CHAPTER XVIII

THE COLLASUYU, OR “UPPER” PERU

On November 11th I took train southward. Though my original plan of

following the Inca highway from Quito to Cuzco had been accomplished,

the thought of turning homeward with half the continent still unexplored

had become an absurdity. But the scattered life of that dreary region to

the south of the Imperial City promised too little of new interest to be

worth covering on foot. If I did walk down to the station, behind my

belongings on jogging Indian legs, it was because to have waited for the

nine o’clock mule-car would probably have been to miss the nine-thirty

train.

Cuzco, like its rival to the north, has been connected by rail with the

outside world since 1908. The train leaves on Tuesdays and Saturdays,

spending a night at Sicuani and another at Juliaca, whence a branch

descends to Arequipa. Every Friday there is a vertiginous “express” that

makes Puno in one day.

A fertile valley, the great _bolson_, or mountain pocket, that stretches

from the pampa of Anta in the north to Urcos on the south, with many

grazing cattle, frequent villages, and strings of laden Indians and

asses, rolled slowly past. Before noon we caught the gorge of the muddy

Vilcañota, the same stream that under the name of Urubamba encircles

Machu Picchu, with little patch-farms far up the face of the enclosing

ranges and here and there steep, narrow side valleys rich with

cultivation. Yet cultivatable ground was scarce, so scarce that it was

easy to understand why the ancient population spared as much of it as

possible by walling up their dead in caves and planting all but

perpendicular slopes.

Next day the valley rose gradually, until cultivation gave way

completely to cattle and sheep, then to llama and alpaca herds grazing

on the tough ichu of broad punas stretching to arid foothills that, in

turn, rolled up into a great snow-clad range on our left. An aggressive,

despairing aridity, rarely touched with a cheering note of green, spread

in every direction. A dreary land indeed would this have been to journey

through afoot. Small wonder the race accustomed always to this desolate

landscape is of melancholy temperament, given to personifying nature as

a host of evil spirits inimical to man.

The drear and barren land across which lay the branch line of the third

day rolled ever higher to the Crucero Alto at 14,666 feet. Two large

lakes, cold, steely-blue in tint, with a few barren islands, broke upon

the scene and sank slowly as we panted upward; patches of snow lay

above, around, and then below us; the glare of the arid, sun-flooded

landscape grew painful to the eyes, recalling that many an Andean

traveler holds colored glasses an indispensable part of his equipment.

Towns there were none; and the stations consisted of one or two

wind-threshed buildings of stone or sheet-iron, dismal beyond

conception.

Then we descended gradually. Here and there in the edge of reedy lagoons

stood _parihuanas_,—long-legged, rose-tinted birds the feathers of which

in olden days formed the Inca’s head-dress, when capital punishment was

meted out to anyone of lesser rank who dared decorate himself with them.

Equally sacred were the _vicuñas_, the undomesticated species of the

llama family that furnished the imperial ermine. Ordinarily the traveler

is fortunate to catch sight from the train of one or two of those timid

animals. To-day a group of fourteen appeared not five hundred yards away

across the pampa; then within an hour we passed close by flocks of nine,

twelve, seven, and eight respectively, a total of fifty, more than my

Peruvian seat-companion, who crossed this line several times a year, had

seen in all his life. Unlike the three domesticated species, llama,

alpaca, and guanaco, the vicuñas are uniform in color, a reddish-brown

with whitish belly, legs, and tail, not unlike a fawn in general

appearance. A more delicate animal could scarcely be imagined; the neck

seemed hardly larger than a man’s wrist, the legs fragile in their

slender daintiness. They were graceful, as well as swift, even in their

running, which resembled the gait of the jack-rabbit in the way they

brought front and hind legs together. The flocks still belong to the

government as in the days of the Incas, when they were protected by

royal edict, under penalty of death. For some ten years past Peruvian

law, too, has forbidden killing them, but the valuable wool and skins

are still to be had in the larger cities, for game-wardens are

conspicuous by their absence.

What seemed a hopeless desert thinly covered with dry, wiry bunch-grass,

now spread in all directions. We were crossing the vast “Pampa de

Arguelles,” so named from the family that has leased hundreds of square

miles of it from the government. They in turn grant the Indians

permission to graze their cattle,—at 25 cents a year for larger animals,

twice that for each flock of small ones; yet “los Arguelles” derive

income sufficient to permit the family to live on the fat of Paris.

Mirages, as of rivers flowing landward, appeared now and then across the

arid immensity. At stations lay piled great heaps of _yarlta_, a fuel

resembling a cross between peat and giant mushrooms. Further down, a

scraggly bush was cut for the same purpose and carried in bundles on

donkeys’ backs. Soon that dreary Sahara of the West Coast lay on every

hand, massive rocks piled up fantastically, monotonous to the last

degree, yet not without a certain striking beauty under some moods. The

landscape was what the Germans call _eintönig_, of a rich yellow-brown,

dusted by the winds and bleached by the suns of centuries, and spreading

away to infinity with a hint of the vastness of the earth which even the

sea does not give.

Suddenly a deep-green patch of alfalfa burst out among the glaring

rocks, trebling their barrenness by contrast. It was the little oasis of

Yura, fed by a small stream, the water of which, reputed efficacious to

disordered livers, is bottled and sold—less widely to-day than before

the priests, whose rival establishment produces the “Water of Jesus,”

threatened to blackball out of heaven anyone who drank the other. Then

far away across the Egypt-tinted world the eye made out well below, at

first dimly, a green oasis with a great, or at least a widespread, city

covering about half of it. “Ari, quepay!” (“Yes, let us stay a while!”)

the first settlers are said to have cried when they caught sight of this

garden spot; and the train seemed like-minded, setting us down at last

in Arequipa, second city of Peru. Three dawdling days had been required

to cover 412 miles.

The only place of importance between the Pacific and Titicaca is

strikingly oriental in atmosphere, with a suggestion of Cairo, thanks to

its shuffling donkeys—a hole is slit in their nostrils that they may

more easily breathe this highland air—and its encircling desert, yet

exceeding the latter in beauty by reason of the snowclads hovering about

it. To the north lies Chachani, fantastic with its peaks and pinnacles

and jagged ice-fields; nearer at hand stands hoar-headed Misti, rivalled

in symmetry of form only by Fujiyama and Cotapaxi. From any second-story

roof the arid, yellow sand stretches away as from the summit of the

pyramids to a horizon far more broken and tumbled than that of the

Sahara. The hills are streaked with what looks like snow, but is really

fine sand, the same sand that lies in waves monotonously multiplied in

the form of wandering, crescent-shaped _médanos_ nearer the coast,

whence quantities of it are shipped to Europe to make a cheap glass.

Down below and round about the city are fat cattle knee-deep in green

pastures, in an oasis where irrigation produces alfalfa, as well as many

fruits, in abundance. The desert air is clear beyond words, bringing the

newcomer from the bleak highlands above the impression that summer, an

unoppressive midsummer of the North, has suddenly come again. Every

evening wonderful sunsets, ranging from lurid pink through purple and

blue-gray to a velvety fading slate, play a veritable symphony of color

across the surrounding desert world.

The city itself is flat, of one, or at most two stories, always with the

bulking mass of Misti or its neighbors behind it. Earthquakes have been

frequent in Arequipa. Because of these visitations, perhaps, the town

has everywhere an unfinished appearance, most buildings ceasing abruptly

just above the first story and looking as if the rest had been shaken

off or suddenly abandoned. A few have ventured to crawl up again to two

stories, and here and there a bold adventurer to three, these latter,

commonly of sheet-iron, seeming constantly to tremble at their own

temerity. As in Lima and the lands of the Arab, the roofs are flat,

places of promenade and evening _tertulias_; for rain falls, if at all,

only in brief afternoon showers. The town is built largely of a soft

white stone, almost chalk in composition, and light in weight as

terra-cotta, which is chopped or sawed out of a desert quarry not far

away and which, though it hardens in the air, can still be carved with a

knife. Two arched bridges with massive piers, mildly suggesting those by

which one enters Toledo in Spain, span the little cliff-sided Chili. The

eucalyptus seems less at home here than in the higher cities of the

Sierra, but drooping willows abound. As everywhere on the West Coast of

Peru, massive mud fences afford places of promenade in the outskirts.

I was treading close on the heels of civilization of a material sort.

Electric street-cars had appeared in Arequipa a bare three months

before; with motormen imported from Lima they afforded an efficient

service to nearly every corner of the oasis. The innovation had not been

without its difficulties. Strolling one morning, I met three cholos

driving a dozen donkeys marketward. Suddenly they began to shout and

dance about the animals as if some danger were imminent. A block away

sounded the gong of a bright new tramcar, but as I had never known one,

least of all in South America, deliberately to run down an animal, I

wondered at the uproar. To my surprise the car came on without

slackening speed. The shrieking cholos succeeded in hauling, pushing, or

coaxing most of the stubborn brutes off the line, but one pair refused

to vary their set course. At the last moment one of these lost courage

and sidestepped, but his sturdy black companion kept serenely on, with

stubborn down-hung ears and a “to-hell-with-you” flip of the tail—and

just then a corner of the swiftly moving car caught him on the starboard

beam. He turned a complete somersault on the cobbles, rolled on to his

feet, and gazed after the still speeding car with a scowl not unmixed

with a ludicrous expression of astonishment. Later I learned from the

American manager of the line that a number of donkeys, burritos, and

dogs had been killed during the first month of operation. Decrees and

warnings had been utterly wasted, and Arequipa’s donkeys would have

stagnated the lines and again taken possession of the gait of life

without this resort to the teaching of experience.

Cuzco and Arequipa are reputed the Peruvian strongholds of conservatism.

