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.
[Illustration: BLIZZARDS BLOWING OVER THE ANDEAN PASSES.]
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.
[Illustration: SOLDERING THE FOOD IN TIN CANS.]
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.
[Illustration: SCATTERED IN HYSTERICAL FLIGHT UP AND DOWN THE
PRECIPITOUS SLOPES.]
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.
[Illustration: SKIRTED THE BASE OF AN UNBROKEN CLIFF.]
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.