BACK HOME
More difficulty developed when I, in an amiable frame of mind bought a
chance in a watch from a Sorata man, for when a man moves from a village
he raffles off all his household goods and his own and his wife's
jewelry. This raffle was made famous by the fact that I won something. I
won the watch; and the next morning was arrested by the intendente on
the complaint of a thrifty Soratañian that the whole machinery of the
raffle had been undermined and debauched, and Bolivia dishonored in
order that the dice might give me this marvelous watch. The watch, by
the way--I will keep it for years as proof that I am Fortune's
favorite--_did_ strongly resemble gold in a dim light and when wound
would tick for quite a while, but in its general aspect was on the order
of those given as a premium with two cakes of scented soap for a quarter
by the slick corner spieler of a gang of pickpockets.
At last we were to start the next day over the pass to Mapiri with our
outfit and men. The surly American with his ever-present extraordinarily
long barrel Colt sent a messenger to me to announce that his home
office, easy chair, contract on the Mapiri River happened to cover all
of the available balsas and callapos and that I could not use any.
Presently we met in the plaza and he remarked with a suggestive
emphasis, "You got my message about my callapos?" I replied briefly that
I had and that I would act as my judgment dictated when I arrived in
Mapiri. "Very well," he said suggestively; "then you know the
consequences and can take them."
That night a friend came to our party with the information that this man
had shipped in to his barraca recently some dozen Winchesters and
considerable ammunition and that he was arranging to ship more. That
gave their barraca some twenty-six rifles--a pretty heavy armament for
merely a peaceful rubber company. His ignorance of the country and his
truculent vanity and the carelessness with which he talked "fight,"
drunk or sober, made it a matter of no little concern. And he neither
knew nor respected the rights and customs of river travel, although he
attempted to dictate them.
Like many patriots he was willing to fight as long as he could hire his
fighting done for him--an absentee bravo.
We bought four Mausers and a thousand rounds of ammunition and started
back to our camp, with five white men and some thirty-five Cholo workmen
and three pack-trains of supplies.
Once again we climbed sleepily into the saddles at daybreak and began
crawling up to the final pass over this third and last great range of
the Andes. The first night's camp was hardly below the snow line in a
little sheltered cove on the mountain flank; the next morning a slippery
climb in a blizzard that coated every mule in ice as though with armor
brought us to a ragged, narrow cleft in a long fin of rock through which
we passed as through a gateway. It was the summit of the pass. There was
on the farther side the usual votive cairn of stones built by the
Aymarás with the twig cross at its apex while, leaning against the fin
of protruding rock as far as the eyes could penetrate the blizzard, were
narrow, spear-head pieces of shale placed on end as further efforts in
worship or propitiation of the great god of the mountain.
From the pass the trail dropped a trifle and we crowded for that night
into the tambo in Yngenio. They were a surly lot and viewing with a
hostile suspicion--doubtless with causes inherited from the remote past
of the conquistadores--any outfit of wayfarers.
Again followed a day of sleet and snow-squall with an occasional rift in
the clouds when, thousands of feet below, could be seen the soft greens
and the waving palms of inviting tropical warmth and dryness. The narrow
trail zigzagged up the bare mountain steeps, followed for a distance the
wanderings of the crest, and then dropped in another series of zigzags
to lower levels. For hours there was this constant rise and fall. In a
cold rain we camped in a stone hut, Tolopampa, a place that has the
reputation of perpetual mud and rain where the skull of some deserted
Aymará packer still kicked around in the cold mud outside.
And then at daybreak began the drop into the warmer zones where there
was sunlight and a riot of tropical color. For two days it was one
unbroken descent while the back grew weary and exhausted leaning against
the cantle and the stirrups interfered with the mule's waggling ears.
The clayey mud of the wallowing trails rose up and wrapped us in its
welcome until boot-lacings, spur and puttee buckles blended in
shapeless, indistinguishable masses. And then, five days after leaving
Sorata, we plodded into the straggling line of palm thatched huts that
is credited on Bolivian maps with being the town of Mapiri. For two days
the mules were rested while the arrieros passed the time in keeping
mildly drunk. Below the high bank on which the town stood, the River
Mapiri boiled past in muddy eddies; here in a cane hut we camped and
oiled and packed the saddles; from now on it would be rafts, callapos,
until we again reached the main camp.
