OVER THE ANDES TO CHILE
It was with keen regret that I cut myself off from Uncle Sam’s modest
bounty when the time came to set out on a journey that was to carry me
outside the Argentine and beyond the jurisdiction of our overworked
consulate. But with a handful of gold sovereigns to show for my
exertions in running errands and eluding _Porteño_ prices, the day
seemed at hand for continuing my intensive tour of South America. The
“International,” of the “Buenos Aires al Pacífico” leaves the capital
three times a week on what purports to be a trip clear across the
continent. In spirit its assertion is truthful, for though the
“International” itself halts where the Argentine begins to tilt up into
the Andes, other trains connect with it and one can, with good luck and
ample wealth, reach Santiago de Chile, or Valparaiso on the Pacific,
thirty-six hours after bidding the _Porteños_ farewell.
On a crisp May morning I set out westward from “B.A.,” lying featureless
and yellow-white in the brilliant early-winter sunshine, not a church
spire, scarcely a factory chimney, though many unsightly American
windmills, rising above its monotonous level. The heavy “limited” train
made scarcely half a dozen stops all day, though no extraordinary speed.
At the rare stations a few passengers hastened to enter or leave the
cars; between them trees and windmills rose or receded hull-down over
the horizon of the dreary pampas. Outside each uninspiring town was an
ostentatious city of the dead; in the sodden fields were flocks of
sheep, cattle, and horses, fat as barrels, some snorting away at sight
of the train, others gazing disdainfully after it. In many places the
pampa was flooded, sometimes for miles, the shallow temporary lakes
dotted with wild ducks, the roads mere rivers of mud, with only the tops
of the fence-posts out of water, in which dismal looking animals were
huddled up to their bellies, or crowded together on little muddy
islands. Many mud houses were half under water, their thatched roofs and
adobe walls turned into velvety green lawns; hay-stacks had grown
verdant with sprouting grass; several pairs of horses dragging along the
churned roads a load of baled alfalfa was one of the rare signs of
activity. Even the _ñandúes_ seemed to have fled to some modern Ararat.
[Illustration: A woman of Córdoba, _mate_ bowl in hand]
[Illustration: Even a lady would not look unladylike in the _bombachas_
of southeastern South America]
[Illustration: The highway over the Andes into Chile was filled with
snow]
[Illustration: A bit of the transandean highway in the wintry month of
May]
Farther west the country was somewhat drier, or at least more often
above water. Here the vast pampa was divided by wire fences, producing
the illusion of an immense cobweb, broken only rarely by a dense blue
grove of eucalyptus trees planted about the central house of an enormous
_estancia_, estates in most cases too large for the economic health of
the country. Up to recent years the great mistake of the Argentine
government was to grant mammoth tracts of land to men who quickly became
so wealthy that they moved to private palaces in the capital, leaving
little or nothing for the homesteads of what might be a host of
productive freehold farmers. The railway company is striving to get
these huge estates broken up, encouraging colonization by offering
prizes for the best crops along its lines, as well as special
inducements of transportation. For much of the region through which the
“Buenos Aires al Pacífico” runs is so thinly populated that, as in some
of our western states, the common carrier is forced to help produce
something to carry. But the big landed proprietors have a Spanish pride
in the size of their holdings, and with it an abhorrence not only of
manual labor but even of living on their estates, from which the income
is large enough for their comfort under the poorest systems of farming,
or mere grazing, and it is not easy to induce them to sell even those
portions lying wholly idle. The company has various ways of combatting
this attitude. The most common is to build stations only where wealthy
_estancieros_ donate not merely the land needed for immediate use, but
room for future railroad development and sometimes for the building of a
village and the beginning of more intensive agriculture about it.
A few of these have developed into true frontier towns, with enormously
wide mud streets and electric lights, stretching far out into the
country, as if the inhabitants expected to wake up any morning and find
the place trebled in population. They were like a country without a
history,—prosperous, contented—and uninteresting. There being almost no
stone or wood all the way from the Córdoba hills to Tierra del Fuego, it
was not strange that the majority even of town houses were made of the
only material at hand, mud, as the Esquimaux build of snow and ice; yet
the most dismal of these structures were by no means the comfortless
dens of the Indians and _cholos_ of the Andes. It was Sunday, and
especially on that day is it the custom in the smaller provincial towns
to _hacer el corso_, to parade back and forth, at the station at
train-time. Groups of comely girls, well dressed for such districts,
powdered and perfumed, with flowers in their hair, their arms
interlocked, were not content to display their charms to their rustic
fellow-townsmen outside the station barriers, but invaded the platforms
and strolled from end to end of the train as long as it remained. As
attractive members of the fair sex are never without their attendant
groups of admirers in South America, the latter increased the platform
throng to a point where it was a lucky traveler who could find room to
descend and make his way across it.
