CHAPTER XII
OFF ON THE LONG DRIFT

A long line of half-naked Leccos trotted across the grass-covered bluff and disappeared over the edge and down the steep path to the river, where our clumsy rafts swung and eddied in the boiling current. They grunted and sweated and laughed as they threw the heavy packages of our outfit on their shoulders, for they could swing a hundred and fifty or two hundred pounds as carelessly as you could handle a valise. Steadily the raised platforms on the rafts piled higher with the accumulating baggage, while slowly the rafts sank under the weight, until the logs were entirely covered by the muddy current. As the last package was put aboard, the Leccos began lashing the cargo in place with our spare rope and the long vines which they used for towing the rafts up-stream. They used as much care in throwing and tightening the lashings as though stowing the pack on a “bad” mule for a mountain-trail, rather than a cargo raft that was only to drift with the current. It seemed absurd.

“Here, good,” grunted a Lecco, waving a hand toward the mill-race current; “below, very bad, patrón, muy peligroso—yes.”

When later we struck the “bad places,” and waist-deep in the boiling, angry waters of the cañons, clung to those same lashings, to keep ourselves from being washed overboard, the need of lashing for the baggage was plain.

The intendente, the jefe politico, and the only postmaster for many leagues of this virgin interior came down to tender us his farewell embraces; for as a strict matter of fact those three functionaries resided in the single person of that one short, stocky Cholo half-breed, who had given all the hospitality in his power during the dreary weeks of waiting in his little palm-thatched domain, but whose Aymará wife had viewed us with such sullen hospitality. Officially he noted with approval that we had already complied with the Bolivian regulations in regard to navigation, and at the bow floated the green, yellow, and red flag of Bolivia, and with much curiosity he viewed our American flag fluttering at the stern. It was the first he had ever seen. It gained, too, much approval from the Leccos, its decorative scheme of stars and red and white bars drawing admiring comment, and we could have sold it many times over as dress goods or as strictly high-class shirting. As a special mark of favor the shrewish, leather-skinned Indian wife of the Cholo jefe came down to see us off, and while we patted her lord on the back in our mutually polite embracings, she fluttered in the background, clacking unintelligible, but cordial, Aymará farewells.

When first we had dismounted in this tiny settlement of Mapiri this Aymará woman had borne us a fierce dislike that was kept from literal and open war only by the strong hand of her Cholo lord. A little later, unfortunately, one of our men, in making his offering of candles in the little mud-walled chapel, had ignited a saint. When I saw the saint shortly after, his vestments were charred shreds, he was as bald as a singed chicken, and his waxen features had coagulated into limp benevolence, out of which his sole remaining glass eye stared mildly. He had been placed on a little table up against a mud wall, and the Indian women were weeping and wailing before him in abject apology. They were hastily offering flowers, candles, and libations, but with this last straw the Aymará lady’s dislike had become even a more fixed, fanatical hatred.

Shrewish, unattractive, and savage though she was, she was devoted in her love for her Cholo husband. Some time after the burying of the saint, one night their son developed a difference with his father in which each tried to kill the other. The father had just reached his gun and would have been successful when, being thick-necked, violent, and full-blooded, he toppled over in a stroke of apoplexy. There being no doctor, not even an Aymará yatari within three hundred miles, the old lady turned to us in a panic, and, probably despite our amateur efforts, the Cholo pulled through. In the meantime the poor old woman fluttered about in an agony of helpless fear and love, eagerly hanging on the slow words of translation that came to her, for she spoke nothing but Aymará, and everything had to be translated first into Spanish and then into her own tongue. That very night she burned a box of candles before the charred saint, while in the morning we had for our breakfast a fine chicken apiece. Her gratitude endured, and in the quivering furnace heat she had come to see us depart, and as we waded aboard she followed us and laid on the cargo a pair of live chickens as a final gift.

The Cholo handed us a small sack of mail, asking us to distribute it on our way down the Rio Mapiri, these irregular trips being the sole means of mail communication with the rubber barracas of this far interior; the Leccos cast off the vine ropes that moored us, and a few strokes of their heavy paddles swung us out into the full, swift current of the river. As we struck it there was no feeling of speed or even of motion, but immediately the green walls on each side of the river began flitting past in a shimmering ribbon of confused green jungle. In a moment, far behind, came the crackling of rifle-shots. It was the Cholo and his Winchester in salute; even while we were pulling our guns to reply he and his wife had dwindled to tiny dots that the sound of our guns could have reached only as a faint echo. Then a bend in the river hid them from view, and my river voyage had begun.

The balsas were slender rafts of very buoyant logs spiked together with heavy pins of black palm; they had a rough bow made by the crooked center log, which turned up in a snout-like projection, giving the affair a curiously animal-like and amphibious expression. For the return voyage three of these balsas were lashed side by side with cross-logs and strips of the inner bark of some tree. The callapo, as this combination is called, is entirely submerged and except for the cargo platform and the turned-up snouts, nothing is visible above the muddy river.

