OUT OF LA PAZ BY PACK TRAIN
Here in La Paz were completed the final arrangements for reaching the
interior; this was the last of the easy traveling, from now on it would
be by pack train and saddle, raft and canoe, and to gather them we
advanced from one interior town to another as best we might. It was the
third and last of the Andean series that was to be crossed, and it was
also the highest and hardest. Daily we haggled with arrieros over pack
mules or rode to their corrals in the precipitous suburbs of the city
and between times there were the odds and ends of a big outfit to be
filled in and the commissary to be stocked. It was the last place where
the little things of civilization could be procured, for there was but
one more real settlement, Sorata over the first pass, that could be
counted upon for anything that had been overlooked. And then one day it
appeared as though we were complete.
[Illustration: HAGGLED WITH ARRIEROS OVER PACK MULES.]
The arriero came around and weighed the cargo and divided it in rawhide
nets, equally balanced, according to each individual mule's capacity and
then even before daybreak on the following morning we were off.
It seemed like midnight. The dead, still blackness of the night, with
the lighter crevice of gloom that marked the dividing-line between the
curtains at the window gave no indication of dawn, and only the echo of
the little tin alarm-clock, with its hands irritatingly pointing to the
hour of necessity, indicated that at last the time was at hand for the
actual entry into the vague interior of South America. A thin tallow
candle glimmered in the high-ceilinged room and illumed flickering
patches between the areas of cold, uncertain darkness, and by its light
I scrambled into breeches, puttees, and spurs, and buckled my gun under
my heavy, wool-lined jacket. Down in the patio I could hear an Aymará
scuffling about in his rawhide sandals, and as I stepped out on the
balcony above the patio, a thin drift of acrid smoke floated up from
where he was cooking our tin of coffee over a clay fire-pot with llama
dung for fuel.
Below my window, up from the narrow street there came the shuffling
noises of the pack-train--the creak of rawhide cinches, the thud and
strain of the packs as they came in restless collision and now and again
the "Hola! hola!" or "Huish!" of an arriero or more often the long-drawn
hiss of a rawhide thong. Then the pack-train lengthened in file, and the
noise died away up the crooked, narrow street. The few final necessities
of the trail I jammed in my saddle-bag as the last mule was packed; then
had a cup of coffee, steaming hot, although only comfortably warm to the
taste from the low-boiling point of the high altitude, and we climbed
into the saddle and were off.
The city of La Paz was still in darkness, but above the rim of the great
crack in the depths of which it rests there was a suggestion of a silver
haze that dimmed the stars. The streets were deserted except for an
occasional scavenger pig grunting restlessly on its way. Sometimes a
little Bolivian policeman, in heavy coat and cape, and muffled to the
eyes in a woolen tippet, would peer sleepily from the shelter of a great
Spanish doorway, and then, observing our solemn respectability, sink
back into the comfortable shadow. By the time we had rejoined the main
body of the pack-train we were in the shabbier outskirts of La Paz,
where the Aymarás and the Cholos--the latter the half-breed relatives of
the former--live in their squalid mud-brick hovels.
[Illustration: Prisoners Along the Trail up from La Paz]
The streets were wider now, in fact they were nothing but a series of
ragged gullies, along whose dry banks straggled the grimy dwellings.
Always, in some of them, there is a _fiesta_ of some kind, a birth, a
wedding, a death, a special church celebration, or perhaps some
pantheistic festival that still lingers in their dulled history and has
prudently merged itself with the piously ordained occasions. The orgy of
the night is past, yet from here and there come the feeble tootings of a
drunken flute, an instrument that every Aymará seems to be able to play
as a birthright, whose mournful and monotonous strains drift through the
thin air from some less stupefied celebrant.
The Aymará love of their primitive music is very strong; it is universal
among them and, while their primitive flute, pandean pipe and crude drum
interpret the joy ordinarily, yet they take cheerfully to any new form
of musical instrument, and in some miraculous way learn, in time, to
produce the same series of ragged, droning sounds. The accordion,
concertina and mouth organ are much beloved and once I even heard a
self-taught Aymará band of brass horns, cornet, tenor horn, bass, and a
slide and key trombone, playing the Aymará airs with their own home-made
orchestration. The government bandmaster had drilled a large military
band that used to give concerts twice a week in the plaza and there was
not an approach to a white man in the outfit, it was composed wholly of
Cholos and Aymarás from the little boy drummers to the great horns that
curled like a blanket-roll over the shoulder.