For long distances there were almost no signs of animate life except
occasional flocks of _ñandúes_ cantering away like awkward schoolgirls.
About every _boliche_, country store and liquor shop, were groups of
shaggy pampa ponies and their no less shaggy riders, the animals
prevented from deserting their owners by rawhide thongs binding their
front feet together. _Bombachas_, the bloomer-like nether garments of
the pampas, were much in evidence among these modern _gauchos_. A few of
these, no doubt, were independent farmers; the majority were plainly
hired men whose greatest likeness to the hardy part-Indian cowboys of a
generation ago is the ability to absorb some five pounds of meat a day,
washing it down with copious draughts of boiling _mate_. Vegetables are
as little grown in the Argentine as in most of South America, and the
employees, only the _mayordomos_ and the pen-driving class missing, who
gather daily about the _asado_ provided by the _estanciero_, still live
almost entirely on meat, with occasionally a few hardtack _galletas_
from these pampa stores. Boys of seven or eight, with true _gaucho_
blood in their veins, who sat their horses as if they were part of them,
galloped about some of these smaller towns, _boleando_ cats and dogs
with astonishing skill. At the more important crossings an old man or
woman, sometimes a little girl, stood waving as solemnly as if the whole
future of the railroad depended upon them the black-and-yellow flag that
means “all safe” to Argentine trainmen. Country policemen were almost
numerous, riding along the miserable roads or dismounted at the
stations, covered with dust or mud and mingling with the hardy,
independent countrymen. The rural Argentine police still have a far from
enviable reputation, though they no longer tyrannize over the new style
of _argentino_ as they once did over the bold but unsophisticated
_gaucho_ of the “Martín Fierro” type. Yet on the whole they were not a
body of men to inspire confidence. One felt at a glance that, far from
trusting to their protection, it would be better to have someone else
along in the more lonely sections of the country to protect one from the
police.
Mendoza, metropolis of western Argentine and capital of the province of
the same name, lies at the very base of the Andes, six hundred miles
inland from Buenos Aires and barely one fourth as far from the Pacific,
though with the mighty Andean wall intervening. Built on plentiful flat
ground in what is sometimes called the “Argentine California,” the city
is laid out in wide checkerboard streets, some of them shaded by rows of
magnificent trees of abundant foliage. Each street is bordered with
ditches made of mosaics of small cobbles, for the torrents that pour
down from the Andes at certain seasons are worthy of man’s attention,
and though the town is not tropical, banana, acacia, and mulberry trees
bathe their feet in these intermittent streams and take on an
extraordinary vigor. The central section has a number of modern business
buildings, but the dwellings are nearly all still in the old Spanish
style, often large houses, but capacious chiefly in depth, so that one
only half suspects the several flowery patios they inclose. Few
buildings are of more than one story, and even the stylish habitations,
with columned façades and _corredores_ paved with colored marble
_dalles_, are made of mud baked with straw and lime. For Mendoza still
remembers the days, sixty years ago, when an earthquake destroyed the
entire town, burying nearly the whole population of ten thousand in the
ruins. Nothing remains now of the old town except the ruins of a church
or two that are preserved as historical souvenirs and warnings against
high buildings, mere masses of bricks standing like monoliths on the
summits of walls that seem ever ready to fall down and on which a bush
or a plant has here and there taken root; yet the _mendocinos_ are only
beginning to put their faith in reinforced concrete. Many of the houses
are smeared pink, saffron, blue, or other bright color, and when it
rains the mud roofs run down over the façades, streaking the colors or
washing them out to a leprous gray.
Being almost entirely a one-story town, and retaining the Moorish style
of architecture, even the hotels of Mendoza have no windows on the
streets, the only openings to the rooms being the door on the patio, so
that the guest who needs a bit of light must disclose to servants and
fellow-clients all his domestic activities; and to reach the bathroom,
if there is one, means parading the entire length of the courtyard.
Sidewalk cafés are thronged even on “winter” evenings; as elsewhere in
the Argentine, every workingman’s restaurant has its _cancha de bochas_,
a kind of earth-floored bowling-alley native to rural Italy. There are
electric street-cars, and the electric lights, outdoors and in, outdo
our own in size and brilliancy. While the English own the important
Argentine railroads, Germans hold most of the concessions for electric
light and power in the provincial towns, and Mendoza is no exception to
this rule.
The modern _argentino_ is not only a transplanted European, but in most
cases has come over within the past century. Only Caucasian immigration
is welcome, no negroes and none of the yellow races being admitted. As
in Buenos Aires, there is in the capital of each province an immigration
bureau, with attendants speaking the principal tongues of Europe, which
strives to place the newcomer to his and the country’s advantage. Thus
there is a decidedly European atmosphere even in towns as far back in
the depths of America as Mendoza, one that all but obliterates the
purely American aspect. The city retains a suggestion of Spanish
colonial days, but the native _bombachas_ are no more familiar sights
than the Basque cap of the Pyrenees and the hemp-sole sandals, the short
blouse with wide sash of contrasting color, and the clean-shaven
features of the hardy Spanish peasant and _arriero_.