As we disappeared around the bend in the swift current, the hills against the background seemed to close in upon us, and as they narrowed, the muddy river snapped and crackled in peevish, little waves. The banks grew steeper, and the air damp and cool, and although directly overhead there was the glaring blue sky of the forenoon, yet we moved swiftly through an atmosphere of evening. Long, trailing creepers drooped from the overhanging trees into the current near the banks and cut the water like the spray from the bow of a trim launch; the soft murmur of rapidly moving water rose, and was broken only now and then by the shrill cries of parrots flying high overhead; sometimes a pair of macaws, with their gaudy plumage flashing in the high sun flitted across the gorge. But though the river doubled and twisted among the hills, there were yet, according to Lecco standards, no “bad places,” and they passed the bottle of cañassa sociably around among themselves, inspecting their passengers with interest and chuckling over their own comments. They had never seen a man with eye-glasses before, and I was a matter of fine interest and guesswork. What were those panes of glass for? Cautiously they would make a little circle with their fingers and thumbs and peer through it to see what effect of improvement might result. I received my name, “the four-eyed patrón,” promptly.

The whole crew of Leccos was amiably drunk; it is the custom of the river, and it seems in no way to impair their efficiency. It has become their right by long custom, and one that it is not prudent to disregard; for a trader, being of a thrifty turn and not caring to buy the cañassa, decided to run the river on a strict prohibition platform. Every one of his callapos was curiously enough wrecked in the same rapids on the day after he announced his thrifty principles. The general allowances is about two quarts a day for three men, and perhaps, if the day has been a hard one, a small teacupful each in the camp. Money to them has no value compared with cañassa. Once, when trying to buy a fine bead neckband from a Lecco, I offered him money up to a dollar, Bolivian, the equivalent of eight bottles of cañassa, and he refused, for his Lecco sweetheart had made it; then I began to barter all over again by offering him a bottle of cañassa, and at once he handed me the neck-band without question.

While the current was swift, from eight to ten miles an hour, we had not come to the bad rapids. Sometimes the river would open out into broad shallows, where the callapo would bump and scrape along over the bottom, and then would close up into another gorge that in its turn would merge into tortuous cañons with bluff walls of rock. Drunk though the Leccos were, yet their river skill did not seem to be affected. When we floated along the quieter reaches, they would play like silly children. Occasionally one would be tumbled into the river, and would swim alongside in sheepish embarrassment until he decided to climb aboard, amid the pleased cackles of the rest.

One, a young Lecco about seventeen or eighteen years old, who handled one of the stern paddles, accidentally stepped off backward into the river. The others shrieked with delight as the Lecco struck out for shore. We saw him land, pull his machete out from under his shirt, and start chopping down some saplings. Perhaps fifteen minutes later, in the next milder stretch of river, down came the Lecco like a cowpuncher on a pony, only his pony was a bundle of mere sticks lashed together with vine, and in place of a rope he swung a bamboo pole, using it as a paddle. He was standing up like a circus-rider on his frail raft, shifting it with his pole over to where the current was swiftest, and he coasted down the inclined glissade between rocks, avoiding every little eddy and catching only the roughest and swiftest places, until presently he had worked his way alongside and stepped aboard again. His little bundle of sticks did not number ten, and not one was as thick as your wrist, while merely two bits of vine at each end held them together.

I asked what would have happened had the vine lashings broke. When that was translated to the Leccos, they roared with laughter. That, it was explained to me, was what they were hoping for, so that then he would have had to swim. Swim! A fine joke to swim rapids and whirlpools that looked like sure death or worse mangling. But I found later that any one of them could have done it on even worse passages. If they are sure to be caught in a whirlpool, they will dive, and the fury of the rapid itself troubles them not the least. A Lecco once, to avoid a whipping by his rubber boss, threw himself into the river and swam six miles in the worst section of the river without a thought. A German later attempted to swim the mildest of these, and his broken body was picked up in an eddy three miles below.

CHAPTER XIII
THE LECCO TRIBE

These Leccos are among the finest Indians, or semi-civilized savages, I have met. They are sturdy and muscular, with a distinctly Malaysian suggestiveness, and very superior to any of the surrounding savage tribes of the interior. Yet they have neither religion nor superstition; they have no legend or tradition, and their only historical recollection is from the time when quinine bark was the main river commerce instead of rubber—the time of the “Great Quina” they call it,—about half a century ago. They are brave and loyal, although not a fighting race, and have made but a poor showing against the neighboring tribes. Their life is on the river, chiefly this Rio Mapiri, and they stick close to its banks. Their sole work is transportation with these balsas and callapos up and down the river.

For months in the year the stream is virtually closed by reason of the rains and the impassable cañons. Down stream is simple and finely exciting, but against the currents up-stream, portaging or hauling the balsas through the cañons, where there is often barely a hand-hold on the naked walls of rock, and often vines must be lowered from above, drenched during the day and sleeping on the sand playas at night, is the hardest kind of labor. As had happened while they were trying to reach me on this trip, the food gives out—it is not a game country—and unless they are near enough to the goal to live on nuts and berries, as they did for two days on this occasion, they have to go back, replenish, and start over again, with all the previous labor lost. And there is scarcely a free Lecco among them; they are always in debt to the rubber barracas, who by the sale and purchase of their debts pass them as veritable chattels. With thriftless, unthinking good nature, they accept this condition and at the end of each trip will squander their credit-wages on worthless trifles. A Lecco friend of mine once squandered the wages of a whole hard trip up-stream on a woman’s straw hat and its mass of pink-ribbon bows that he wore for two days in great pride on the drift down-stream until it was lost overboard in one of the worst rapids. He watched it whirling off in the spray and foam with a childish pleasure and no sense of loss, but rather with the calm complacency of a man who had lost a trifle and could with easy labor earn another.