Rapidly the first silver of the morning deepened to richer tints and
glowed above the purple silhouette of the rim of the great gorge, while
Illimani, the perpetually snow-capped mountain that overshadowed La Paz,
burst into splendid prismatic bloom as the first direct rays of the sun
shimmered over its slopes and ice peaks; below, the gorge and the city
slowly lightened and glimmered in detail through the frosty, early
morning mists. The thin bitter air of the night was gone; it was cold
still, but the thin high air held in some indefinable way the promise of
a seductive warmth.
The long line of pack mules climbed steadily upward; the rambling,
hovel-lined streets were gone and only now and then we passed a little
mud hut with its one door as the sole aperture, the headquarters of the
tiny Aymará truck farm. The acrid smoke from their cooking-fire leaked
through the blackened roof and rose in little spirals straight up
through the still air, while the members of the household squatted in
the chill sun, muffled to the eyes in ponchos and with woolen cap and
superimposed hat drawn down to meet the mufflings, squatted in the
chilly sunlight. They muffle themselves in this way at the slightest
suggestion of chill in the air; but from the thighs down they are
indifferent to cold or storm. It makes no difference if they are in a
blizzard blowing over one of the high Andean passes, they will trudge
along with legs bare to above the knees, but with heads and throats
muffled deep in woolens. I have seen them make a camp in a driving
snow-storm and go peacefully to sleep with their heads carefully
enshrouded, and awake at daybreak none the worse for the experience,
though their bare legs were drifted over with snow and their sandals
stiffened with ice.
Along the road that climbed up the side of the great crack in the high
plateau that formed the valley of La Paz, little groups of Aymarás who
had camped there during the night were packing their trains of llamas
and burros for the last short distance in to the La Paz markets. Often,
without taking the trouble to cook, they would gnaw on a piece of raw
chalona--the split carcass of a sheep dried in the sun and cold of the
high plateaus--which has about as much flavor as an old buggy whip.
Sometimes they ate parched corn or _chuño_--the latter the native
potato, shrunken and small after the drying in the high air in the same
treatment as the chalona receives--and tasting very much like a cork
bottle stopper. But always they chewed _coca_, the leaf that furnishes
cocaine. Leaf by leaf they would stow it away, and add a little ashes
and oil scraped out of a pouch with a needle of bone. Among the older
Aymarás, the cheek frequently has developed a sagging pouch from the
years of distention with _coca_. Aside from that, it seems to have no
effect upon them.
The Aymará pack-trains of burros would pass us with indifference, half
hidden in great sheaves of _cebada_--barley--or with chickens slung in
ponchos on either side and with only their heads visible and swaying in
time to the gait of the burro. But the llamas would go mincing past,
crowding as far as possible against the other side of the road with an
obvious assumption of fright. Their slitted nostrils would twitch and
their slender ears wiggle in an agony of nervousness, while their eyes,
the most beautiful, pleading, liquid eyes in the animal world would be
humid with hysterical fear. Yet from their infancy they have seen men
and horses, pack-trains, and all the travel of the mountains and
plateaus. But the apparent gentleness of the llama is purely
superficial; for it can spit with unpleasant accuracy to repel a frontal
approach, while its rear and flanks are guarded by padded feet that are
vicious in their power and uncertainty. To the Aymará the llama is
transportation, food, wool, and fuel. An Aymará child can do anything
with a llama, and with nothing more than her shrill little voice; but in
the presence of a white man it is a creature of hysterical and timid
peevishness.
[Illustration: AYMARÁ DRIVER OF PACK LLAMAS.]
[Illustration: MEMBERS OF A GANG OF PRISONERS.]