Like several of the more important cities far distant from the federal
capital, Mendoza enjoys a certain local autonomy, though the prevailing
political party in the Argentine advocates a strongly centralized
government more nearly like that of France than that in the United
States. The province prints its own small money, legal tender only
within its limits, for the national currency not only becomes scarcer
but more and more ragged and illegible in ratio to the distance from
Buenos Aires. A not entirely unjustified fear of revolution, too, causes
the province to maintain a large police force, for the Argentine has
nothing like our National Guard. It is easy for the federal government,
often looking for just such a chance, to intervene at the first
suggestion of trouble in a province, and as such intervention means a
suspended governor, a legislature forced out of office, and the loss of
nearly all political patronage, the provincial authorities find it to
their advantage to have a dependable police force. Persistent rumor has
it that the police of Mendoza, however, are far from perfect, that they
lose few opportunities to force bribes from, and otherwise tyrannize
over, the population. Many fines may legally be imposed and collected
directly by the police, and the story runs that it is particularly
unfortunate to attract their attention toward the end of the month. They
are then apt to be penniless, and are given to wandering the streets
after dark, seeking whom they may run in and threaten to lock up if he
does not at once pay the “fine” then and there levied by the police. If
the victim asks for a receipt, rumor adds, he is instantly clapped into
jail, or rather, is sent to stand all night or sit down in mud in the
prison yard. Even important citizens of Mendoza hesitate to go out alone
after dark at the end of the month.
I spent May twenty-fifth, the Argentine Independence Day, in Mendoza. An
official salute woke the town at sunrise, to find itself already
fluttering with flags, the blue-and-white Argentine banner
predominating, but with many others, the yellow-and-red of Spain in
particular—and one lone Stars and Stripes, in front of a sewing-machine
agency. The uninformed stranger might have suspected that there is more
patriotism to the square yard in the Argentine than in any other land.
Had he inquired a bit, however, he would have learned that the law
requires all inhabitants—not merely citizens, be it noted—to fly the
national flag on May 25 and July 9, as it requires all men to uncover
when the national anthem is played, and all school children to learn by
rote certain chauvinistic platitudes. Nor should the fact be overlooked
that the “Veinticinco de Mayo”—for which Argentine towns, streets,
shops, cafés, and even dogs are named—is perilously near the end of the
month.
In the morning everyone went to church, from white-haired generals
lop-shouldered with the weight of the gleaming hardware across their
chests to newly-rich Spaniards who still wore shoes with less ease than
they would have cloth _alpargatas_. Scores of police, dozens of firemen,
still wearing their hats or helmets, as is the custom throughout South
America, lined the aisles from entrance to altar. When all the élite and
high government officials had gathered, the archbishop himself preached
a sermon founded on the not wholly unique assertion that politicians
seek government places for their own good rather than for that of the
governed, ending with the warning that the Argentine was sliding
pellmell to perdition because the teaching of the Catholic religion is
not permitted in the public schools. The governor of the province lent
an attentive ear throughout this harangue, and watched the service with
attentive Latin-American politeness; but it was noticeable that he did
not show enthusiasm, and that no ceremony was included that required
kneeling or crossing oneself on the part of the congregation, for
Argentine government officials are often noted for their anticlerical
attitude. There was an entirely different atmosphere here than at the Te
Deum I had attended on Colombia’s Independence Day two years before in
cloistered Bogotá.
The municipal band met us outside the cathedral and led the parade of
police and firemen—marching like men long accustomed to drilling—of
citizens and ecclesiastics, the archbishop, still in his purple,
surrounded by a guard of honor with drawn bayonets. The procession broke
up at the entrance to the Parque del Oeste, said to be the largest city
park in South America. Miniature trains, astride which human beings look
gigantic, carried those who did not care to walk, or hire other
transportation, out to this extensive civic improvement, spreading over
all the landscape at the base of the Andes to the west of the city. The
crowning feature of this enormous new park, with an artificial lake
nearly a mile long, concrete grandstands, and broad shaded avenues, is a
solid rock rising from the plain on which the city is built, the first
outpost of the Andes that bulk into the heavens close behind it. The
entire top of this hill, reached by a roadway cut in a complete circuit
of it, has been blasted off, and on this great platform has been reared
a gigantic creation of granite and bronze called “The Armies of the
Andes.” It commemorates the passage of the Andes by San Martín’s troops
early in the last century to free Chile from Spanish rule, one of the
most heroic expeditions in American history,—a badly equipped, half
starved force struggling through snow-blocked passes on what seemed then
an almost quixotic mission. Yet the conception and execution of the
monument, magnificent in proportions, rarely surpassed in dignity, is
worthy of its subject. Behind and above the splendid equestrian statue
of San Martín are his officers and the army of liberation, ranging all
the way from low relief to detached figures, the whole surmounted by an
enormous winged victory, while around the monument hover huge bronze
condors. All this, be it noted, was planned and carried out by a
provincial town of fifty thousand inhabitants. Of the view to be had
from it, on one side the plains of the Argentine, flat as a motionless
sea, on the other this same plain, bursting suddenly into mountains,
which climb in more and more jagged formation to the snow-clad summits
of the Andes almost sheer overhead, mere words are but weak symbols to
describe.