The Indians whom I had met before were the Quechuas and the Aymarás, the great tribes of the high plains; heavy-boned, stocky, and powerful peoples, who, in feature and color strongly resemble our own Sioux and Apache type. These Leccos, on the contrary, were slender, well-built men, with a direct, soft quickness of movement that revealed the perfect strength that lay behind it. In feature they were absolutely Malay—a perfect reproduction of any of the Malay tribes that fringe the coast of Asia.

Other rivers have the balsa and the callapo too, and the long rapids through narrow gorges, but the Indians of those rivers lie down and clutch for safety when they go through them. Your Lecco goes into the boiling smother of a cataract with a grinning yell of pure joy, and keeps his feet like a Glo’ster skipper in a high gale.

The balsa of the Leccos is a raft made of the light, corky wood from which it takes its name. Eight-inch logs of this balsa wood are pinned together with palm spikes from the hard, black palm that is also used as arrow-points and for bows. When floating in the water it looks like some unwieldy amphibian that has risen to the surface for a fresh supply of air. It is generally about twenty-five feet long and about four feet wide. The Leccos lash three balsas together, broadside on, by means of stout cross-logs tied with strips of bark or vine, and this result is called a callapo. It is a structure that is capable of carrying some three tons of cargo—that is if handled by Leccos.

The first thing that impressed me about these Leccos was the distinctness with which they represented another race. It was not the mere divergence of tribe; it was more fundamental—it was a racial difference. There was nothing in it to suggest even a remote relation to any of the tribes with whom I had come in contact up to that time, or, for that matter, with any of those that I subsequently met. To begin with, the Leccos looked clean—a condition that one seldom finds in the Quichua or Aymará nations; although cleanliness is almost an invariable condition of all river peoples. Their complexion was of the soft, warm brown of the Hindu or the Filipino, having no suggestion of the dull chocolate of the negro or the weather-beaten copper of the Aymarás or of our own Western Indians.

Their features again are decidedly Malaysian—straight high nose with thin nostrils; forehead fairly high and well shaped; finely cut thin lips, and the narrow, though not slanting eyes of the East. The hair is oily jet-black, thick, and grows to a point on the forehead, in the style made known by Aguinaldo, and is kept neatly cut in a straight, bristly pompadour. They do not care for the gaudy feather head-dresses of their savage neighbors—not even ear-rings—and for head decorations are content with the brilliant bandanna of the trader, twisted and tied in a band about the head in very much the same manner as used by our own Apaches of Arizona. A band necklace of bright beads, strung and designed in simple patterns by their own women, on threads of wild cotton, is their only ornament. These are almost invariably worn by the men only and are tied tightly about the throat.

Another striking point about the Leccos, one in which they differ from all of the “barbaros,” or the savages of the Amazon tributaries, is their muscular development. The barbaro in this respect is very deficient. He is strong almost beyond belief, but it is the strength of sinew and not of muscle. It is like the strength of the monkey, that is not made visible by the ordinary signs of muscular development. The barbaro has no apparent deltoid, no biceps, no triceps, none of the finely developed muscles of the leg and thigh that with us make for strength. He is built like an undeveloped boy who has suddenly suffered from too rapid growth. The Leccos, on the contrary, are beautifully developed physically; knotted muscles shift and play evenly under the soft skin and suggest a swift sureness of movement and a strength of endurance that are demanded in their life on the river.

The likeness of these people to the Malays is still further accented by their costume. They wear rather tight breeches of white tucuyo, a coarse muslin, that taper to the ankle, and above it a short shirt of gaudy red, yellow, or blue, or even sometimes white, though the red is popularly regarded as the most aristocratic. The shirt is cut square with the armholes in the two upper corners. The hole for the head is emblazoned by a border of crude design cut from varied-colored calicos and sewed on. In the course of many days’ association with them, I discovered that the little chipa, or bag of native-woven wild cotton, which every Lecco carries with him on any of his river expeditions, is filled with clean clothing. The muddy water of the Rio Mapiri and the Rio Kaka—which the Mapiri becomes farther down—soils everything it touches, and so the Leccos, who are as much in the water as out of it, regularly changed their garments daily, only making an exception when some extra-hard passages would have made it a useless extravagance.

In my contact with the South American Indians, whether among the high plains of the Andes or among the forests drained by the tributaries of the Amazon, I received rather the impression of inert, passive races; of peoples who were patiently hoping for the return of the legendary days of their fathers, yet who, dimly, in some way felt that the hope was vain. It might poetically be interpreted as a vague consciousness of their doom of ultimate extinction. The Lecco is probably doomed to extinction as well, but he is by no means a despondent specimen. On the contrary, no more cheery, indeed hilarious, outfit can be imagined than that with which we embarked on our callapos at Mapiri. Candor compels me to own that this exuberance of spirits was probably largely alcoholic, for it is one of the few rights to which he clings tenaciously—that of being allowed to keep drunk while making a voyage on the river. For the Lecco will not work to any good purpose if kept sober; they feel that they have been defrauded and cheated of an inalienable right, and at the first convenient opportunity they will avenge the injury by running the callapo on a rock in a rapid, while they themselves will swim through it like otters and make the shore below safe and unrepentant. Unlike all other savages, who become treacherous and turbulent under the influence of liquor, the Lecco becomes even more genial and jovial when in his cups. He is pre-eminently a man of peace.

