for dessert. Also there was champagne and whiskey and pisco and cañassa and gin cocktails again until in final triumph a little beer—everything lukewarm or tepid from the shallows of the tropical brook.

By and by the old man would venture on a German song or two and then beckon to the little beady-eyed Aymará girl; off she would dart to return with a couple of heavy footed Indian women. The host would rise—with assistance—and trolling some uncertain song march off to his bedroom to doze. And the rest of the time would be spent with his son and manager, both fine, pink cheeked young Germans who looked after affairs. It sounds like a wassail, though as a matter of fact, it was old Violand who was the chief performer—he was an old man, civilization was far away, eight days to La Paz over pass and plateaus and blizzard and after that to Germany—six months for a letter and an answer!

Later he would reappear suddenly, generally clad in a shrimp pink bath gown, a patent, German Emperor-moustache-shaper over his moustache, and groping for his spectacles. When they were found he once more settled himself for a pleasant time, generally having to go through a second search for a key so that another bottle of bitters could be produced.

The morning after, he would appear, fresh and blue-eyed and solicitous.

“You hef a goot time—yes?” then he would chuckle until he shook in ponderous ripples and go on in Spanish, “I do not remember much—after dinner—yesterday—a good dinner—yes? A good dinner is much in this country of the black gold—the rubber—yes—we drink a little for the digestion, la, la—yes. Hoi, mozo—” the little Indian girl clattered inside for the bottles—“just one little cocktail before the saddle—yes?” His face would beam in its frame of thin whiskers with the proudly upstanding German-emperor-moustaches the center of their radiations.

In the jungles across the river from Mapiri was another rubber barraca in which a Bolivian owner held court. Every morning we could see a dozen thin threads of blue smoke trickling above the forest where his pickers were smoking their morning collection of rubber milk. Over there the cañassa was always on draft for all at all times, while half the week was a fiesta and Sunday a brawling bedlam.

Slowly the days dragged on with an occasional rumor of the progress of the Leccos and the callapos. Once, as much to furnish a variation as anything else, I routed out a couple of jars of mincemeat and ventured on some pies. An oven was heated, a big clay dome, such as our great-great-grandmothers used, from out of which the fire was drawn and on a long handled paddle I shoved in a load of pies. Almost instantly they browned and then passed to a crisp black before the paddle could maneuver them out again. The native population, however, appreciated them highly. It was small loss as the manufacture of pie crust is somewhat of an undertaking—at least in that tropical temperature. The lard, native or imported, is a beautiful amber liquid that is bought or carried in bottles and pours with no more deliberation than so much water.

A little later a general fiesta in Mapiri helped out the dull waiting a little. We noticed an extra number of candles burning before the altar in the little mud-walled church and for some days before there had been the thrumming of hollow-tree drums from the little huts of the village. The night before the great day, while it was scarcely dark, the big drums began booming with a typical Indian rhythm; from the line of huts came the droning wail of the guests that rose and fell in fitful bursts, while now and again a straggling line of drunken Cholos, men and women, in a weaving single file, trotted in a staggering hop around the grass grown plaza. There was feasting and drinking and noise; from the barraca across the river came a delegation to lend a joyous hand. Toward morning it died down, slumbered uneasily during the forenoon, and then began working to a frenzy of excitement as evening approached.

All the drums had been concentrated in the church, tallow dips lined the walls, attached by their own tallow to the sun-baked clay, and cast uncertain masses of shifting shadows that flickered in the hot and smoky drafts; overhead a flood of bats chittered in amazement at the invasion of their domain. On one side of the church were squatted all of the old women in Mapiri with dull, cañassa bleared eyes and cheeks distended with coca leaves hammering out a monotonous rhythm on the drums.

Before the altar and facing it side by side were two lines of the smaller boys with the tallest at the front and then shading down to the rear, each naked to the waist but for some cheap necklaces of gay beads. Each had a forked twig like those we used for our juvenile sling-shots, and strung on a wire or twisted bark thread that connected the forks were a dozen little bits of flat tin hammered out of old sardine cans. Like castanets they jiggled the forked stick in rhythm with the drums and as they jiggled shuffling in a hopping, dancing lock-step in single file up to the altar, and then back in the same way half the depth of the beaten earth floor. As one file advanced the other jiggled back and so on alternately. For hours they had kept it up and there was no sign of either a stop or a rest.

The rest of the villagers flitted in or out as ordinary spectators, still nibbling at portions of the feast or sharing a continuously filled bottle of cañassa with the drumming old women. It was not until daybreak that Mapiri dropped into an exhausted rest.

During this fiesta there had been no shooting of dynamite—that is quarter pound sticks with a short fuse like a fire-cracker. This once more popular amusement had been dampened by the last really important fiesta they had celebrated. A Cholo gentleman had, it seemed, zigzagged out into the grass grown plaza with his stick of dynamite, lighted it from his cigarette, and then in a drunken effort to throw it away had dropped it. He did not notice this trifling difference in his program and swinging dizzily round with the effort of his throw fell sprawling upon the cartridge. His demise is still spoken of with awe on that river. Therefore it was that Mapiri celebrated a quiet fiesta.

And then the balsas arrived. Their Lecco crew gorged and slept and drank for a day and then were as fresh as ever, busy in lashing each three balsas together with cross logs to make callapos for the down-stream voyage. Three of these callapos we had and, when loaded with their freight, crews and workmen passengers, their logs were four inches under water, the little platforms on which the baggage was piled and carefully lashed, rising like a little island on stilts above the current.