Meanwhile the excellent municipal band had been playing all the
afternoon in a kiosk nearer the park entrance. Soon after noonday we
low-caste promenaders on foot had begun to gather about it; then a few
poor public vehicles took to ambling around it; better and better
carriages appeared, with coachmen in high hats and livery; finally
private automobiles, large and gleamingly new, joined the now crowded
cortège. Pedestrians had become too many for free movement; the
carriages and automobiles circled in unbroken procession farther and
farther out on the horseshoe-shaped drive, until each heard only
occasional snatches of the music as they passed near it. A few silk-clad
ladies and their perfumed escorts deigned to descend and stroll a bit.
Policemen on magnificent horses, white plumes waving from their helmets,
directed the traffic with princely gestures. By dusk all Mendoza was
there, every class of society from the proud hidalgo descendent of the
conquistadores to the millionaire Spaniard who came out forty years ago
with his worldly possessions in a cardboard suitcase, and who now took
care to avoid the old Spanish match-seller who was his boon companion on
that memorable voyage. Vendors, hawkers and fakers, announcing their
wares as loudly as they dared without arousing the wrath of the haughty
army officer, master of ceremonies, who would presently vent his spleen
upon those who failed to snatch off their hats at the first note of the
national anthem, mingled with honest European workmen in _boínas_ and
_alpargatas_ and sun-faded shirts, enjoying a rare day of recreation in
the life-time of toil which they naïvely consider their natural lot.
Though wine flows as freely in Mendoza as in Italy, not a suggestion of
drunkenness did I see during the day.
As evening advanced, the crowd became more and more silk-hatted in looks
and temperament, a better bred, less provincial, more cosmopolitan, yet
also more blasé throng than similar gatherings over the Andes. The bony,
ungraceful women numerous in northern countries were rare, the plump
type not only of Mendoza but of all the Argentine most in evidence being
physically attractive in spite of overdress and enameled faces. Soon
after full darkness had fallen some of the most regal equipages fell out
of the procession by failing to turn the outside corner of the drive,
and wended their way homeward. The better class of hired vehicles
gradually followed their example; the public hacks, whose occupants were
having perhaps their one spree of the year, at last got tardy, regretful
orders to turn townward, until the place was left again to the
foot-going classes, many of the hawkers, fakers and vendors still
wandering among them, emitting rather helpless yelps in a last effort to
be rid of what remained of their wares. There came a hurried last number
by the band, cut unseemly short as the players dropped out and fell to
stuffing their instruments into their covers, and behind the hurrying
musicians the last stragglers took up the march to town. Not a
firecracker had exploded all day; no fireworks enlivened the evening,
though the grounds of the chief plaza and several smaller parks were
gaudy with colored electric lights set out in the form of flower-plots,
and similar lights outlined the municipal theater into which all those
who had attended services in the morning, with the exception of the
ecclesiastics, crowded to hear “Rigoletto” sung by fresh young Italian
voices with more power than polish.
The “Buenos Aires al Pacífico” has several lines in and about Mendoza
province, with frequent trains out through the vineyard districts. One
train travels an S-shaped route and comes back to the station from which
it starts without covering any of the ground twice, then makes the same
trip in the opposite direction. When I rose at dawn, the Andes stood out
against the sky as if they had been cut out of cardboard; by the time I
had reached the station long banks of steel-gray clouds were rising like
a steam curtain under the rays of the red sun, until the range was all
but hidden from view. My journey through the vineyards uncovered great
peaks capped with snow and glaciers that seemed to touch the sky, and
everywhere were grapevines, stretching away in endless rows, between
some of which oxen were plowing and men hoeing, vineyards limited only
by the horizon or the Cordilleras in the background. As there is little
natural campo on which to fatten herds in Mendoza province and
insufficient rainfall to make wheatfields productive, grapes were
introduced here half a century ago by Spaniards who brought them over
from Chile. The torrents pouring down from mighty Aconcagua were caught
and put to work, and wherever there is irrigation grapes grow abundantly
in what was a bushy Arizona when the first settlers came, until to-day
the province does indeed resemble California. For a long time Mendoza
furnished the Argentine all its wine. Then Europe began sending it over
at prices that competed, the vineyards spread into neighboring provinces
along the base of the Andes, and Mendoza lost its monopoly. When the
railroad came, it brought French, Spanish, and Italian peasants who knew
grapes as they knew their own families, and the Argentine became the
greatest wine-producing country in all the world outside western Europe.