Of the two, the latter is probably more deeply under the spell of the

ancient church. The din of bells was almost constant; during my week in

the city I saw no fewer than five images of the Virgin paraded through

the streets to the usual accompaniment of kneeling cholos, bareheaded

whites, and scores of sanctimonious-faced old beatas following with

funereal step. Several of Arequipa’s fiestas are noted for the dancing

of wooden saints to barbaric music in the public squares. Others have

fixed periods of calling on their fellows, sallying forth from their

home churches to the plaza where, manipulated by the cholo bearers

beneath, they bow to and finally “kiss” each other, to the fanatical

applause of the multitude. The town boasts also several crucified

figures operated by wires that cause the eyes to roll, the limbs to

quiver, and the head finally to droop as in death, after which a gang of

workmen, carrying towels over their arms to wipe away the “blood,” climb

up to remove the nails and lay the “body of Jesus” away in a glass

coffin until the next holy day.

[Illustration:

The babies of Bolivia sit in a whole nest of finery on nurse’s back]

[Illustration:

Arequipa is built of stones light as wood, cut from a neighboring

quarry. They harden when exposed to the air]

From a score of stories typical of Arequipa with which I was favored by

a fellow-countryman, who had spent many years as the alpaca expert of

the chief local warehouse, I pass on two. For months he and his wife had

been annoyed by the throngs of beggars who gathered for a bowl of soup

each noon at the monastery just across the narrow street from his

residence, and then slept out the day in the sandy hollows nearby, like

the dogs of Constantinople. What particularly aroused his ire were the

habits of an old fellow of ninety or so, whom he had known for years. A

few weeks before, finding him in the all too scanty remnants of what had

once been shirt and trousers, the American had smuggled him into his

workshop and given him a complete new outfit from his own wardrobe. The

mendicant returned to his customary hollow a hundred yards up the

street, which he was accustomed to share with several curs and a donkey

or two, and during the night his fellow-beggars robbed him of the new

garments. What, then, was the donor’s surprise and American disgust when

he set out on his early stroll next morning to find the old fellow

parading up and down the street, begging of the women bound for mass in

the monastery church “without a lickin’ stitch on him, as naked as the

day he was born. If you’d tell it in the States, they’d say you was

lyin’ and that he must have had a shirt an’ britches on anyway. But, no,

sir, just as I’m telling you, without a lickin’ stitch, an’ parading his

wrinkled old ninety-year carcass up an’ down amongst all them women

goin’ to mass.”

But the ladies seemed merely to be mildly amused, and the native

policeman saw nothing in the sight worthy of comment. Children now and

then roam the streets of Arequipa in their birthday clothes, and the old

fellow had long since been in his second childhood. My outraged

fellow-countryman went across town to make complaint to his friend, the

prefect. The latter did not see what he could do about it.

“Why don’t you send him to the hospital?” grumbled the alpaca-expert.

“They wouldn’t receive him, with no one to pay for his keep.”

“Well, sir, I couldn’t stand it no longer having that ol’ feller

paradin’ around before my house, with my wife inside an’ all of them

women folks goin’ to mass, as naked as the day he was born. So next

mornin’ I borrowed a stretcher an’ got four Indians, an’ I says, ‘Now

you git that ol’ feller on that stretcher an’ tie him down an’ carry him

over to the hospital an’ leave him inside, or dump him in the river or

anything you like, only so’s you git him out of here. An’ I’ve got a

phone an’ when I hear he’s inside the hospital I’ll give you each a

sol.’ Well, sir, them Indians just dumped him in the hospital _payteeo_

before the Sisters of Mercy could shut the gates, an’ they had to keep

him.

“I’ve got a lot of friends amongst them priests across the road, even if

I ain’t a Catholic,” he went on, “an’ they’re a pretty nice lot o’

fellers, take ’em all in all. They’s three kinds of ’em: the brown

priests, the black priests, an’ the white priests” (Franciscans,

Dominicans, and Mercedarias). One especial, by the name of Jayzoóse, has

been over here in my house off an’ on for fifteen years to ask for a

chicken or some eggs, or a few dollars to build a new altar, or to have

a few drinks—Oh, they’re a pretty decent lot o’ fellers, an’ of course

they’ve got to live somehow. Well, Jayzoóse—he’s livin’ with a woman

over there behind the monastery wall an’ got four or five kids; but then

of course they all do that in Peru, though I suppose the Catholics up in

the States wouldn’t believe you if you told ’em, but of course you ’n me

or anybody that’s been down here—well, Jayzoóse come over the other day

an’ says he wants me to come an’ hear him preach. So I went out to a

church over here on the edge of town an’ I tell you he preached a mighty

strong sermon, too. Only it was All Saints’ Day an’ of course everybody

was drunk. So I was layin’ here readin’ along in the afternoon, when I

heard somebody knock at the street door—or if I happened to be asleep

an’ didn’t, Theodore Roosevelt” (pointing to a cross between a Dachshund

and a pug curled up at his feet) “here, or Woody Wilson” (an Irish

terrier) “there did, for they always hear anybody that knocks, no matter

if it’s midnight—an’ I went to the door an’ there was Jayzoóse, an’ he

was pickled to the eyes. So I invited him in, an’ he says, ‘Why don’t

you give me something to drink?’ An’ I says, ‘Well, Jayzoóse, I ain’t

got anything in the house just now, but I’ll send out an’ get something.

An’ I sent out an’ got two bottles of beer. But Jayzoóse was that drunk

he couldn’t sit up, say nothin’ of stand up, an’ when the beer come he

got to rollin’ around an’ out of his pocket drops a big loaded revolver.

I picked it up an’ says, ‘Here, I’m goin’ to keep this gun fer you. What

are you goin’ to do with a gun anyway?’ An’ Jayzoóse says, ‘I’m goin’ to

kill that there Chilian blacksmith down the street, because he don’t go

to mass an’ says he don’t believe in the Holy Church an’ its miracles;

an’ if I’d a had a couple of drinks more, I’d a killed him las’ night.’

An’ I says, ‘No, you don’t want to kill that feller, Jayzoóse, an’ I’ll

keep this gun fer you until to-morrow,’—an’ I got up to help him home,

an’ when I opened the street door, in tumbles a woman that had been

leanin’ up against it—being All Saints’ Day—an’ just fell down into the

parlor here; an’ by the time I rolled her out again an’ got Jayzoóse

home I was sweatin’ some, I can tell you.”

I strolled out one afternoon in a leisurely hour from the central plaza

by a street growing ever rougher and less cobbled to the Harvard

Observatory on the flank of Misti, with a splendid view of the

snow-capped cone towering into the sky close beside it and a marvelous

outlook over all the oasis of Arequipa. Here, in a household where it

was easy to fancy myself suddenly set back in the heart of my own land,

American scientists photograph the heavens on large dry-plates, with

exposures of from one to eight hours, through telescopes automatically

regulated to the speed of the earth, but requiring also constant hand

adjustment. Arequipa, however, is growing less ideal for the purpose,

since the number of its cloudy days has more than doubled. The blood-red

sun was sinking behind the Sahara hills when I turned homeward through

the caressing air of evening, the desert flanks of Misti and Chachani

and Pichapichu glowing a velvety red from the reflection of the opposite

horizon, the white oriental city growing dimmer and dimmer, then

suddenly bursting out in a spray of electric lights above which the two

white spires of the cathedral more than ever resembled minarets.

Next day I returned to the highlands in the private car of the railway

superintendent, a fellow-countryman. The day was brilliant, the leprous

desert flashing in the sun even after it had given way to the ichu-brown

tablelands of the great plateau, Misti bulking as large a hundred

kilometers away as out at the observatory on her flanks, and snow-caps

springing up into the luminous sky about us to all points of the

compass. All the afternoon we loafed in cushioned armchairs facing the

back platform, on which sat our host shooting with automatic gun-pistol

at vicuñas, a pastime strictly against the law, but Peruvian statutes

scarcely reach the altitude of a railway superintendent. Fortunately the

animals were scarce and far away, and the nearest he came to breaking

the law was to raise the desert dust about them and send them scampering

across the rolling pampa at a lope between that of jack-rabbit and a

deer, sparing us the necessity of halting the train and sending out the

crew to bring in the game. From Juliaca we turned south along a flat

once-lake-bottom. Arms and branches of Titicaca, full of shivering

reeds, broke in upon the dusk that thickened into night just as we

pulled into Puno, cold, dreary, and monotonously like all other towns of

the high Sierra.

I had timed my arrival to take, instead of the regular steamer directly

across the lake, the semi-monthly “Yapura” that makes the round of its

shore, with many stops. We were off at ten and out upon the “open sea”

by midnight, a huge distorted moon rising off the starboard bow, into

the prismatic wake of which we wheezed slowly but steadily, until it

crawled up under the black skirts of the clouds that covered the edges

of an otherwise starlit sky. A wind as penetrating as that off Cape Race

caused our diminutive craft to roll and plunge merrily, to the distress

of the priest, lawyer, and home-made Ph.D., with whom I shared the

six-by-eight dining-room-cabin. Titicaca by daylight has the identical

color of the sea itself, and we awoke to find ourselves wheezing along

in mid-ocean, so to speak, at eighteen knots—every two or three hours.

We cast anchor first before the red town of Juli, in a lap of bare hills

sloping up from the steel-blue lake. I dropped on top of the first

boatload of cargo and went ashore, the captain, having orders not to

start without me, promising to blow a special signal. The Jesuits claim

to have set up in Juli the first printing-press in America, and here

Quichua was first reduced to writing. To-day it is a mere dawdling

village, distinguished by the voluminous Dutchman breeches of its

Indians. At noon Pomata held us long enough to unload the priest and a

few boxes and bales at the usual cobblestone wharf. This same good padre

had assured me that it was a well-known fact that Saint Thomas had

visited America before the Conquest and had brought the Indians their

civilization, being known to them as “Tomi”—a bit familiar, to say the

least. How persistently mankind seeks to rob poor old Columbus of his

glory!

In the afternoon we churned into a wide, semicircular bay as far as

shallow water and rustling reeds permitted, and I was soon climbing the

easy slope to Yunguyo. Here and there was much freight to discharge.

When I expressed my surprise at the consumptive powers of so small a

town, the captain winked an Irish-Peruvian eye and breathed, rather than

murmured, “contrabando.” I had come at last to the end of endless Peru,

with the unexpected privilege of walking out of it, as I had entered it

eight months before. Yunguyo lies on the neck of a little peninsula,

part of which, by the arbitrariness of international frontiers, is

Bolivian. The steamer had orders to pick me up in the morning, and

slipping on kodak and revolver, I struck out for the sacred city of

Copacabana. A league from the landing the road mounted a stony ridge,

passed through the two arches of an uninhabited rural chapel, and left

the historical, if sometimes profanity-provoking, land of Peru forever

behind.