From the moment that we shoved out into the stream everything was a huge joke. If one slipped on the submerged logs of the callapo and floundered overboard, the rest hailed it with yells of delight, and they dug their heavy paddles into the water and tried to pull the callapo beyond his reach. The victim would dive and come up in some unexpected place, where the effect of the black pompadour and the beady eyes suddenly popping above the opaque depths of an eddy, followed by a damp, sheepish grin, was irresistibly funny.

They are perfectly at home in the water, and will swim any rapid and the dangerous whirlpools that are constantly forming below them, without hesitation—places that it would be fatal for a white man to attempt. There is a story of a Lecco who went through the most dangerous of the rapids with his wife and baby and a mule—the mule and baby inclosed in a framework of palm amidships on the balsa, and the wife helping with a paddle at the stern. They made the passage safely, but it was the survival of the mule that excited their admiration.

Their huts are one-roomed affairs with the floor of beaten clay, upon which, at night, are laid woven grass mats that serve as beds. The walls are of charo—a kind of poor relative of the bamboo—lashed to a slender framework of the same material by split strips of the mora, the typical hut of the tropical frontier. Stout posts sunk at the corners give the strength to support the roof. The huts are about ten by fifteen feet. The steep-pitched roof is thatched with split palm-leaves that render it water-proof even in the heavy tropical thunder-storms. A high broad shelf at one end serves as a second story and a place of storage. In some there is a low shelf of charo along one side that serves as the family bed, though these latter are only in the houses of the more ambitious Leccos. All cooking is done at one end over an open fire, the smoke escaping as best it may through the interstices between the layers of charo. A single door is the only opening.

Near by is the little platano or plantain patch, and a few yuccas. A few scrawny chickens use the house as their headquarters, and are reserved for fiestas. A pot or two, purchased from the traders complete the household equipment. Invariably they boil their food, even to the platanos that are so much better roasted. This is in striking contrast to the barbaros of the farther interior, who are without the knowledge of boiling food; they either eat it raw or roast it slightly.

The Lecco women are also as distinctly Malaysian in appearance as the men. They have fine figures and retain the free gracefulness of carriage of the nude savage, and, up to the time they are sixteen, if not absolutely pretty in feature, are distinctly pleasing. One, however, that I saw in the rubber barraca of Caimalebra, living with a Bolivian refugee murderer, was an absolute beauty by any standards of comparison. They were living happily, and on one trip I enjoyed their hospitality for five days. The single garment of the women is an exaggeration of the Lecco shirt, reaching nearly to the ankles. It is pleasing in its effect, and sets off the graceful beauty of their figures in a way that recalls the simple fashions of the Hawaiian and Polynesian peoples. The women of other tribes are apt to adopt slatternly skirts after their introduction to the frontier civilization.

The girls are fully developed at fourteen, and they usually mate a year or so later with a Lecco boy of about their own age. The boy at that time is a full-fledged balsero and able to hold his own in the struggle with the river—their only test of arrival at man’s estate.

Sometimes a mission priest comes down the river, and then, if the family has prospered, there will be a grand fiesta and a marriage will be performed according to the rites of the Church. This will cost forty bolivians—about eighteen dollars—for the priest’s fee, and considerably more for the drunken orgy that follows. To have been married according to the ceremonies of the Church is a great distinction, and also a rare one.

Of any form or ceremonial that the Leccos may have had at one time, there is not a trace left. All vestiges of their own original superstitions have long disappeared. Nominally they are Catholics, and are claimed as such by the padrés, but in reality they are without religion or belief. The rites of baptism and marriage seem to appeal to them, but apparently more on the ground of the superior dignity that is lent to the following fiesta. Baptism is performed by any trader who happens to be passing on the river, and to their complete satisfaction, while his crew is impressed as godfathers. I was invited to perform it once, but declined, to their evident disappointment.

There are no ceremonies attending the death and burial of a Lecco. During the last illness the neighbors may drop in on a visit of sympathy, and cañassa will be handed around. When death occurs, one member of the family, the husband, son, or son-in-law, wraps the body in a piece of tucuyo, and carries it on his shoulder to a secluded place in the jungle, and there buries it. The slight mound above the grave is its only mark, and that disappears after the lapse of a season or two. Apparently there is no idea of spirits haunting these places, for the Leccos pass them without hesitation after nightfall—something that the Cholos do not care or are afraid to do.

The Lecco families are small. Two or, at the most, three babies are the rule, and it is not at all uncommon to find a childless family. Cañassa and the frequent drunken fiestas that are their only relaxation seem to be the means by which they are accomplishing the suicide of their race. Girl babies are preferred to boys; for when a daughter marries, her husband will eventually have to support her parents. But with a son it is recognized that his duty is to his wife and her people. The women are faithful to their men, if their men care for them and guard them; but if the men become careless or apparently indifferent, the women regard it as a tacit relinquishing of the rights of fidelity, and establish such casual relations as suit them.