In Mapiri the callapos were waiting and we embarked. One camp on a sand
bar, one camp in Guanai and the next day we shot more rapids and came
into the country of the truculent one with the long barreled Colt. The
barraca lay just around the bend where the river broke in some small
rapids and then saved itself in miles of smoothly coiling eddies for the
grand smother of the Ratama. It was here at this chief barraca of his
company that there might be trouble--we had been warned that if we
attempted to round this bend in any unapproved, uncensored callapos we
would be fired on. The four Mausers had been issued and the case of
ammunition unscrewed. There were four callapos with the white men on the
one in the lead. It was rather exciting, this uncertainty, but it was
accompanied by the invariably clammy spinal undulations and the strong
desire that I was somewhere else or that what that jungled river bed
held for us was an incident of the past rather than of this imminence.
As though casually the freight had been loaded on the callapo platforms
so that it made an informal breastwork and quite as informally we loafed
behind it. And then the callapos drifted silently around the bend--we
had not fired the salute that is ordinarily made when approaching a
barraca at which one is going to stop and call--and the clearing with
its collections of huts and palm thatched roofs broke into view. A
little figure scuttled across the clearing and disappeared. The edge of
the clearing on the bank was within a stone's throw and not a sound
broke the stillness. A word to the Leccos and their heavy paddles began
working us over to the bank where a little path ran down to the water's
edge. If the two camps were in for a frontier war, a feud, it might as
well be found out at once. Before there had been only the threats of a
foolish man--here was the place and here were the men under his control.
How far would they back his stupidities?
In single file we climbed the steep path to the clearing; at the top the
head man came forward cordially.
"What's this about firing on us as we came around the bend--you getting
in Winchesters by the crate?"
He laughed cheerfully:
"Oh, phut! If it amuses that old fool outside to send them in I don't
mind, but if he wants to start any fighting let him come on in and do it
himself."
We told him of the rumors and the threats that came from Sorata.
"Sure, I know," he said; "that old cuss didn't do much else but talk
fight with me when I was out; how many rifles, how we're going to run
things--you know him--and I'll bet he's never heard anything more than a
firecracker go off in his life. He'd fire me if he thought I had you at
my table. Bring up the hammocks and come on into grub!"
And so like most other really serious things it faded away on a close
approach. But it had held all of the serious elements.
The next morning we swung out into the river and again shot the rapids
of the Ratama and drifted out where the whirlpools drew the callapos
under neck-deep. As we approached the site of our camp we turned loose
the rifles and shortly came the answering pop of guns. The callapos
grounded on the shallows at the foot of the bank, the old Cholo workmen
swarmed around the new comers and waded ashore with the new freight.
Where we had left the beginnings of a palm thatched roof was a long
bunk-house; a patch of young platanos was opening its long leaves with
its promise of our own base of supplies; a hen clucked around with one
lone chick--the rest having succumbed to snakes--the result of some
trading with the cacique; under a palm thatch there drifted the blue
wisps of smoke from a bank of charcoal burning and a well defined trail
stretched through the jungle to a clearing farther down where the placer
workings would be finally located.
It was like the Swiss family Robinson--it was coming home. The Cholo
with the one silver eye, the drunken shoemaker with the scalloped scar,
and all the others crowded around and chattered in a happy excitement.
The proper native custom is to celebrate so according to formula a tin
of alcohol was ordered for the night and the workmen decked themselves
with leaves and shuffled round in what passes for a dance until
exhausted. The next day the time expired ones started up-river with the
callapos.
It had been five months since I left the camp and we began that slow,
heart-breaking struggle against the current. It was with all the
feelings of having at last reached my restful home that I turned into my
hammock that night. Rapidly the camp grew under the influx of the new
men; the song of the whip-saw rose in the forest and long clean timbers
began piling themselves along the trail; now and again the roar of some
huge tree shook the air as it mowed a swath of jungle in its fall; a
tiny store was opened and now and again Leccos came to trade--out from
the original jungle of the year before had come a tiny, fragmentary
community hanging on to the frontier.
And three weeks later I started on a callapo down the river to cross the
interior basin of South America, over the Falls of the Madeira and then
down the Amazon and to London. Two days and two night camps with a
callapo and a crew of Leccos and one forenoon we drifted and scraped on
the gravel beach of Rurrenabaque. Here was the last touch of a town, or
of a straggling settlement that I would sleep in for many days.