Now there is a little corn, alfalfa, and grain, though all these are
insignificant compared to the principal product. Spaniards I met along
the way asserted that corn or wheat paid better now than grapes, so low
in price as to be scarcely worth picking, and that olives would do best
of all, if only the growers would bring in experienced workmen and give
the trees proper care.
I left Mendoza on a crisp May morning, and the autumn leaves I had not
seen for years were falling so abundantly that a line from “Cyrano de
Bergerac” kept running through my head, “_Regardez les feuilles, comme
elles tombent_.” Here they lay drifted under the rows of slender
yellowed poplars which stretched away through the vineyards, endless
brown vineyards everywhere covered with the dead leaves of autumn
standing in straight rows as erect as the files of an army and backed
far off by the dawn-blue Andes, their white heads gradually peering
forth far above as the day grew. Between the rows glided Oriental
looking people, lightly touching them on either side, bent on unknown
errands, for the fruit was nowhere being gathered. Unpicked grapes,
shriveled to the appearance of raisins, covered even the roofs and
bowers and patios of the flat adobe houses. Here and there a weeping
willow or an _alfalfal_ showing the advantages of irrigation gave a
contrasting splotch of deep green to the velvety-brown immensity. Before
his majestic entrance the god of the Incas gilded to flaming gold a
fantastic white cloud high up above his eastern portal, then lighted up
the files of yellowing poplars, then brought out the golden-brown of the
vast vineyards, gave a delicate pink shade to the range of snow-clads
away to the west, and at last burst forth from the realms of night in a
fiery glory that quickly flooded all the landscape.
I am not sure that I have ever seen nature so nearly outdo herself as in
this dawn and sunrise across the vineyards of Mendoza, while we crept
upward from the Argentine toward the Cordilleras. No other hour of the
day, certainly, could have equaled this, and it made up amply for the
discomfort of being routed out of our comfortable cabins on the
“International” before daybreak, to wash in icy water and stumble about
in the starlight until we were thoroughly chilled, before we had been
permitted to board the little narrow-gauge _transandino_ train, so tiny
in contrast to the roomy express that had carried us across the pampas
that one seemed crowded into unseemly intimacy with one’s
fellow-travelers. Across the aisle sat a priest with an open
church-book, mumbling his devotions and crossing himself at frequent
intervals, but never once raising his head to glance out the window. No
doubt when he gets to Heaven he will falsely report that the earth has
no landscapes to vie with those of the celestial realms. Over me swept a
desire to get off and walk, to stride up over the steep trails and feel
the exhilarating mountain air cut deep down into my lungs, sweeping
through every limb like a narcotic, and to take in all the magnificent
scene bit by bit, instead of being snatched along, however slowly,
without respect either for nature or my own inclinations.
The day turned out brilliant and cloudless; in full sunshine the scene
lost some of its delicate beauty of coloring, though still retaining its
grandiose majesty. The vast pampa sank gradually below us as we turned
away toward the mountains, the irrigated green patches grew almost
imperceptible. Slowly the plain itself was succeeded by fields of loose
rocks on which vegetated a few gaunt, deformed trees, spiny bushes,
gnarled and crabbed clumps of brush scattered in unneighborly isolation.
The sun flooded the barren, fantastic, million-ridged and valleyed
foothills of many colors, rolling up to the base of abrupt mountains
that climbed, rugged and unkempt and independent of all law and order,
like some stupendous stairway to heaven, to the clouds in which their
tops disappeared. Cliffs washed into every imaginable shape by centuries
of hail, snow, and mountain winds—for there is no rain in this
region—cast dense black shadows, which in the narrow valleys and tiny
scoops and hollows contrasted with the thousand sun-flaming salient
knobs and points and spires and hillocks—a lifeless stony barrenness
only enhanced by the scattered tufts of a hardy yellow-brown bush barely
a foot high.