To that day I had never, to my knowledge, met a Bolivian. Those born

beyond the boundary evidently kept the fact a profound secret, and in

Peru the silence about the adjoining land was as if it were on the

opposite side of the earth. Once in Bolivia it was as rare to hear

anything of Peru. It was a stony country, in fact there were more stones

than country. Everywhere they lay piled up in high massive fences with

half-tillable patches between them. The wide road was well-peopled with

Indians afoot, Indians darker and of more independent mien than those of

Cuzco. This was the route by which, according to tradition, Manco Ccápac

set out from the island of Titicaca to found the Inca Empire. The

countrymen were engaged in a sort of planting and plowing bee, a

half-drunken festival, their hatbands decorated with newly picked

flowers. The instant I passed the boundary the head-dress of the women

changed to an ugly, round, narrow-brimmed felt hat hitherto unknown. On

the Peruvian side the shores of the lake had been reedy and shallow,

lisping with water-birds and a melancholy wind from off Titicaca, as if

the sea were thinking sadly of its lost glory. But as I topped the ridge

of the peninsula, there opened suddenly before me the vast steely-blue

lake, as clear-cut against the base of the reddish-brown hills as if dug

with some gigantic spade, rolling away in one direction over the horizon

like an Atlantic, the velvet-brown island of Titicaca standing forth in

the middle distance sharp as an etching. Rocks, which the superstitious

Indians fancy are impious men turned to stone, stood forth on every

hand. Children along the way addressed me as “tata,” the Aymará version

of the Quichua “tayta” (father).

At the end of a five-mile stroll the stony highway broke forth into a

little lake-side town. The church and monastery sacred to Our Lady of

Copacabana, roofed with glistening green and yellow tiles, in a square

surrounded by heavy walls brilliant with the crimson _flor del Inca_,

nestles in a lap of rocky hills a bit back from the lake and bulks high

above the haunts of mere men at its feet. In the days of the Incas this

was a holy city, with a certain “idol of vast renown among the

Gentiles,” a place of purification whence pilgrims embarked for the

ultra-sacred island of Titicaca. The church militant would not have been

itself had it lost this opportunity of grafting its own superstitions on

those of the aboriginals, and some three centuries ago the present

“Virgen de Copacabana” was set up, with the usual marvelous tale of her

miraculous appearance in this spot. Her servants have been realizing

richly on their foresight ever since. A steady stream of pilgrims pours

into the holy city from Peru, as well as Bolivia, and even from further

off, the year round, though August 5 and February 2 are the days of

chief festival and mightiest crowds. Near the monastery is a large

_hospicio_, a two-story lodging-house for pilgrims, with a great

rectangular patio opening through an archway. In the town roundabout is

that curious atmosphere of a mixture of piety and commercial advantage

common to Rome, Jerusalem, Benares, and Puree, an air of something hard

to believe, yet highly advantageous to accept, at least outwardly. The

costumes of the populace had grown frankly Bolivian. In several of the

shops stocked with sacred baubles, facing the immense grass-grown plaza,

women were rolling cigarettes, new proof that I was in Bolivia, for to

roll a cigarette in Peru is the exclusive privilege of the government.

The priest of Pomata had given me a note to the superior of the

monastery. A doorkeeper led me into pillared cloisters opening on a

flower-grown patio and softly into the sanctum of Father Basoberri, deep

in conversation with a parish priest who had brought a flock of pilgrims

from a neighboring town. Being a European, he created a better

impression than the average native churchman. To celebrate my arrival he

ordered a servant to uncork a bottle of imported beer and, after the

first formalities, had him set me down in the monastery dining-room,

where an excellent meal stopped abruptly short of dessert and coffee.

The superior conducted me in person to the large brick-and-tile room

reserved for distinguished guests, opening on the now bitter-cold

expanse of Titicaca, and advised me to fasten the padlock and put the

key in my pocket, “for though we are here in a monastery, there are

people passing back and forth, and it is safer. Now,” he went on, “if

you wish to see the customs of the pilgrims, you have only to mount that

stairway.”

I climbed two stone flights in semi-darkness and found myself in a

narrow wooden gallery at the back of a large, high chamber suffused with

a “dim religious light.” It was painted blue, with a sprinkling of

golden stars, as nearly the painter’s visualization of heaven, no doubt,

as the crudity of his workmanship permitted him to express. Confession

and a contribution to the attendant priests are requirements for

admittance to the floor of the church below. At the further end stood

the gaudy altar, in its center a glass-faced alcove containing the

far-famed Virgin of Copacabana. The figure, scarcely three feet high,

was cumbered with several rich silk gowns, laden with gold and jewels,

and with a blazing golden crown many sizes too large. Round-about her

were expanses of golden-starred heavens, and half a hundred of what

looked to a layman like large daggers threatened her from all sides. The

original blue-stone idol had been destroyed by the Spaniards, the

present incumbent having been fashioned in 1582 by Tito-Yupanqui, lineal

descendant of the Incas. He was no artist, but was said to have been

inspired by the Virgin herself.

The place was unusually immaculate for the Andes, as becomes a famous

shrine where money pours in the year around, and was in striking

contrast to the squalor of the surrounding region. The entire floor

below was crowded with kneeling pilgrims, weirdly half-lighted by

candles, except around the altar, where there was light enough to make

priests, acolytes, and the Virgin stand out brilliantly. A week is the

customary length of stay for pilgrims, with a ceremony of welcome and

one of dismissal, separated by a long series of masses, confessions and

purifications—not to mention the ubiquitous fees. It is perfectly

well-known throughout the length and breadth of the Andes, as the priest

from the neighboring town, having taken me in hand as soon as I appeared

in the gallery, whispered above the rumble of the services, that Nuestra

Señora de Copacabana is an all-round champion in the miracle line. For

instance: Hardly a year back she had picked up a ship about to be

wrecked on the coast of Chile and set it out a thousand miles or so into

the mill-pond Pacific, merely because one of the sailors had had the

presence of mind to call upon her at the height of the storm. The

newspapers of the time seem to have covered the service poorly. Or there

was the case of the Indian in my cicerone’s own parish who, working in

his field far up the side of a mountain sloping swiftly toward Titicaca,

suddenly fell headlong down the precipice. He would infallibly have been

dashed to pieces on the rocks below, had he not suddenly, halfway down,

uttered the name of the Virgin—personally I never knew the mind of an

Andean Indian to work with such rapidity—and instantly found himself

comfortably seated back in his own field again. The fact should not be

lost sight of, however, in rating this marvel that the Aymará husbandman

cheers on his labors with an even stronger chicha than that of his

Quichua cousins to the north.

The ceremony we were now witnessing was that of dismissing the departing

pilgrims. At about two-minute intervals there knelt on the steps of the

altar one person, a man and wife, or sometimes a man, wife, and child,

always of the same family. An Indian acolyte in red thrust a lighted

candle into a hand of each, the chief priest bowed down before the

image, while back beside us in the gallery an Indian in a poncho pumped

a wheezing melodeon and the choir, consisting of several boys, four old

half-Indian women wrapped to the ends of their noses in black mantos,

and three merry little girls who managed to keep up a constant gossip

and game through it all, knelt on the floor about the instrument and

moaned weird hymns. If the pilgrim was of the “gente decente” class, the

hymn was in Spanish; if an Indian, it was in Aymará. During the singing,

and the chanting of the priest, another acolyte in a still more striking

robe stepped forth and covered the kneeling person or persons at the

altar with what looked like a richly embroidered blanket. This the

priest beside me asserted was the Virgin’s cloak, capable of protecting

from all evil, for a certain length of time—varying, perhaps, with the

fee.

Then suddenly the cloak was snatched away, the candles were jerked out

of the hands of the worshippers, the latter were all but bodily pushed

aside, and a priest on the side-lines called out the next name from the

list in his hands. This field-manager was startlingly unBolivian in

efficiency, keeping things moving with a rush, and calling the next

group almost before the acolyte reached for the blue blanket. The

attitude of all those professionally connected with the ceremony, was

scornful, careless, and hurried—like a New York barber who is convinced

there is no “tip” coming. The fifth group to appear, however, was less

cavalierly treated. A tall, well-dressed man stepped forward, and an

acolyte quickly slipped in front of him a _prie-dieu_, or prayer-stool

with high back, of the style used in church by well-to-do South American

women. Then, to my surprise, two young men in riding breeches and

leggings, who had been standing near us in the gallery, stumbled over

each other in their haste to get down to the floor below and kneel on

either side of the older man. “Ese caballero,” whispered the priest

beside me, with a distinct tone of pride in his voice, “is a famous

lawyer and ex-senator from La Paz, and those are his two sons. They are

great devotees of the Blessed Virgin of Copacabana.”

[Illustration:

Indians plowing on the shores of Titicaca. Those behind break up the

clods with wooden mallets]

[Illustration:

Sunrise at Copacabana, the sacred city of Bolivia on the shores of

Titicaca]

When the cloak had been laid away for the night, the chief priest

mounted a pulpit projecting from the side-wall, and in the same drawl in

which he had chanted at the altar, compared with which the notorious

American nasal twang is soft and songful, either preached a sermon, or

recited a bit from the Bible, or imparted some stern orders from the

Pope—which, neither I nor, I am certain, any other hearer not previously

informed ever guessed. For the monotonous drone in which he hurried

through the thing, like a man with an appointed tryst, was such that

during the full twenty minutes it lasted I had not the faintest notion

whether it was in Latin, Spanish, or Aymará. The only intelligible word

I caught was an often-repeated, slovenly “Copavan.” Then the acolytes

hastily snuffed the candles, and we filed out. At the foot of the

stairway my companion was fallen upon by an old Indian and his son who,

imprinting a rapid-fire of kisses on his by no means lily-white hands,

begged him to hear them confess. He waved them aside as one might an

importunate cur, until the Indian, redoubling his osculations, assured

him he had real coin to pay for the service, whereupon the good padre

took courteous leave of me and led the pair to his room in the

monastery.