With rare exceptions the men are, in effect, in a state of slavery. The debt system prevails, and they are easy victims. The trader spreads his gaudy stock of trade stuffs before the Lecco, and the Lecco buys recklessly whatever attracts him at the moment. The trader gives him full swing at first, and the Lecco gets himself heavily in debt. And that debt is allowed to the exact extent of each particular Lecco’s value as a balsero or rubber-picker. A well-to-do balsero has a debt of two thousand bolivians; poorer ones less. And the Leccos are valued as slaves in the terms of the debt. The Lecco never gets free from his debt.

Of his race the Lecco has no knowledge. He has no written language—not even primitive hieroglyphs or crude pictures. He is even without a primitive instrument for making music. To all questions about themselves, as to where their fathers lived before them, or as to where their families came from even before that, or to the flattering questions as to the time when the Leccos “were a great people,” they have but one date to give. That is the “time of the Great Quina,” when the bark of the quinine was worth a dollar and ten cents a pound, gold, on the river. This is their only date, and it was about sixty or seventy years ago.

They rigidly retain their own dialect, which they call the Riki-Riki, although they have acquired a Spanish patois in their dealing with the traders on the river. The Riki-Riki is strongly labial, though with many guttural sounds, and, like most barbaric tongues, is impossible to reproduce with our alphabet. The counting reduplicates systematically and on the basis of five, instead of ten as in our system.

CHAPTER XIV
DRIFTING DOWN THE RIO MAPIRI

That night we made camp on a sand bar in one of the more open reaches of water and close to the river’s edge. With their short machetes the Leccos cut some canes, unlashed our tentage from the platforms, and rigged a rough shelter. In the balmy air of the sunset there was no indication that it was needed, but during this season a tropical rain comes up with the suddenness of a breeze, and pitching a tent in a driving downpour in the darkness of perdition is no light pleasure. For themselves, the Leccos simply threw a matting of woven palm-leaves on the sand and their camp was made. The bank was lined with a fringe of driftwood, and Spanish cedar and mahogany made admirable fuel, and gave one at the same time a sense of wanton, extravagant luxury that the humbler cooking fires of our North never obtain. Presently little fires crackled into life along the playa while gathering around each were groups of Leccos in their loose, flapping, square shirts, or else stripped to the waist in the hot evening air, intent on the small pots of boiling rice, platanos, and chalona. Quickly the velvet darkness of the tropics fell, and the high lights flickered on naked skins; slowly the moon rose above the purple hills of the background, transforming the muddy surface of the swirling river into a shimmer of molten silver.

The smooth, sandy playa softened in the mellow light, while, in the foreground, the campfires threw in strong relief the easy play of naked muscles in the shifting groups of savage figures; beyond were other figures silhouetted against the night or merged with the bulk of the callapos, gently swaying at the river’s edge, to the low roar of the current. The subdued chatter of the Leccos, the crackling of the driftwood flames, the occasional cry of some morose tropical bird of the night, and once in a while the far-off, snarling howl of a jaguar in the hills beyond blended like the carefully studied tones of some painting, and the peace that passeth the understanding of cities descended.

The very pleasing moon also added to the enthusiasm of the sand fleas and sand-hoppers; diabolical out of all proportion to their physical capacity and by the aid of the fourth dimension triumphing over my netting, they made of sleep a periodic and exhausting labor.

I looked out and envied the impervious Leccos; half naked to the night they sprawled on their patches of palm matting and only awakened in response to an itching thirst and then prowled round to locate the extra ration. Somewhere back in the hills were the savages, the Chunchos and the Yungus, but they rarely come down to this river. It is too populous, according to their standards, and precautions against them are rarely needed. Farther on, when we got into the Rio Kaka and the Rio Beni, some care was essential; and it was necessary to camp on the largest sand bars and close to the water’s edge, where the camp could not be rushed in a sudden dash from the jungle.

The next morning, with the first faint trickle of dawn along the rim of purple hills, the camp was astir. A single fire was stirred into activity, and in the dim, gray light there was a hasty cup of tea and a raw platano, and again we waded aboard the callapo and swung out into the current. The cool gray-green of the early morning had faded to a delicate sapphire; the purple hills loomed nearer in the soft haze; above them shimmering waves of amethyst overspread half the skies. A faint glow as of soft coral flickered over the crests of a stray cloud, that, close after, flushed with the bolder brilliancy of the ruby and the topaz. There was no pause; one color after another, exquisite in its gorgeousness or delicacy, as though from the slowly opening door of a prismatic furnace—crimson, violet, deep-sea blues, and old-gold—shifted and coiled above the purple hills. A thread of silver tipped their crests and then, at their center, there was for an instant the gleam of molten gold, and a second more above the low morning mist there floated the glowing mass of the sun. The day had begun.

For hours we drifted down the swift current. Now and then a snake or perhaps an otter glided silently into the eddies as we drifted by. We seemed to move with intolerable slowness and yet when we watched the jungle on each side slipping by, we could see the speed—six, eight, and sometimes ten miles an hour. The sun rose higher; it beat down on the unsheltered callapo like the hot blast from a furnace; the animal sounds in the forests ceased; the faint morning airs died away, and nothing broke the stillness but the occasional shrill flocks of parrots. The muddy surface of the river turned to a heated brazen glare, and the long breakfastless hours of the forenoon crawled past.