As we filed by these pack-trains, the Aymará driver would remove his
native hat of coarse felt, leaving the head still covered by his gay,
woolen nightcap with its flapping ear-tabs, and murmur a respectful
"_Tata!_" to which we would politely return a "_Buenos dias, tata,_"
unless the driver happened to be a woman, in which case we would
substitute the corresponding "_Mama_" for the "_Tata_." The women would
plod along barefooted while they spun yarn from a bundle of dirty, raw
wool held under one arm. As the yarn was spun, it was gathered on a
top-like distaff dangling at the end of the woolen thread. In some
miraculous way it was never permitted to lose its spinning twirl, and at
the right moment always absorbed the additional thread, so that it never
was permitted to drag along the trail. At her little home somewhere on
the inter-Andean plateau, she will afterwards dye the wool and knit one
of those night-caps or weave a poncho, according to some rough tribal
pattern, so tight that it will shed water as well as a London raincoat.
Her loom will be two logs laid on the ground, on which the warp is
stretched; the shuttle will be carved from the bone of a sheep, and the
threads will be beaten into place with the sharpened shin-bone of a
sheep. Weeks may be spent in the patient weaving. Whether she is on the
trail or is weaving, she has usually a pudgy, expressionless baby of a
tarnished copper color held in the fold of the poncho that is knotted
across her shoulders. Sometimes a prosperous Aymará gentleman, with his
pack animals, passed us and then he was apt to be accompanied by several
Aymará women and their assortment of tarnished copper babies, the women
being his wives, who assist in the heavier work of driving and packing
with complaisant domestic affection.
This road up from the great, raw gulch of La Paz was full of life;
pack-train after pack-train passed, loaded with the daily supplies for
that city. All of the trails of the high plateau above converge to feed
it and it broadens out into a real road, no longer a trail, under the
needs of the heavier traffic. A group of sandaled soldiers was
apparently detailed to act as road-masters; and they would stop the
Aymarás and enforce a bit of labor in aid of the gang of prisoners under
their guard. The instant dull and sullen submission of the Indians at
once indicated their position in the Bolivian scale.
[Illustration: THE GUARD FOR THE ROAD MENDERS.]
Steadily during the early morning hours we climbed, until the rim of the
high plateau itself was only a short distance ahead. Worn through the
rim by generations of plodding hoofs was a crooked trail, so narrow that
the mules bumped and scrabbled along, and we emerged, as through a
trap-door, out on the endless distances of the vast inter-Andean
plateau. Below, losing itself in the distant haze, stretched the ragged
crack that made the valley of La Paz and miles away, quivering in the
slowly warming air, was the city itself, a tiny clutter of gaudy houses
and red-tiled roofs, with the brilliant green of the little park making
a sharp contrast in color. Elsewhere the slopes of the valley were as
destitute of verdure as when they were blown into existence by the
terrific forces of primeval nature. Yet in this desert barrenness there
was no lack of color; in the cool of the morning the shadows were soft
in every delicate variation of purple and amethyst; the bare soil and
the jagged slopes blended and shifted in ochers and vermilions, in
golden tints and copper hues and, scattered here and there, were little
patches of greens where some little, irrigated Aymará truck-farm was
breaking into the world against the moist chocolate-colored soil.
Beyond--and in their immensity there was no suggestion of their great
distance--rose the jagged fangs of the last and most interior range of
the Andes, with their black cliffs and scarred flanks disappearing under
the everlasting mantles of snow; over all, was the clear, shimmering
turquoise heaven of the high altitudes.
[Illustration: WHILE RODRIGUEZ AND HIS CHOLO HELPERS TIGHTENED THE
RAWHIDE CINCHES AND REPLACED THE PACKS.]
Down in that valley were the little cafés, the little shops with
imported trinkets, the plaza Sunday afternoons with the band and the
parading élite and all the little functions of civilization, yet this
city is fairly balanced on the edge of the frontier, while beyond were
the high passes and the vague interior of South America, the last of the
great primitive domains, where men still exist by means of bow and arrow
or stone club, and where the ethical right and the physical ability to
survive are yet indistinguishable.
From this edge of the plateau the narrow trails run in all directions
like the sticks of a fan. Trained from many previous trips, the
pack-animals halted or wandered aside, nibbling at the tufts of dry
bunch-grass, while Rodriguez and his two Cholo helpers tightened the
rawhide cinches and replaced the packs that had shifted in the long
climb and scramble through the narrow gully. Then, with the bell on the
leading pack-animal tinkling monotonously, began the steady plodding in
single file along one of the furrowed trails.