I was hurrying into my clothes in the bitter cold Titicaca dawn, when

the faint long-drawn whistle of the “Yapura” was borne to my ears. To my

astonishment it was barely five, so great is the difference in the hour

of sunrise in the few degrees I had moved southward since leaving Cuzco.

Copacabana in its lap of terraced hills shrunk into the past as we

slipped away around the peninsula of the same name. Before us rose the

Island of the Sun, traditional cradle of the Inca race, yellow-brown and

mountainous, with terraces far up some of its rugged valleys, one

red-roofed village housing the workmen of General Pando, chief owner of

the island. It produces potatoes, maize, and quinoa. On the mainland,

too, all the shores were terraced and cultivated from the water’s edge

to the tops of the ridges and hills, in long, square, rectangular, or

such fantastic shapes of fields as the lay of the land required. To the

east the great glacier mass of Sorata, by some reputed the highest peak

in America, lay piled into the sky, half-hidden and cut off from the

solid earth by vast banks of white clouds. Before long we passed, a bit

further off, Coati, the Island of the Moon, a low ridge terraced from

end to end, constituting a single hacienda noted for its fertility. Mere

words give but a faint notion of the beauty of Titicaca on a brilliant

morning, with its striking combinations of soft colors,—the dense

blue-green of the lake, curtained by tumbled banks of snow-white clouds,

the velvety yellow-brown islands and mainland, with the faint-purple

cloud-shadows playing across them. The mighty glacier bulk of Sorata

piercing the sky seemed to move forward also, as the steamer slipped

lazily on, frequently bringing into view new and more delicately

beautiful combinations of the same elements.

The Bolivian mainland we drew near in the early afternoon was of a

reddish soil, with many patches of bright green and pretty little tilted

fields checkering the ridges clear down to the water’s edge. At Guaqui,

the landing-place, no train was to leave for twenty-four hours, and I

set out afoot across the exhilarating plains of Bolivia for Tiahuanaco,

twelve miles away. It was a fertile, well-plowed land, where the

remaining stubble suggested wheat as the chief product. The sun dropped

behind a dense, blue-black bank of clouds hanging like a pall over

Titicaca behind, and there was no sunset when the time for it came, but

only a gradual, steady fading of light to a faint gleam in which the

eyes could barely make out the ground underfoot. The evening stillness

was broken only by the rare lowing of a cow afar off; a shower that was

half hail and all cold beat stingingly into my face. But for the storm

and wind, an absolute silence lay like a solid wall on every hand, with

nowhere the suggestion of a light, the many clusters of Indian huts that

had speckled the plain by day seeming to keep disconfidently out of

reach of highway and railroad.

At eight I stumbled into the station building of Tiahuanaco. The

telegraph operator was sufficiently impressed by my familiarity with the

name of the gringo superintendent to induce the woman across the track

to serve me stale bread and native cheese, and tea made of the water of

Titicaca, brought here in locomotive tanks. On the table were several of

the dailies of La Paz—it was difficult to think of that city as “the

capital” after eight months of considering Lima the center of the

universe—in which the world’s news all at once jumped up to date. But it

was like reading a serial story of which one has lost several chapters

and finds it impossible to pick up all the threads again.

Tiahuanaco, 12,900 feet above the sea, in a broad, open, unprotected

plain, frigid by night, and not over warm by day under the chill blue of

its highland sky, is the chief archeological enigma of “Alto-Peru.” The

most important ruins lie a few hundred yards north of the station, and

an equal distance from the modern adobe town with its bulking stone

church. From a slight rise of ground the flat plain, sprinkled with many

clusters of mud huts, stretches away to a gouged and broken ridge, here

reddish, there green with vegetation, that fences it in. Huge blocks of

stone lie tumbled and scattered over a vaster extent than at Luxor and

Karnak, in a disarray at once suggesting earthquake; for they seem too

immense to have been overthrown by a merely human destroying vengeance.

In the region roughly known as Peru there were several detached and

separate civilizations, some of which clearly antedated the Incas; and

Tiahuanaco has little in common with the ruins further north. There the

relics consist almost exclusively of stone walls; here there are

virtually none, though excavations might uncover a few remnants. What is

left looks, in contrast to the stem practicability of “Inca” ruins, like

the caprice of some childish sovereign. But it is not certain how justly

we may judge of the whole original plan, since not only the neighboring

hamlet, as well as La Paz, has helped itself freely to the materials for

its own chief buildings, but the railroad has carried off vast

quantities of it for the construction of bridges and culverts. The still

existing monuments are chiefly immense stone blocks too great to be

moved by puny modern man, some still upright, some fallen. Bas-reliefs,

of which Machu Picchu offers none, are numerous; sculptured figures are

unknown among the ruins of Peru, while here there are several. Some

resemble totem poles of stone. The most striking is a sturdy rock god,

his features defaced by the revolver shots of the enlightened youths of

La Paz on their Sunday excursions, which, like the twin figures of

Thebes, sits abandoned out on the plain. The monolithic gateway, a

single block of dark gray stone on which the intricate carving and

bas-reliefs still stand forth clear yet inscrutable, has been set

together again since Squier’s day.

As I sat gazing across the disordered mystery of long ago, an Indian

woman, the ubiquitous bundle and second generation on her back, a crude

sling in one hand, drove her pigs out into what seems once to have been

the main square of the ruined city. As the animals fell to rooting about

among the ruins, the woman walked across to the inscrutable stone god

and bowed down before it with a strange, heathenish courtesy. I

attempted to work my way around to leeward in the hope of catching a

photograph of the aboriginal rite. But while I was still some distance

off, she either spied or scented me, and raced away toward the town at a

greater speed than I had ever before witnessed in one of her race.

In the modern town dwells an indolent, not to say insolent, population

of cholos and Indians, ignorant as the Arabs of the Nile of the motive

that brings strange beings from far off to view the disdained remnants

of long ago, yet ready to take all possible advantage of that absurd

custom. The place bids fair to become as overrun with the pests of

tourist centers as the show-places of Europe. Already the stranger is

greeted by a rabble of unsoaped urchins, offering for sale as

“antigüedades” all manner of worthless pebbles. Aware that visitors, for

some strange reason, are interested only in things of great age, these

children vociferously proclaim everything in sight “muy antigua,” even

to the loaves and meat displayed in the shops, a statement for which

there is some basis. The bulking church of the town, as well as portions

of the rudest edifices, is constructed of splendid cut-stone. On either

side of the entrance are the weather-worn torsos of a man and a woman,

crudely carved from reddish sandstone, sadly defaced, and having an even

greater air of antiquity than the chief monuments out on the plain. They

would be more properly in their setting out among the other ruins; here

they are startling as one bursts unexpectedly upon them facing the empty

grass-grown plaza of the dawdling village.

The train snorted in soon after noon. Across the bleak Collao spring

plowing was at its height, amid much ceremony. Many of the sleek oxen

were half-hidden by the red and yellow flags of Bolivia, set upright on

the yoke across their horns. Gay streamers and banners decorated animals

and plow, while the Indian family that in each case had come in full

force to see the propitiation of the spirits that rule over the fields,

was garbed in its gayest. For not only must the moon be in a particular

phase, but all gods must be won over, all demons exorcised, and all

signs promising, before it is worth while to begin the year’s sowing.

What a fertile plateau it was, compared to stony Peru, the plowing

unchecked over hill and dale of the slightly rolling plain as far as the

eye could see!

An official passing through the train to examine the bundles for

contraband was the only formality that had marked the passing of the

frontier. In the second-class car I began to gather the impression that

the Aymará Indian, if morose and even less given to smiling, was on the

whole a more promising type of humanity than the Quichuas. For though he

was more inclined to insolence, he was far less obsequious, more manly

than the slinking race to the north, less passive and obedient, more

bellicose and jealous of his rights; and as long as there is any fight

left in a man, there is still hope for him.

The day waned. A plowman driving his oxen homeward and carrying the plow

on his own shoulder is a touch Gray did not catch. The plain grew less

fertile, and was dotted now with countless stone-heaps; Illimani and a

long, half-clouded snow-range grew up before us; we climbed somewhat,

though the world roundabout seemed level as before. The railroad swung

to the left. The scores of mule, donkey, and llama pack-trains, however,

kept straight on across the bleak, stone-heaped plain, till suddenly at

a white pillar a few miles away they seemed to drop all at once into the

unknown over the edge of the near horizon.

Where the train halted I scorned the electric trolley and, walking a few

yards, saw suddenly burst upon me a scene for once superior to the

anticipation,—La Paz, America’s most lofty capital, in its hole in the

ground. Up there at the “Alto,” 13,600 feet above the sea, all was

brown, cold, barren, unenticing; all about, behind, and around me the

bleak, uninhabited Andean plateau, stony and drear, cherishing nothing

but bunches of tough _ichu_, stretched away like a faded brown sea to

the hazy distance. Then at my very feet this gave way, and all the

nearby world pitched headlong down into a gashed and broken chasm 1200

feet down, measuring perhaps two miles across from where I stood to an

equal height on the tumbled and ramified foothills opposite. These,

breaking and splitting and falling away into unseen valleys, and

climbing out again to become more rugged and higher ridges, finally

culminated in a vast and jagged mass of snow and ice, cut off from the

solid earth by banks of clouds, above which the reflection of the

descending sun streamed in brilliant rose color upon the glaciered

pinnacle of giant Illimani, 24,500 feet above the sea. Across the broad

puna a cold, fitful wind whistled lugubriously; down below, though

barely a sound of life except the blood-stirring snort of a regimental

band came up this sheer quarter-mile from the city, all seemed

pleasantly cozy and warm.