Presently as we swung around a bend there appeared a tiny cane-walled hut surrounded by a few platano and yucca trees. Splashing in the river were naked little babies, and as our Leccos set up a shout a woman trotted down to the bank and waved back. We paddled out of the current and made a landing, while the young Lecco who had run the river on the bundle of sticks took on a sack of clean clothes.

The Leccos are very particular in these matters; each morning from out their home-woven cotton sacks they would don clean trousers and shirt, and at every opportunity, going up or down the river, they would stop and turn over to the Lecco wife the soiled ones and take aboard a clean supply. When a trip is too long for a complete outfit, they would get busy at each midday breakfast and wash their own. The sack they carried would hold about as much as a small keg, and it was always crowded to its capacity with their queer, square shirts and tight ankled trousers. Their only other baggage was a plate, a spoon, and a tiny kettle for rice. Clean clothes every day is a peculiar hobby for a primitive tribe.

This Lecco woman, or, rather, girl, who trotted down to the water’s edge was about sixteen, wore only a single long garment, a chula, that came to above the ankles and had no sleeves. Some forest flower was in her black hair, and she was a beauty, not by any of the savage standards alone or by the easy imagination that gives some youthful savages a certain attractiveness as a matter of pure contrast, but she was beautiful by any of those standards that obtain in our home countries. Along with her regular features, delicate nostrils, soft eyes, and regular, curving lips, with a soft, light-coppery, tawny complexion, so soft and light that the color came and went in her cheeks like a fresh-blown débutante, she had the carriage of a queen, though that was nothing to a race of women who carry burdens on their heads from babyhood and who can swim like otters. I saw later very many Lecco women, and while all were superior in type to those of the neighboring tribes, there was but one that could compare with the features of this first Lecco girl and the two might have been sisters, so close was the type of their beauty.

More Lecco homes appeared, and at each some one of the crew received his new stock of clean clothes and packed his pouch with them. Then Guanai appeared, or rather we stopped under the river bank close by, for the straggling collection of huts lies some distance back from the river. A few rubber-traders, half-breeds, and Cholos live here, and control the Leccos. Most of them, when I was there, were refugees from the other side of the Andes, and here are beyond the reach of the Bolivian authorities. Once in a while some one of them is caught and taken out in chains by the soldiers sent in for the special purpose, but as a rule that followed only as the result of internecine difficulty and resulting treachery.

The head man came down to the bank to meet us with his neck stiff and awkward in some home-made bandage. He was still half-drunk, but very hospitable. The night before, it seems, there had been a fight, and when the candles were stamped out in the little hut it became very confusing, he explained, hence the stab in the neck and somewhere a couple of men were nursing bullet-holes. We handed over the few letters from the Cholo at Mapiri, and he was eager to get news of La Paz and the outside world. For years he had lived here, a refugee from the law, and unmolested; some day he will meet with as sudden a death as he had often bestowed, and another head man will fill his uncertain shoes. A torn straw hat, cotton shirt, and Lecco trousers were his sole costume, and he hunts barefoot and runs the river as readily as any of the Lecco tribesmen.

Below Guanai the Rio Mapiri is reinforced by the Rio Coroico and the Rio Tipuani, clear, cold streams. All along little brooks and mountain torrents have also been adding to the volumes of our river, so that it had grown to a goodly size. Below this settlement of Guanai were the worst and most dangerous passages. Any of the rapids are bad, but they are less to be feared than the great whirlpools that form below each one of them. It is these remolinos that are more likely to catch the rafts and tear them apart. The rough water of the rapid can be watched, and the callapo can be kept head on in the current, but below there are no means of judging when a whirling vortex will form that will drag the callapo under and perhaps later throw it out farther down in scattered fragments.

For fifty miles the hills crowded in, and there were only rarely any open, slower reaches of river. Huge masses of rock had broken from above and hurled themselves into the gorges, where the current was choked in masses of high-flung spray. The Leccos know that on one certain side of these rocks there was disaster and with their heavy paddles they pried the raft in the proper currents. At first the water was smooth—smoother than in the broader reaches—but the banks moved past more swiftly, and from out of the water itself came a little rattling, crackling sound—the sound of boulders on the river-bed crashing together as they were swept down-stream. Then the surface of the river broke up in snapping little ripples, while under our feet there was the feel of the raft straining in the eddying thrust of the current. But it is these parts of the river that the Leccos fairly love; their eyes sparkled and they laughed and chattered with excitement.

Ahead there was a roaring smother of foam, which curled back in a crested wave; the paddles, with the callapo snouts as a fulcrum, swung the course to the right, and a second later there came a rush and a crash as a mass of boiling water climbed over the starboard cargo and we careened until the crew on the lower side were breast-deep in the smother. It was only for a second, and the raft drifted out among the eddying whirlpools that formed below. One, a fairly small one, caught us at the stern, and we were drawn under as if caught by a submarine claw; the waters rose to the breasts of the stern crew, while they, braced against their paddles, grinned back at us cheerfully. Then the vortex broke and very slowly the cargo rose dripping into view.