Hour after hour we wound back and forth across the river Mendoza, fed by
the glaciers above, taking advantage of its two flat banks to rise ever
higher, while the river itself grew from a phlegmatic stream of the
plain to a nervous mountain brook racing excitedly past through deep,
narrow, rock gorges. The rare stations were “beautified” with masses of
colored flowers that would have been pretty enough in their place, but
which here looked tawdry and seemed to mock man’s feeble efforts to vie
with nature in her most splendid moods. Above Cachueta, noted for its
hot baths exploited by the city of Mendoza, in so dismal a landscape
that visitors come only from dire necessity, all vegetation had
disappeared and all the visible world had grown dry and rocky and barren
as only the Andes can be in their most repellant regions. Not even the
cactus remained to give a reminder of life; not even a condor broke the
deadness of the peaks which seemed cut out with a knife from the hard
heavens. After several bridges and tunnels there came an agreeable
surprise,—the valley of Uspallata, with a little pasture for cattle. But
this oasis did not last long, and soon the dull, reddish-brown cliffs
shut us in again. Broken and irregular peaks eroded into thousands of
valleys of all shapes and sizes gave lurking-places in which shadows
still hid from the searching sun, like smugglers on a frontier. Though a
certain grandiose beauty grew out of these crude, planless forms of
nature, they ended by giving the beholder a disquieting sadness. One
seemed imprisoned for life within these enormous walls; the utter
absence of life, the uniformity of the dry desolation, especially the
oppressive, monotonous solitude, enhanced by a dead silence broken only
by the panting of the sturdy little locomotive crawling upward on its
narrow cogwheel track and the creaking of the inadequate little cars
behind it, seemed to hypnotize the travelers and plunge them into a sort
of stupor from which nothing short of imminent disaster would arouse
them.
Between ever higher stations the only signs of man were rare _casuchas_,
huts of refuge built of the same dreary material as the hills, tucked
away here and there against the mountainsides. Before the building of
the railroad these served travelers as shelters for the night or against
the dreaded _temporales_, hurricanes of the winter-bound Cordillera. At
the Puente del Inca, a natural rock bridge under which the Mendoza River
has worn its way in a chasm, we caught the first clear glimpse of
Aconcagua, its summit covered with eternal snow and ice. Yet it seemed
small compared with the tropical giants of Chimborazo and Huascarán,
with their immense slopes of perpetual blue glaciers, perhaps because
there was no contrast of equatorial flora below, and it was hard to
believe the scientists who rank it the highest in the western
hemisphere. By this time snow lay in patches about us and stretched in
streaks up every crevice and sheltered slope, yet the mammoth glacier
peaks and striking Alpine beauty one expected was little in evidence.
As we drew near Las Cuevas, the increasing desire for a mountain tramp,
coupled with that of seeing the famous “Christ of the Andes” which the
traveler by train comes nowhere near, caused me to sound several of my
cosmopolitan fellow-travelers on the suggestion of leaving the train and
walking over the summit. But the few of them who did not rate me
hopelessly mad felt they could not spare the three days between this and
the next train, even if they were not seriously infected with the tales
of Chilean bandits. Yet I could not sit supinely in a railway coach and
be dragged through a dingy, three-mile tunnel, to come out on the other
side without having seen a suggestion of the real summit. Besides, there
was another excellent reason to drop off the train at Las Cuevas. There,
at the mouth of the international tunnel, my Argentine pass ended, and
the fare through and over the summit, a mere fifty miles by rail, was
almost twenty dollars. Even second-class, with the privilege of sitting
on a wooden bench in a sort of disguised box-car, was but little less
than that, and it was noticeable that all but the well-dressed had
disappeared from this also, the most expensive bit of railroading in the
world being too much of a luxury for the rank and file. These high rates
make the Andes a doubly strong barrier against immigration from the more
crowded and less capacious Pacific slope, which is to the _argentino’s_
liking, for on the eastern side the Chilean is hated and feared, all the
talk of international affection notwithstanding, as something between a
cruel and piratical Indian and a Prussianized tradesman.
As we drew into Las Cuevas I gathered together the essentials of kodak
and note-book and turned the rest of my baggage over to a young
Norwegian on his way to Valparaiso, with a request to leave it at Los
Andes, where the _transandino_ joins the government railways of Chile.
The train went on. The detachment of Argentine police that had given it
their protection up from Mendoza clambered upon the released engine and
went back down the mountain, and I found myself stranded and almost
alone in something far less than a hamlet at more than ten thousand feet
above sea-level. A quick movement instantly reminded one of the height,
an altitude doubly impressive at this latitude and at this season. Even
near midday it was not particularly warm in the sunshine and it was
decidedly cold in the shadows. Yet I must climb more than three thousand
feet higher to get over into Chile. The section-gangs of half-Indians,
in their heavy knit caps without visors and thick woolen socks reaching
to the knees, were a sullen, cruel looking crew, with marks of frequent
dissipation on their bronzed faces, men suggesting the Andean Indian
stripped of his humility and law-abiding nature and gifted with the
trickery that comes to primitive races from contact with the outside
world.
With sunset it grew bitter cold, an icy wind howling and moaning
incessantly even through the chinks of the dismal, guestless frontier
hotel in which a coarse and soggy supper cost me three pesos. When it
was finished, the landlord led the way out into the frigid, blustery
mountain night and, wading through a snow-drift, let me into the first
room of what is in summer-time a crowded wooden hotel, telling me to
lock the outer door, as the whole building was mine. What he would have
done had a lone lady also stopped here for the night I do not know—wired
to Mendoza, perhaps, for a chaperon. I burrowed under a veritable
wagon-load of quilts. Two or three times during the night I awoke and
peered out the curtainless window upon the bleak, jagged snow-clads
piled into the starlight above, each time wondering whether day was
near, but there was no way of knowing, for not a sound was to be heard
above the howling of the wind and the shivering of the doors and windows
of the unsheltered wood structure.