The lower flanks of the great _cuenca_ were checkered with little Indian

farms, now mostly light-brown from being newly plowed, some still the

brownish-green of old crops, and all hanging at a decided angle. Further

down, on the floor of the valley itself, were similar irregular patches,

chiefly of the brilliant green of alfalfa, of every conceivable

shape,—round, triangular, horseshoe, veritable “Gerrymanders” in the

strange forms given them by the configurations of the ground; for, once

down below it, this proves by no means so floor-flat as it seems from

above. In the very bottom of the valley, rather on the further side and

stretching a bit up the opposite slope, lay La Paz itself. It was a

compact city, so compact that it seemed one conglomerate mass into which

the eye broke only once,—at the tree-roofed central plaza, tiny from

here as a green paster on a vast wall-painting. From this height one saw

little but the roofs, the dull-red of the tiles greatly

predominating—almost too much red, as in the garments of an Indian

gathering; next came the white and colored house-walls, then the sober

gray of old churches, and finally here and there the edge of a blue,

green, or even an orange wall peering above the mass.

All about the city proper, imperceptibly joining it and stretching away

on nearly all sides over vastly more space than the town itself, were

perhaps half as many buildings, scattered singly or in small clusters,

forming an almost unbroken row down the valley to the southeastward.

Here and there one of these ostentated itself in brilliant red; most of

them were cream-color or the gray of sheet-iron; and everywhere between

them were the irregular green of plowed patches, with now and then a

grove of blue-green eucalyptus, or a patch of willows, enticing from

this treeless height where, once the eye rose a bit from the floor of

the valley, there was not the suggestion of a shrub. Not the least

striking feature of the scene was the glassy clearness of the

atmosphere, with nowhere a puff of smoke, and absolutely nothing to dim

the view; if the clock in the all-too-slender tower of the congress

building had been larger, it would have been easy to tell the time by

it.

Brown ribbons of roads, all starting at a pillar on the plateau above,

strung like drippings of syrup down all sides of the cuenca, except on

the rugged, uninhabited flank opposite; and along all of them on this

Saturday afternoon crawled at what seemed a snail’s pace files of

Indians with their laden donkeys and llamas, the cargoes generally

covered with straw, the drivers chiefly in red ponchos, though so like

tiny crawling ants were they from this height that the colors were

barely noted. Seldom broken, these strings of pack-trains stretched from

the edge of the plateau to where the head of each procession to the

morrow’s market was swallowed up in the compact, silent city.

I walked on around the yawning chasm, the wind that howled across the

puna reaching the very marrow of my bones, a raging hail-storm beating

upon me for a brief moment and making the city below seem doubly snug

and serene by contrast. The little “Great River” of La Paz one did not

see at all, so tiny is it and worn so far down into the clay soil of the

valley in a half-seen gorge descending through tumbled ranges of gnarled

hills toward the _yungas_, as the Bolivian calls the tropical _montaña_,

below. Mere words give but a faint notion of this lower end of the

cuenca of La Paz. For so broken and pitched and tumbled, so

fantastically gashed by the rains is it, that it would be an

indescribably beautiful thing, even if there were not added the

wonderful colors and half-tones, a rich dark-red predominating, over the

countless split and torn and every-shape hollows and needles and

pinnacles of earth across which the cloud-shadows play incessantly. The

mournful notes of a _quena_, or rude Indian flute, floated sadly by on

the wind. Then sunset crept relentlessly across the valley to the town

that seemed to crouch motionless with fear of the darkness descending

upon it, paused a moment to do its work well, swallowing up all before

it in the purple twilight of tropical altitudes, then climbed slowly

again out of the hollow on the further side and spread at last across

all the world. The city’s bright colors had faded to an indistinct

sameness, the brown hills and deeply eroded clay cliffs were blotched

red by the departing sun, though the snow peaks above were still ablaze

with light; the purple bases of the range receded into black, then into

nothing, leaving Illimani standing forth white and cold, stone-dead as a

once ardent hope, utterly alone in the luminous sky of the Andean night.

I descended afoot behind the last pack-train, a stony, thigh-aching

half-hour from the pillar to the central plaza. The first information to

reach me was that La Paz outdid in cost of living even Lima, which is

criminal. The _boliviano_ having but four fifths the value of the _sol_,

I had fancied prices would be correspondingly lower; but here _two_

units were often required where one had sufficed before, and the great

majority scorned to do business in smaller coins. The hotels which my

sadly mutilated letter of credit permitted me to enter were not only

unsavory and atrociously managed, but had the barbarous custom of

several beds in a room. Each in turn attempted to thrust me into a

rumpled nest, with four or five others of unknown nationality or

antecedents close beside it, within a battered door to which there was

neither lock nor bolt. Whatever else I may be, I am distinctly not a

gregarious being in that sense; whereupon they offered me a room with

only _one_ companion, as if there were any particular virtue in numbers!

I brought up at last in the “Tambo Quirquincha,” facing the Plaza Alonzo

de Mendoza, an inn favored almost entirely by natives arriving on

horseback.

The constitution of Bolivia asserts that Sucre is the real capital, but

permits congress to choose its place of meeting, and “because of the

constant danger from our two chief enemies” (Peru and Chile) “at the

northern end of the Republic, the Government really resides in La Paz.”

How much the choice is governed by the fact that there is no railroad,

but only a mule trail, to the “real capital,” is a matter of conjecture.

At any rate, the president has not been in Sucre in more than a dozen

years, congress has its seat in La Paz, and the head of the army resides

there—conditions which will no doubt continue, at least until the

railroad reaches Sucre. On the other hand the former “Chuquisaca” is

honored with the presence of the supreme court and the archbishop of

Bolivia, who do not have to move often enough to make mule trails

burdensome. But Sucre will not be comforted. Her chief newspaper is

named “La Capital,” each of its editorials ends with the argument “La

Capital!” and it always refers to La Paz as “the present seat of

Government.”

This “seat of Government,” perhaps the most Indian capital of all South

America, has the most purely Spanish name. It should still be called

Chuquiyapu, as the aboriginals refer to it to-day, rather than by the

trite Castilian designation that is duplicated a score of times

throughout Spanish-America. The census of 1909 discovered 76,559 persons

in the entire hole in the ground. Of these, 20,007 were rated “white,”

but as usual in Latin-America the enumerators got the color sadly mixed

with the social position of the enumerated. Indeed, the chief of the

census goes on to explain “white” as “descendants, more or less pure, of

Spaniards, Europeans, or North Americans”—in other words, anyone with a

distinct trace of European blood. There may be a third that many of

strictly Caucasian race. Of the 3458 foreign residents, 86 were

Americans; of 696 non-Catholics, 562 were foreign men, 40, foreign

women, 193, Bolivian men (“chiefly atheists”), and _one_ Bolivian woman.

Bold woman, indeed, to admit it! The census rated 30% of the population

as Indians; but here again the social status must have played its part,

or else there are many non-resident country Indians often in the city.

African blood is extremely rare, though slavery was not abolished until

1851. It is no climate for negroes. “The unmarried American women are

nearly all teachers,” the report continues, then takes a rap at the

country’s chief enemy for stealing her seaport and bottling her up

within South America by remarking, “Las chilenas living in La Paz are

almost without exception prostitutes.” Most striking of all the data,

perhaps, is the fact that of the 60,445 inhabitants over nineteen years

of age, only 13,047 are married. But this does not mean that race

suicide is imminent; rather that the priests have made the cost of

marriage all but prohibitive to the lower classes, and that many others

are thereby influenced to consider the ceremony of minor importance. In

the entire republic 16% are “alfabéticos,” that is, “know their

letters,” a much more handy expression in Latin-American statistics than

“read and write.” Only Honduras, in all America, is so low in this

respect.

[Illustration:

One of the two huge figures facing the grass-grown plaza of modern

Tiahuanaco at the entrance to the church]

[Illustration:

The ancient god of Tiahuanaco before which the Indian woman, herding

her pigs, bowed down in worship]

Roughly speaking, the population is divided into three classes, as

everywhere in the Andes, each shading into the other until the lines of

demarkation are at best hazy. Of the whites, the census report itself

asserts, “Sequestered, they knew more of theological subtleties than of

religion, were more devout than moral, and had more preoccupations than

ideas. There is even to-day no stimulus for their best faculties, and

they have lost almost completely that virile character bequeathed them

by their Spanish ancestors. They will work only at commerce or

government employments that demand no corporeal fatigue.” Effeminate is

the description that most quickly occurs to the foreigner; but they are

no more so than all men of the “gente decente” class throughout South

America. Even the whites take on something of that sulky dis-confidence,

that unobliging insolence of the Aymará character, and one quickly

catches the feeling that the foreigner is disliked in Bolivia, at least

far more so than in Peru. Another native, with the point of view of wide

travel, assures us, “The whites are really Indians and cholos in their

mode of thought. Thanks to the Aymará blood in his veins, or to the

effect of that environment on his character, the paceño lacks docility,

is uncommunicative, and is bored at all times at everything; hence his

desire for excitement, for noise, and the resultant life in the

canteens. In the three cold cities of Bolivia more liquor is consumed

than in all the rest of the country; alcoholism is the national vice par

excellence, and the surest way to win a fortune is to run a bar.”

But in any strict census the cholo is the most numerous class of La Paz.

A native writer succinctly explains the rise of this mixed race: “As in

the beginning the Spaniards had not within reach many women of their own

race, they satisfied the physical and moral necessities of the sex with

women of the vanquished tribes.... A few of these succeeded in inspiring

real passion in the breasts of the hardy Conquistadores, sometimes even

to the extent of causing the latter to marry themselves legally and

Catholicly with our Indian women.” All hail to the inspiring Indian

women! One must not, however, overlook the fact that “real passion”

among the old Spanish Conquistadores was not so closely allied to soap

and tooth-powder as in our own days. Short and sturdy—especially the

women, who do not wear themselves out with dissipation—with quick little

eyes, the cholos have much of the independence of the Aymará character;

they are quite the opposite of servile, and somewhat despise both the

whites and the aboriginals.