Every rapid, bend, or cataract in this part has its name, an honor denied the distances up the Mapiri of the day before. We passed the Conseli, and entered Kirkana—the spelling is phonetic—a magnified mountain brook that boiled through the tortuous passages for miles. There was not a mile that did not have its channel choked with rock, through which we shot in a smother of foam like a South Sea Islander on his surf-board. Then came a cañon, with walls of gray rock on which were stains or symbols that in a rough way suggested some of the old Inca forms, to which the Leccos have given the name of “Devil-Painted” rapids. Beyond lie the rapids of the “Bad Waters,” and then the Ysipuri Rapids, where there was a large rubber barraca in charge of an English superintendent.

The night’s camp was at Ysipuri, a rubber barraca that was complaining bitterly at the time that it was overstocked with marmalade and snakes. If you have never lived on marmalade for six months hand-running when transportation is practically cut off—and a cheap, tin-can marmalade made mainly for the calloused tongues of a half-breed trade at that—you do not know what real desolation in a rubber jungle is. Also it was the hatching season for snakes and there was never a day, even scarcely an hour, when a few feet or less of snake was not being untangled from the cane walled thatch of the house. Two were fished out of the kettles in the cook-shack as the Lecco lady-cook started to prepare the midday breakfast and even the ordinary security of a hammock was no guarantee against them. Rarely were they big, some were mere babies and others but adolescent boas; one of eight feet in length was killed, but this was an exception, for the general run were juveniles of from a few inches to two or three feet. Also eight feet was not a big snake, not in a country where you can hear tales of thirty and forty foot reptiles.

The chief in this barraca was a white man; he had a well kept place with its out-buildings and little Indian quarters laid out with some system. There was sweet corn, real sweet corn, and not the choclo of the Aymará, an unripe ear of common field corn; melons, yuccas, bananas, and the best attempt at a garden that could be made in a tropical jungle. Also, before dinner that evening a Lecco boy came in with a log of wood which he dumped in the cook house; with a machete he chopped it up—for firewood as I thought. Presently, at dinner there was a most delicious vegetable, hot and looking like cold-slaw or sourkrout. It was my old friend the log of wood, the bud of the cabbage palm chopped by a rubber picker somewhere out in the forest.

CHAPTER XV
SHOOTING THE RATAMA

At daybreak we left the Ysipuri barraca and emptying our rifles in salute to the Englishman’s Winchester, we started on for the next rapids, the greatest rapids on the river—the Ratama.

Two miles above the Ratama the walls of the gorge began to close in steep cliffs. Here and there shrubs clung on little niches, while from the high edges long vines hung down and were whipped taut in the swift, glassy current below. The air began to cool in the deep shadows, and there was a damp chill in it like the breath from a cavern. The Leccos were not chattering now, for this place may on any trip prove to be serious, and the silence of the smooth drifting was only broken by an occasional kingfisher, which clattered by like a flying watchman’s rattle.

Slowly a dull roaring, echoing from the distance, steadily obtruded itself; the current was still glassy, but as it moved it snapped against the walls of the cañon in angry ripples. Every Lecco in the crew was poised, with his paddle, as tense as a strung bow. Now we knew who was the captain of the crew. It was the forward Lecco on the right; he was the only one who had anything to say. It was no childish joking now; there were commands. Occasionally he grunted his order, and the paddles dipped as they held the raft true, bow on, in the middle of the current. With a grand sweep we swung round a bend between the walls of rock and there far ahead the white waves of the Ratama were snapping like great fangs against the dusk of the cañon, while above them hung a heavy mist that blurred the outlines of the gorge beyond.

The callapo increased its speed; the Ratama seemed to be springing toward us with each leaping wave; the roaring water deepened, and the voices were drowned. The Lecco captain dipped his paddle, and the rest followed the signal, and gently the callapo was held true, with the three upturned snouts headed straight for the foaming center. The cliffs had closed in like the walls of a corridor, and they flew past like the flickering film of a moving-picture; the spray from the trailing vines was whipped in our faces and floated upward to form rainbows in the slanting sunlight high overhead. Then for a second we seemed to pause on the edge of a long slide of polished water, the edge of the cataract.

The Leccos crouched for the shock, and we could fairly feel their toes gripping the submerged callapo logs, while their paddles were poised above their heads. Then came the brief coast down the smooth water and the plunge into the great wave that loomed above our heads, only to break with a drenching roar over us and the lashed freight. The Leccos dropped on their knees, gripping a hold as best they might; their eyes glittered with excitement, and I could see their wide-open mouths in a yell of wild joy, though every sound was drowned in the crash and roar of waters. The paddles swung in powerful circles, and at each dip the paddlers went out of sight, head and shoulders in the smother of foam.

The water was above my waist, and somewhere below the surface I was hanging on to the cargo lashings, with my feet braced against the logs. Under the boiling smother of foam I could feel the callapo writhe and twist in the strain; a keg broke loose, and a Lecco lost his paddle in recovering it. His paddle was of no consequence, for he could whittle another, and he fondly believed the keg held the beloved alcohol—cañassa—though he was wrong, for it held nothing but pickled beef, and worthless, as I later found.

Sometimes a Lecco’s shoulder would rise above the boiling smother, with the brown muscles playing in hard knots; sometimes we would slew side on to the current, and no power could hold us straight until a bursting wave would throw us back; sometimes for an instant the dripping snouts of the callapo would be flung high in the air and fall back with a crash that made itself heard above the roar, and the raft would quiver and strain with the impact. One saw nothing; we might have been standing still. There was nothing but the lashing sting of the whirling spray and the thunder of the cataract. Then, in an instant, the roar and the tumult were behind, the waves calmed, and the callapo shot out into the calmer waters below, where the whirlpools and eddies shifted and coiled.