At last there seemed to be something faintly brighter about the white
crest of the range, and I coaxed myself out of bed. The darkness was
really fading. I drank the cup of cold tea I had prevailed upon the
landlord to leave with me the night before, strapped on my revolver for
the first time since leaving Bolivia, and set out as soon as I could see
the next step before me. The automobile road that zigzags up the face of
the range, accomplishing the journey to the “Cristo” in seven kilometers
of comparatively easy gradients in the bright summer days of December
and January, was heaped high with snow in this May-day winter season and
was plainly impassable. Beyond the last dreary stone refuge hut I took
what had been pointed out to me the day before as a short cut and,
picking up a faint trail, set out to scramble straight up the barren,
rocky slope toward the grim, jagged peaks above.
For hours I clawed my way upward through loose shale and broken rock,
all but pulling the mountain down about my ears, slipping back with
every step, filling my low shoes of the city with sand, snow, and the
molten mixture of both, panting as only he can understand who has
struggled up an almost perpendicular slope in the rare atmosphere of
high altitudes, my head dizzy and my legs trembling from the exertion.
Every now and then I had to cross a patch of hard snow or ice so steep I
must clutch with toes, heels, knees, and fingernails to keep from doing
a toboggan to perdition hundreds of feet below. Sometimes there was
nothing for it but to spring like a chamois from one jagged rock to
another, at the imminent peril of losing my balance once for all. In
many places the mountain itself was made of such poor material that it
came apart at the slightest strain, so that many a time I laid hands
upon a rock only to have it come sliding down toward me, threatening to
carry my mangled remains with it to the bottom of the valley. I would
gladly have gone down again and, after kicking the “short cut”
informant, made a new start, but that was next to impossible. It was
difficult enough to climb these great toboggan fields of loose shale and
ice; it would have been a rare man who could have descended them whole
without at least the aid of an Alpine stock. There remained no choice
than to keep on picking my way back and forth across the face of the
cliff, gradually clawing upward, reviving my spirits now and then by
eating a handful of snow, always subconsciously expecting to receive a
well-aimed shower of stones or knives from a group of bandits ensconced
in one of the many splendid hiding-places about me.
I had lost myself completely and, convinced that I was in for an all-day
struggle, could have met with resignation the lesser suffering meted out
by bandits, when I suddenly struck what proved to be a gravelly ridge
between two peaks and on it an iron caisson marking the international
boundary. Far from coming out at the “Christ of the Andes,” I found the
famous statue standing in utter solitude in a sandy pocket of the
mountains free from snow so far below me that it looked almost
miniature. By the time I had climbed down to it, however, the figure
itself, erected by the two nations to signalize what they fondly hope
will be perpetual peace between them, grew to several times life size
and took on an impressiveness much enhanced by its solitary setting.
Not a sign of humanity had I seen or heard when I emptied my shoes and
set off down the opposite slope. On the Chilean side the highway was
drifted still deeper with snow, in places stone hard, in others so soft
that at every step I sank knee-deep into it. The brilliant sun that had
cheered me on all the breathless climb here grew so ardent that I was
forced to shed my outer clothing. I was present at the birth, nay, the
very conception, of the River Juncal, which later joins the Aconcagua
and flows into the Pacific, for I had stood even higher than the point
where the snow and glaciers begin to melt and trickle down the mountain.
It is this foaming blue river which carves out the route down into
Chile, leaving highway and railroad the precarious task of following it
down the swift and insecure slope.
Near the mouth of the international tunnel the Lago del Inca, beautiful
in its setting of haggard mountain faces, reflected the blue of the
glaciers and the white of the snow peaks above. From there on all was
comparatively easy going, for though the sharp ballasting of the little
narrow cogwheel railroad mercilessly gashed and tore my shoes, I had
already saved enough in fare to buy several pairs. Now and then I met a
work-train straining upward out of the mouth of a sheet-iron snow-shed
or one of the many long dark tunnels through which I passed with hand on
revolver butt. By the time I had met several section-gangs, however,
dismal, piratical looking fellows, with a suggestion of Japanese
features, in ragged patched ponchos and wide felt hats, I decided that
they were more savage in appearance than in character, and when at last
a whole gang of these reputed cut-throats left off work to show me a
short cut, I laid away the stories I had heard of them along with the
fanciful tales of danger I had gathered in many other parts of the
world. They were _rotos_ indeed, “broken” not only in the sartorial
Spanish sense in which the word is used in Chile, but in the meaning it
has in American slang. Not a suggestion did they have in manner or
features of that hopefulness of the Argentine masses, but rather the air
of men perpetually ill or saddened by a recent death in the family, who
lost no opportunity to drown their sorrows in strong drink.