No country of South America has so large a percentage of pure Indian

population as Bolivia. The Aymará is by nature silent and aloof, more

sullen and cruel than the Quichua, and by no means so obsequious as the

aboriginals of Cuzco. He never touches his hat to a passing gringo;

unlike the Indian of Quito he crosses the main plaza in any dress he

chooses, even carrying bundles and sitting on the benches; in the region

roundabout, the race has inner organizations under their own chiefs

which are virtually independent of the Government; yet in town he does

as he is ordered, though sullenly, and shopkeepers drag him in to

perform any low task at whatever reward they choose to give him. As

_pongo_, or house-servant, he is farmed out as a child and becomes

virtually a slave,—though that condition worries him little. A frequent

“want-ad.” in the papers of La Paz runs: “Se alquila pongo con taquia,”

that is, there is for rent an Indian servant with necessity of gathering

for his master llama droppings as fuel. Festivals and fire-water are his

chief amusements. Sunday he reserves as a day to get drunk, and couples

are reputed to take turns at this recreation, so that one may be in

condition to lead the other home when it is over. His music is

melancholy beyond words. As a Bolivian puts it, “He lives without

inquietude and without remorse, being dangerous only when he is full of

liquor or religion. He is a beast of burden, uncomplaining, desires

nothing, is apparently content with his fate, and looks with supreme

indifference on all the rest of the world and its people.”

The contrasts of life in La Paz are striking. Here an ancient scribe

sits before a typewriter agency; there a group of Indian women squat

before the crude products of the country, in front of the

electric-lighted emporium of a foreign merchant; electric tramways

thrust aside trains of llamas even in the principal streets. Speaking of

these street-cars, they crawl back and forth across town, sometimes

zigzagging whole blocks for every street; and the dishevelled carriages

for hire are generally drawn by four horses. For La Paz is broken and

steep, often held up in layers by retaining walls, while the sidewalks

are often toboggan-steep and always slippery. Houses which from the

“Alto” seem on the level are found to be a hundred feet or more one

above the other. It is one of the easiest cities to get lost in without

being really lost; for one always comes out finally on some corner where

a familiar landmark or half the city stands forth to orientate one at

once. Many a street is crowded with Indians from the country, and

especially with chola vendors who, there being no regular market-place,

spread their wares where they will, squatting in unbroken rows on the

sidewalks and driving the uncomplaining pedestrian into the slippery

cobbled streets. One does not hurry in La Paz; the air is too scanty. A

bogotano complained that he could not sleep there on account of the

altitude! The temperature ranges from 6 degrees Centigrade in June to 18

in this mid-summer month of December. Yet even then it was somewhat

wretched after sunset, and no one would choose to sit in pajamas in the

central plaza at night. From eleven to three it grew almost

uncomfortably warm for climbing about so up-and-down a place, and the

brilliant unclouded sky was hard both on eyes and nerves at noonday.

It is difficult for the stranger to get accustomed to seeing droves of

llamas, with drivers dressed in the style of Inca days, soft-footing

across the main plaza or patiently awaiting their masters, with the

modern congress building as a background. Congress, by the way, was in

session during my days in La Paz. The visitors’ gallery is high up above

the perfectly circular chamber, giving the half-hundred representatives

the appearance of being down at the bottom of a deep well. They smoked

frequently, spoke sitting, were largely white, though the cholo class

was by no means unrepresented, and among them were two priests in full

vestments, their tonsures shining up at us like rays from the Middle

Ages. There were also several who strangely resembled Tammany

politicians of the popular cartoons, and nowhere was there any outward

sign of genius, legislative or otherwise. While the man who had the

“floor” kept his seat and droned endlessly through something or other,

the presiding officer sat motionless and openly bored, and members

slept, smoked, read newspapers, wrote letters, and otherwise busied

themselves with the vital problems of the nation, after the fashion of

legislative bodies the world over.

There is a distinct gradation in the costumes of La Paz, especially

among the women. The men of the “gente decente” class, the whites and

the consider-themselves-whites, ape Paris to the best of their ability,

as in all Andean capitals. The higher-class cholo, ranging from

shoe-makers to clerks—in both the American and English sense—wears more

or less countrified and ill-fitting “European” garb, even to gloves and

a cane on Sunday, if he can get them; for social standing depends

chiefly on dress. The less ambitious half-caste wears the same leather

sandal as the Indian, a coat showing a bit above or below his more or

less crude-colored poncho, a coarse shirt without collar, and a heavy

felt hat. A peculiarity of the paceño costume, as universal among the

Indians and poorer cholos as the cord around the knee of British

workmen, is a slit in the back of the trouser-leg, showing a white,

pajama-like undergarment above the bare brown ankle. The Indians,

conservative as all their race, are slow to adopt the slightest change,

and still dress much as in the time of the Incas. The men wear peaked

knitted-wool “skating-caps” of gay colors, with earlaps, like clowns in

a circus, often with a felt hat of varying tones of gray on top of it.

Their ponchos of alpaca-wool are of solid colors,—orange, scarlet,

purple, magenta—with some tone of red always the ruling favorite. Much

of this cloth has for years come from Germany, though there is still

considerable native weaving. Some go barefoot; more often they wear the

heavy, well-made leather sandals that are displayed in large quantities

in the market-stalls.

But the men of La Paz lend it little color compared to the women. These

may be roughly divided, following the local phraseology, into

“señoritas,” “cholas,” and “indias”; though these in turn subdivide,

until there are six rather distinct costume classes, all shading

somewhat into one another. First: The foreign women and a small number

of native white ones copy the styles of Paris with more or less success.

Second: The moderately well-to-do woman—and all those of the “gente

decente” class during the morning hours of mass; it being against the

rules to wear a hat in church—wrap themselves from head to foot in the

jet black _manto_ that gives them the appearance of stalking crows.

These commonly powder their faces with what seems to be cheap flour, and

are rarely startling in their beauty, though many are physically

attractive between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three.

[Illustration:

Arequipa, second city of Peru, in its desert oasis, backed by Misti

Volcano]

[Illustration:

“Suddenly the bleak pampa falls away at one’s feet, and La Paz in its

hole in the ground, 1,200 feet below, spreads out at the foot of

Illimani and its sister peaks”]

Third (to be marked Baedeker-fashion with two stars) comes the most

picturesque figure in Bolivia, if not in South America,—la chola de La

Paz. Her mate may blossom out in all the atrocities or “European”

attire, but la chola clings tenaciously and wisely to the costume of her

ancestors. Moreover, in this case the picturesque is not attended by its

usual handmaid, uncleanliness. La Paz is not immaculate by modern

standards, but at least la chola does her share toward making it seem

so. She wears the usual multiplicity of skirts, but of a finer material

and better fit than elsewhere, so that while she is still somewhat bulky

about the hips, she is not disagreeably so. Her outer skirt is always of

a solid color, distinctly gay, but never of the crudeness this garment

attains among the Indian women. Of well-woven cloth, it stops just

halfway from foot to knee, never high enough to suggest immodesty and

never low enough to drag on the ground, as is the distressing custom

among many of the middle-class women up and down the Andes. Above this

she wears two shawls—at least that is the nearest English equivalent in

a male vocabulary—of some excellent material closely resembling silk,

with perpendicular stripes of varying width and color, the whole gay in

the extreme, yet never clashing with the rest of the costume so far as

the mere male eye can detect. These being large, they are folded in the

middle and thrown about the shoulders, a glimpse of the inner one adding

to the gaiety of the ensemble, the fringe of both sweeping her ankles.

Her hair, jet black, and coarse as a horse’s mane, she parts in the

middle and combs flat on either side, the ends of the braids, without

the suggestion of a decoration of ribbon or flower, hanging sometimes

inside, sometimes outside the shawls. From her ears swing heavy earrings

of fantastic design some two inches long. Most striking of all is her

unique hat. This is of straw, of “Panama” texture, with the general form

of our derby or the Englishman’s “bowler,” lacquered or glazed over with

something that causes it to reflect the brilliant sunlight of these

heights like a mirror, and seeming at first sight as absurd and out of

place as our own “’ard ’at” might to a visitor from Mars.

But one soon gets used to it, and even to like it, especially as la

chola wears it at just the suggestion of a rakish angle, ever so

slightly inclined over the right eye, though the near-certainty that she

is wholly unconscious of that fact only adds to the attractiveness. When

she grows excited, as in arguing the price of a nickel’s-worth of beans

in the market-place, she has a way of giving the front rim a flip of the

finger that knocks the hat back from her brow, under which circumstances

she so vividly recalls a Western “drummer” in a heated but friendly

argument in a bar-room, that one sighs with regret that she has not a

half-burned cigar protruding at an aggressive angle from the corner of

her mouth to complete the picture.

There remains but to speak of her footwear. This consists of a high

shoe, native-made, on a very Parisian last, with high, slender “French

heels,” of every color a shoe could be by any stretch of propriety, but

with cream or canary-color the favorite, a bow of the same material—it

seems to be kid—down near the toe and a bundle of tassels at the top.

Occasionally the shoes are high enough to join company with the

halfway-to-the-knee skirt, below which peers the white lace of an inner

petticoat, but even then when she stoops over in arguing a purchase, one

notes a “clocked” stocking, that adds still more to the debauch of

colors, going on up—at least to where it is fitting for a stranger to

cease investigation.

Astonishment grows that la chola can afford such garments. The shoes

alone cost as high as $10, and every stitch in sight is of a grade and

workmanship that come high in Bolivia, that would not, indeed, be cheap

in a far more productive country. Yet the chief wonder is the

specklessness of her entire garb—doubly wonderful to one of long Andean

experience. The glazed hat shines like the polished dome of a mosque,

the skirts and shawls always look as if they had just that moment come

out of a Parisian shop, and the cream-colored shoes have not a fly-speck

upon them; yet la chola wears this costume at any hour and under all

circumstances—in the street, at least—and carries on her often soiling

business in all parts of town. Some assert that she starves herself to

dress; but her appearance does not uphold the contention. However she

affords it, it is to be hoped that the means will continue, and that she

will not some day abandon in favor of the atrocities of foreign fashions

the most picturesque costume in South America, and the chief decoration

of every outdoor scene and public gathering in La Paz.

