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.
[Illustration: WE SEEMED TO MOVE WITH INTOLERABLE SLOWNESS.]
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.
[Illustration: BUT IT IS THOSE PARTS OF THE RIVER THAT THE LECCOS FAIRLY
LOVE.]
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.
[Illustration: A RUBBER PICKER.]
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.