There were grades as steep as ten per cent. in the rackrail line down
which I strode at forty cents a mile. In places the western face of the
range was so steep that the mountain fell almost sheer for hundreds of
feet to the railroad, the loose shale seeming ready to drop in mighty
avalanches and bury everything at the slightest disturbance, and
suggesting some of the problems faced by the American engineers who
built the more difficult Chilean half of the _transandino_. The station
of Juncal, perched on a rock, posed as a railway restaurant, but at
sight of its price-list I fled in speechless awe, and at the next stream
below fell upon the lunch I had been brilliant enough to pilfer from my
Argentine supper the evening before. The tiny brook that had trickled
from under the snow below the “Cristo” had swollen to a scarcely
fordable river when, toward evening, with twenty-eight miles, or more
than eleven dollars’ worth, of ups and downs behind me, the huts that
had begun to appear, carelessly tucked in among the broken rocks and
mammoth boulders of the Rio Juncal, collected at last into a little
village called Rio Blanco, in which I found an amateur lodging. I had
heard that Chile was different from the other west-coast countries, but
this first glimpse of it scarcely bore out the assertion. Here were the
same squalor, cur dogs, chicha—even though it was made from
grapes—Indian fatalism and indifference to progress with which I had
grown so familiar in the other lands of the Andes.
Descending still farther into Chile next morning, I met a fellow tramp
limping toward the summit, a mere bundle of whiskers and rags, evidently
a German, though he was either too surly or too sad to speak, carrying
all his possessions in a grain-sack, his feet wrapped in many folds of
burlap. The twenty-two miles left were an easy day’s stroll, much of it
through the rocky canyon of the river that had roared all night in my
ears. In mid-morning I passed the famous “Salto del Soldado,” where the
railroad leaps across an abysmal chasm with the Rio Juncal brawling and
foaming at its bottom, from one tunnel directly into another, and over
which hovers the legend of some soldier jumping to fame and death in the
revolt against Spanish rule. I had dinner in an outdoor dining-room
under a red-flowered arbor beside the track, where a large steak—of
rhinoceros, I fancy—corn cakes fried in grease, excellent coffee, and
endless chatter from the pudding-like Chilean woman serving it, cost
only a peso—and the peso of Chile is but little money indeed. The woman
had never in her life been a mile farther up the valley, so that I was
an object of the deepest interest to her as a denizen of the unknown
world above and beyond the jagged snow-clad range that bounded her
horizon.
By afternoon the weather had become like May at home. There was nothing
autumnal about it except the pencil-like Lombardy poplars touched with
yellow along the beautiful valley of the Juncal, back up which one
looked almost wonderingly at the glacier-capped range walling off the
rest of the world. The country was very dry, the hills inclosing it
rocky and half-sterile, yet enlivened by the green of the organ cactus
which grew plentifully, the more distant ranges showing a faint red
tinge through their general blackness. Some of the parched fields were
being plowed with oxen. Gradually the mountains flattened themselves
out, a genuinely Andean traffic of mules, straw-laden donkeys, and
half-Indian _arrieros_ on foot grew up along the broad highway following
the valley, now well inhabited, chiefly in huts thrown together of a few
reeds or willows, as if there was nothing to look forward to but
perpetual summer. The once narrow gorge had expanded to a broad,
well-settled valley that suggested California when, in the later
afternoon, footsore, but many dollars ahead, I wandered into the town of
Santa Rosa de los Andes, junction point of the most expensive and one of
the cheapest railroads in the world, and found my half-forgotten baggage
awaiting me.
[Illustration: At last I came out high above the famous “Christ of the
Andes” in a bleak and arid setting]
[Illustration: The “Lake of the Inca” just over the crest in Chile]
[Illustration: On the way down I passed many little dwellings tucked in
among the boulders]
[Illustration: The stream that had trickled from under the snows at the
summit had grown to a considerable river, watering a fertile valley]
The bewhiskered conductor of the express which snatched me on into the
night looked like the Bowery at five in the morning. Indeed, one noticed
at once a wide difference between the prosperous spick-and-spanness of
the Argentine and squalid, uncheerful, _roto_ Chile, whether in the
crowds of poor people quarreling over the few crumbs of coal to be found
in the cinder heaps at the edge of town or in the general appearance of
the government railway and its rather unkempt employees. I fell asleep
soon after the train started at seven, woke once when we seemed to be
rushing through high hills and over deep valleys, and again at a station
where the one employee and the two policemen were wrapped to the eyes in
ponchos heavy enough for the Arctic circle. Then myriads of lights
flashed up out of the night ahead, the brakes ground us to a halt, and
we were set down at a station named “Mapocho,” which turned out to be
one of three serving Santiago, capital of Chile.