The chola is not exactly _chic_; the thick-setness bequeathed her by

Indian forebears makes that word fail. But she is as nearly so as the

Andean Indian type can become; and as she trips along at a “snappy,”

energetic stride up and down the break-neck cobbled streets of La Paz,

in her slender-waisted “French heels,” and not only does _not_ break her

neck but does not even jar from its angle her “stiff ’at,” the eye is as

certain to note her passing as it would that of a meteor in the sky

above. She is always full-cheeked and plump, often good to look at in

spite of her rather bulky Indian features, and aggressively independent,

going anywhere at any time she chooses in complete indifference to the

oriental seclusion that still clings about the upper class women. She

treats the rest of the world with a manner midway between sauciness and

impudence, scorning anything on the plane of reading and writing with

the disdain of her Indian forebears. She holds most of the places in the

market and the _pulperías_, or little liquor and food shops, and ranges

all the way from small shopkeeper to unservile serving-maid to

well-to-do women. One gets the impression from a brief acquaintance that

she is as superior to her mate, the shifty-eyed cholo, as are the women

of Tehuantepec to their men. She speaks Aymará by choice, but will use

Spanish when necessary; and she is always at least comparatively young.

One sees cholas up to thirty or thirty-five, but as they do not look as

if they died off at that age, the natural conclusion is that they fall

into a more somber and less agreeable costume. La chola is seldom

married “legally and Catholicly,” but if she has a baby, a mishap that

not infrequently befalls her, she wears it as all Andean women wear

their babies,—on her back. Instead of being carelessly slung in a

blanket tied across mother’s chest, however, this fortunate mite sits in

a whole nest of clean, gay garments, the spotless white lining hanging

down a foot or more on all sides of it, ending in a lace fringe. Indeed,

this better care of baby is notable in La Paz, and has its influence

even among the Indian women.

But I set out to give a half-dozen female classes. The fourth is the

same chola, just a shade lower in the scale. She also wears a little

round hat, but of brown or black felt. Her skirts and shawls are

less gay and of coarser texture, her stockings are dark, and her

footwear a shining-black, low slipper without heel. The fifth is

usually a common servant, almost touching on the Indian woman, her

garments sometimes descending to the plebeian, crude-colored,

made-in-Germany-and-in-a-hurry _bayeta_ in which the higher grade

chola would scorn to be seen, though it is almost universal to her

class elsewhere in the Andes. She wears also a shiny black slipper,

but no stockings, though her brown plump leg looks almost like

finely woven silk. There is no suggestion of immodesty in this

absence of nether covering, yet when one of this class, for some

sojourning-gringo reason, suddenly appears in the bare white legs of

what at first glance seems a lady of our own race, the sight brings

something of a shock. Of the three types of chola, the third and

fourth may blend a bit, sometimes to the extent of coiffing the

latter in a glazed hat; but only the first ever falls into the

foolishness of the “upper” class in flouring her face a bit, and at

worst it is confined to a few sporadic cases.

At the bottom of the scale, as everywhere in the Andes, comes the Indian

woman, varying a bit in garb, according to the degree of her poverty.

She wears the round felt hat and endures the chill highland winds by

wrapping several thick bayeta skirts of clashing colors around her waist

in bunches, until she looks like—I am at a loss for a comparison that is

ugly, awkward, and bulky enough;—may I say, like a very badly packed

sack of assorted hardware with the looser and lighter things above the

compressed middle? She likes red best, and as the day warms, every

second or third of the skirts she removes one by one is of some shade of

that color. Below them are bronzed legs and either bare feet with

hoof-like soles, or, as La Paz and vicinity are distinctly stony, as

well as cold, with a flat sandal of a single piece of leather, with

thongs over the heel and between the large toe and the others. Solidly

built as she is, one wonders how the Indian woman’s waist can support

the weight of six or eight heavy bayeta skirts. Yet always, in addition

to these, night or day, young or old, drunk or sober, filthy or only

dirty, she carries a bundle on her back in the colored blanket tied

across her chest, with, whenever possible—and her possibilities in this

line are infinite—the head of a baby protruding somewhere from the load,

now gazing earnestly at the road ahead, now dancing a crowing hornpipe

on the broad back of the utterly unresponsive mother.

Now, mix all these types; put at least half the male population in gay

ponchos, with every known shade of saffron, red, orange, purple, and the

like; sprinkle among them youths with long hair tied in queues, wearing

gay-striped ponchos that conceal all but their sturdy brown legs, who

straggle up out of the tropical coca-country to the east to mingle with

the city life; add a distinctive costume for each surrounding village,

the noiseless llama-driver in his absurd cap, a number of Germans in

Bolivian army uniforms, monks in black, brown, and white, nuns in gray,

soldiers in light-gray uniforms, policemen in brown ones, hundreds of

personal idiosyncracies in color and style, and it will be more easily

understood why La Paz is justly entitled to that overworked word

“picturesque,” and why the aboriginal name of Chuquiyapu would still be

more fitting than the trite Spanish one by which Bolivia’s unofficial

capital is known to the world. Moreover, children dress exactly like

father or mother as soon as they can walk. La chola’s little girl is her

mother’s exact miniature, glazed hat, gay shawl, fancy little

high-heeled shoes and all, as likely as not with a doll in fancy

garments on her back; the cholo’s son paddles behind his father in long

breeches slit up the back, gay poncho and felt hat; the little Indian

girl trots after her mother in the selfsame red, green, or magenta

skirts of bayeta, the round felt hat on her head, and always a bundle on

her back, though she be barely three years old and the burden only a

bundle of yarn—as if to accustom her early to the life she must lead to

the day of her funeral.

[Illustration:

Llamas of La Paz patiently awaiting the return of their driver]

[Illustration:

Down the valley below La Paz the pink and yellow soil stands in

fantastic, rain-gashed cliffs]

There are many fine walks in and about La Paz. On a sunny afternoon,

brilliant-clear as an afternoon can be only at this height, it is a joy

to follow a muddy little creek, known as the Chuquiyapu, down through

the broken and tumbled gorge below the town, where the clay soil, now

sandy white, now soft red, is rain-gashed into a hundred fantastic

shapes. The slender, always-at-home eucalyptus and a species of

weeping-willow line the way. Illimani raises its hoar head higher and

higher into the sky above, seeming to calm the spirits with its majestic

serenity and promise of perpetual coolness. So imperceptibly does the

valley descend that one could drift clear down into the languid tropical

_yungas_ that draws one on like a lodestone, like the “spicy garlic

smells” of the Far East, until suddenly realizing how far the city has

been left behind, one takes oneself figuratively by the neck and turns

back to the town.

Or there is the climb out of the cuenca itself, a stiff hour to the

pillar above. Once on the bleak puna, I wandered along the edge of the

chasm to get a view of the city below from all angles. Near the station

my eye was caught by the private car of a railroad superintendent.

Fancying it might be that of my host on the journey up from Arequipa, I

strolled toward it. A dishevelled fellow, his ragged coat close up

around his neck, his long hair protruding like straw from a scarecrow, a

two weeks’ black beard bristling, sat on the back platform, peeling

potatoes.

“Está aqui el Señor ——?” I asked casually.

A cloud of incomprehension seemed to pass over the scarecrow face. I

repeated the question, thinking he might be one of those weak-minded

natives so often found at large in South America.

“English! English is all I talks,” came the startling reply out of the

depths of the unshaven one, not only the accent but the presence of a

few blackened stumps in lieu of teeth betraying both the nationality and

the caste of the speaker. As I had never since leaving Panama seen a

white man, much less an English-speaking person, doing manual labor my

mistake was natural.

Thanks to the pleasure of having a hearer who could understand him, the

exile’s sad, not to say jumbled, story was soon forthcoming.

“I ’ad a good iducation, d’ ye see,” he began, “sent to collidge an’ all

that; but I tykes it into my ’ead t’ go t’ sea. An’ I was first-cabin

steward on the ‘Dinkskiver’—I’ve my papers an’ discharge, an’ ready t’

show ’em t’ any man—an’ we runs int’ Australy, an’ I goes t’ the —— Club

there, an’ a gentleman he introdjuces me t’ the club, which is where all

the best gentlemen belongs, d’ ye see. An’ ’e says, ‘Look ’ere, if you’d

like t’ stop ashore we’ll get the captain t’ sign y’ off an’ we’ll put

y’ up as steward t’ the club,’ d’ ye see—I bein’ a first-class cook an’

can bake an’ do any kind o’ cookin’—an’ I got me papers an’ discharges

right ’ere with me t’ prove it. An’ it was a right-o job, one o’ the

best jobs I ever ’ad, s’ elp me. So I was steward t’ the —— Club, d’ ye

see—an’ I’ll show the papers provin’ it t’ any man interested—but fin’ly

one day I blew that job, d’ ye see; an’ I was three years out in

Australy. But finally one day I says t’ myself, ‘I might as well see

America, too.’ An’ I ’ad my passage pyde clean ’ome t’ Liverpool, d’ ye

see, on the Roossian steamer ——, an’ we come across t’ _Ay_quique first,

she bein’ bound round the ’Orn ’ome t’ Liverpool. But three of us gets

ashore in _Ay_quique, d’ ye see, an’ we was messin’ about there

an’—an’—lookin’ about, d’ y’ understand, an’ fin’ly we was left ashore

there in _Ay_quique, d’ ye see, not ’avin’ got on board again before the

packet sailed. An’ the British Consul ’e says, ‘Well, I’ll do anything I

can fer ye, boys.’ An’ I ’ad money too, d’ ye see, an’ my passage was

pyde clean ’ome t’ Liverpool on the Roossian, only she slipped ’er ’ook

while we was ashore an’ there we was stranded in _Ay_quique.