Vortices into which one might lower a barrel without wetting it whirled lazily past within paddle-reach, and sometimes one would suddenly form ahead and the Leccos would watch them intently as to their possible direction, and then paddle to shift our course. These they can generally avoid. It is when one forms or suddenly comes up from underneath that there is danger. A few did catch us this way and the Leccos would stand with braced feet, reading by the straining logs the possible strength of the vortex, and the callapo would grind and slowly sink, until by sheer mass it broke the force of the whirl. Often we would go down by the stern until the after Leccos kept only their heads above water, and even we, farther forward, would be submerged up to our shoulders. There was nothing to do but wait until the vortex broke of itself.

In the Ratama the roar and excitement drowned any emotion, but this was slowly waiting in uncertainty and speculating on how far one could really swim before being drawn under like a chip. Not far, that was certain, and the Leccos watched this shifting, coiling passage in a silent gravity that they had shown nowhere else on the river. It is the breaking up of the logs and cargo that make the danger, at least to the Lecco—greater than the power of the river itself—and a white man would have no chance.

From the Ratama the river and the country back of it opened out, and the last of the eastern Andean foot-hills were almost passed. A few more rapids were left—the Nube, the Incaguarra, the Beyo, and the Bala—but after the Ratama they dwindled to harmless riffles. The Beyo Cañons resound with a deafening roar, but it is from the thousands of macaws that have their nests in the soft sandstone cliffs, and it is their clatter that carries for miles in the soft evening airs.

Presently the chief of the Lecco crew chattered with the others. They argued each according to his recollection, for down somewhere on this stretch of the river—it was the River Kaka now since being joined by the River Tipuani and the Coroico River, mountain torrents both—there was an old camp that was our objective. The jungle had long since wiped out every trace and there was nothing to depend upon but the memory of the Leccos. As a matter of fact, there probably is nothing that could be more reliable; it is the one thing they know, is this river, and every turn, every eddy, every tree or drooping vine along the banks is marked down in their primitive minds with the vividness of painted signs. The callapos strung out each in the wake of the other drifting around a long turn of smooth, swift water. The chief grunted, the crew clattered and grunted back in obvious affirmation. The paddles dipped, and from the following callapos came a yell as they, too, began to splash and pry their way out of the current. One after the other they swung round and bumped into shallow water on the heavy gravel of a playa; beyond rose a steep bank overgrown with masses of creeper and jungle.

The Leccos chopped a way in with their machetes, and with a grunt a Lecco announced a find. There was a tent peg, a broken kettle, a broken bottle neck, and a bit of rope. It was the proof of the site of the previous camp in its exact location. Five minutes later the lashings were off the freight and a splashing line of Indians and Cholos were bringing the freight ashore. Here was to be established the permanent camp; the long journey from the coast had reached its goal.

The Leccos and the Cholo workmen were still splashing through the muddy shallows from the grounded callapos packing the freight for the camp when Agamemnon announced himself as cook. Before this moment he had idly occupied himself as valet, butler, laundress—at least since leaving La Paz—faithful adviser, major domo, village gossip, and occasionally the village drunkard. And now when he announced himself as cook no husk of humility could conceal the fact that he regarded all other cook possibilities in that camp on the Rio Kaka with a scornful contempt.

Later it developed that at this particular time his sole knowledge of cooking was confined to an ability to make guava jelly, an accomplishment which, in view of the fact that we were somewhere around five hundred miles by trail and raft from civilization, was of no service at the moment.

The difficulty over the cook situation had arisen suddenly in the first hour of making camp. Back in Mapiri there was a certain fat little Cholo who had sewed a strip of red flannel down his trouser legs in sign of the fact that under some circumstances he was the Mapiri police force; what these circumstances might be never developed for during our long wait he was busy at nothing more official than taking care of the sugar-cane distillery that belonged to the intendente. Before that, rumor had it, he had taught school in Guanai down the river with a row of empty cañassa bottles by means of which he illustrated addition and subtraction. This was as far as the school went; with that course completed, it issued its diploma. This little Cholo urged himself as cook and, as we needed a cook, he was added. As it turned out he was probably the only man in Bolivia who could not cook, or at any rate the only one who had never passed the stage of being able to boil water.

When the callapos swung in to the playa and grounded on the shallow beach the cook started to get his first meal. The water was brought to a boil successfully in a large kettle between two logs. Presently it began to exude half-cooked rice and cheerfully the fat Cholo added another kettle to hold the overflow. Presently, also, both kettles began to exude half-cooked rice and two more kettles were added to the logs. Once again the pots seethed and frothed and again came forth the overflow of half-cooked rice, still swelling, from four interminable geysers.

Dully the Cholo beat at it with an iron spoon and the Leccos grinned at him as they filled their little pots with the overflow. Heaven alone knows how much rice the cook started with, but in the end half the fire was drowned out, every Lecco had his little pot of half raw rice, a row of big jungle leaves had each their little mound of rice alongside the fire log, and the hot tropic air was drifting sluggishly with the odor of burnt rice. And every pot and kettle in camp held remnants of the salvage. Therefore, it was that Agamemnon became cook.