“So then I gets up t’ this ’ere Arequeepy” (It turned out later that he

meant Arica) “an’ I ’ad money on me, d’ y’ understand, but I was lookin’

about an’ seein’ if I couldn’t get work, d’ ye see, an’ messin’ about

’ere an’ there, an’ fin’ly I ’adn’t no money left an’ was on the beach

there in Arequeepy. An’ so I tykes on with the boss ’ere as cook—I bein’

a first-class cook an’ steward—an’ the boss ’e likes me all right, too,

d’ ye see. Only d’ ye know what ’e’s pying me? Sixty bally paysoze a

month! That is, I sye ’e’s pying me that, but not a blightin’ tanner ’as

’e give me yet, an’ s’ elp me, I ayn’t so much as ’ad a shave since I

took up with ’im. So finally I says, ‘Well, ’ere, sir, I wants me

money.’ An’ the boss says, All right, ’e’d pye me all right, only ’e

’adn’t nothin’ with ’im t’ pye me then, the banks bein’ all closed on a

Sunday; an’ ’e says, ‘Well, I’ll tell ye what I’ll do. If you’ll go up

t’ Bolivy on this ’ere trip I’ve got t’ make, I’ll pye ye soon as ever

we get down again,’ d’ ye see. So I says, ‘That’ll do me,’ an’ we come

up ’ere. An’ I ayn’t ’ad my clothes off on th’ ole bolly trip, an’

cookin’ all the time. The boss ’e likes me all right, d’ ye see, but I

don’t know ’ow about this ’ere Peruvan in the ki’chen with me, seein’ as

’ow I can’t understand ’is bloomin’ lingo. An’ I only jus’ left a good

cookin’ job account o’ a black feller. ’E was always pickin’ up with me,

an’ fin’ly one day ’e calls me a —— —— ——, an’ I says, ‘You’re another,

ye —— —— black ——,’ an’ so I quit an’ got this ’ere job with the

boss—anythink at all t’ keep y’ afloat when y’re stove in, d’ ye see.

An’ yesterday mornin’ we stops at a place, d’ ye see, an’ the boss says,

‘Well, now, Joe, rustle out an’ buy some pervisions’—an’ me not knowin’

a word o’ the bally lingo! An’ then las’ night when I’d served ’em

coffee at ’arf past midnight, the boss says, ‘Well, ye might as well

turn in an’ do a wink o’ sleep, Joe.’ So I turns in under the

dinin’-room tyble; only I couldn’t sleep any all night fer the cold.

Nobody ’ad took the trouble t’ tell me it was cold up ’ere, d’ ye

understand, an’ bein’ in the tropicks I didn’t see ’ow it could be—an’

me been livin’ in North Australy where it’s a ’underd an’ twenty in the

shyde. But I says t’ myself, d ’ye see, I’ll tyke one blanket along in

cyse I ’ave a chance t’ turn in on the trip. Only one blanket don’t stop

the cold at all ’ere, d’ ye see, an’ when the boss comes int’ the

dinin’-room this mornin’ an’ says, Well, Joe, let’s ’ave some coffee,’ I

’adn’t slept none whatever. An’ I ’ave that funny feelin’s, my legs all

’eavy an’ achin’ an’ feelin’ that bad in the back o’ the neck I don’t

know but I’m took with somethink. I’ll tell ye this ayn’t no white man’s

country, tyke it from me. When I gets down again, if the boss’ll give me

my money, I’m goin’ t’ make fer ’ome full speed a’ead, I’m tellin’ ye

an’ not ashymed of it. It’s all right-o fer you that talks the lingo an’

as got ’ardened t’ the cold. But fer me that couldn’t sleep a wink all

night fer bein’ that cold—’ere in the tropicks, too—an’ that busy

cookin’ day an’ night I ayn’t ’ad my clothes off On the trip, an’ this

’ere achin’ in my legs, d’ ye see, as if I’d been took with

somethink.... No, I ayn’t been down t’ the city, though o’ course I see

it from up ’ere, an’ I was wonderin’ what place it would be, bein’ a

moderate fine lookin’ town fer these ’ere foreign countries. But we’ll

be goin’ back t’night; the boss’ll likely be ’ere any minute. An’ I

comes of a good family, d’ ye see, an’ they’ll be ’appy t’ see me ’ome

again, they will. They give me a good iducation an’ sent me t’ collidge

an’ all that, d’ ye see; only I took it int’ me ’ead t’ go t’ sea an’

come out t’ Australy, an’ I’ll show any man me papers—”

But the bitter night air that was beginning to sweep across the plateau

was not the only reason I decided to be on my way.

As the sun sets gradually down through the cuenca of La Paz, so it

rises, gilding first the western precipice far up near the edge of the

plateau, plainly seen from my pillow in the “Tambo Quirquincha,” then

slowly crawling down into the valley until, long after its first

appearance, it finally floods in upon the city itself and lights up its

streets and eastern house-walls. On such a cool, sun-flooded morning,

known to the calendar as December fourth, a cholo boy of eleven

presented himself to carry my baggage to the station, and did so easily,

though I should have groaned at the load myself. The second-class

coaches, here tramcars, left first, and slowly corkscrewed up out of the

valley, the motorman, once we were started, coming inside where it was a

bit less frigid, closing the door behind him, and giving all his

attention to two comely cholas whose little black eyes jumped about like

those of guinea-pigs.

On the “Alto” a brilliant sun somewhat tempered the biting cold of the

puna at this early hour. At Viacha a better train awaited us, her engine

turned south,—big vestibuled cars, marked “Ferrocarril á Bolivia” and

plying to Antofagasta, a smooth, well-built roadbed that spoke of Chile

and more modern countries, a diner ready for those who did not choose to

buy boiled goat and frozen potatoes of the skirt-heaped Indian women

squatting at the stations. Once off across the sandy, bunch-grass

wilderness, flat as a sea, with herds of llamas grazing here and there,

and little farms of all shapes hanging on the slopes of far-off and

gradually receding hillsides, the train sped on as if it never intended

to stop again. In truth there was little reason to do so, for it was as

dreary a region as the imagination could picture. The few stations at

which we halted briefly, single, wind-swept huts on the edge of salt

marshes, bore names fitting to the landscape,—Silencio, Soledad,

Eucalyptus—here a lone tree afforded the only feature to which a name

could be attached. Now and then mirages across the dismal desert gave

the _lomitas_ the appearance of islands, the heat waves seeming to be

water lapping their shores.

[Illustration:

Cholas of La Paz, in their striking costume]

In mid-afternoon Oruro arose across the brown pampa, as Port Saïd rises

from her muddy sea, and we rumbled into a flat, miserable, if from the

miner’s point of view important town, gloomy, bleak, perhaps the most

desolate city my eyes had ever fallen upon. The squat adobe buildings,

chiefly one-story, were in many cases thatched over tile roofs, giving

them the appearance of wearing a weather-worn hat over colored caps,

like the Indians of La Paz. Reddish-brown, utterly barren desert hills,

with mine openings, formed the background. The wind drove the sand like

needles into our faces and seemed bent on cutting our eyes out. Cholas

ostentated themselves in somewhat the same costume as those of the seat

of government, but dulled and soiled by the all-pervading dust.

Siberian, dreary, comfortless, the place seemed, yet its stores were

well-stocked, and there were more gringos per capita than I had seen in

many a day. Seeming to hate themselves and life in general, even the

Americans had a haughty, unapproachable air, as in so many mining towns

of the Andes, the unconscious result no doubt of caste treatment of

Indian workmen.

I was only too glad when the train on a newly-constructed branch-line

carried us off northeastward late next morning. A long string of mud

monuments still marks the centuries’-old route across the trackless

desert. Beehive-shaped huts of mud huddled in the sunshine here and

there. We climbed in long zigzags over the crest of the Cuesta Colorada,

drear hills of broken rock where only a scant brown bunch-grass finds

foothold. Below the divide hearty gringo faces, more cheerful in this

lower altitude, broke in now and then on the monotony of Latin-American

features. Many tents marked with large letters “F. C. A. B.” lined the

way, interspersed with the stone kennels of workmen and their women, and

the swarming natural consequences. There is something about a railroad

construction-gang more suggestive of the world’s progress than almost

any other labor of man.

The new line petered out in the stony village of Changolla, some

sixty-five miles from Oruro and halfway to Cochabamba, which it is in

time due to reach. A stage-coach offered accommodations for the rest of

the trip; but the joy of jolting all day in the thing was not

commensurate with the pleasure of a new experience, even had the fare

for both passengers and baggage not been prohibitive to a scantily

supplied wanderer. “See Sinclair there,” suggested the gringo chief,

pointing to a sandy, unshaven Scot of more than six energetic feet, who

was superintending the loading of all manner of railroad material into

ponderous two-wheeled carts; and the hint was sufficient.

Changolla would have been excited that night were it possible for

railroad constructors of long experience in many wild regions to become

so. A fellow-countryman and predecessor of the New Zealander in charge

of the camp had gone on a rampage with an American youth and turned

bandits, in dime-novel style. Filled with distilled bravery, they had

“held up” a nearby camp under the impression that the paymaster had

arrived, and disappointed in this, they had shot a harmless Chilian

employee. It took some time and all my papers to calm the suspicions of

Changolla before I was offered lodging with the New Zealander. The

“bandits” had sworn to shoot him and his assistants on sight, and a

cardboard had been fastened over the window to prevent them from

carrying out the threat by lamp-light as we ate, though none of the

group showed any nervousness at the prospect.

But the highwaying of the pair was amateurish at best. They had made no

plans whatever for getting out of town, had even to ask the way, and had

as provisions—two bottles of whiskey. Thus it was not strange that they

were rounded up before morning, and my hosts showed no surprise when

dawn disclosed the prisoners shackled in one of the box-cars. They had

been taken, asleep, some ten miles from the scene of the crime, with a

bottle in one hand and a gun in the other. The chief looked his

fellow-countryman over, expressed his sentiments with a “You’re a hell

of a bandit, you are,” lit a cigarette, and went on about his day’s

work. Mounted on asses, with a stick through their elbows behind them,

the pair set out for Cochabamba guarded by a score of soldiers. The

punishment for murder in Bolivia is to be taken back to the scene of the

crime and shot, though there is many a slip between the law and its

execution, and judges, according to my hosts, must be properly “greased”

before they will even indict a criminal, particularly when the

complainant is a rich foreign company.

Meanwhile nine enormous carts, each drawn by six sleek and mighty mules,

laden with all the bulky material required for railroad construction, to

say nothing of my baggage, and covered in Forty-niner fashion, got under

way. I set off ahead. The trail followed a broad, stony and sandy

river-bed across which serpentined a yellow brook of brackish, luke-warm

water which it was impossible by just two steps to cross dry-shod. The

unfinished railroad flanked the barren, stony hills on the left, the

embankment carved out of them being broken by unbuilt bridges and

incomplete cuts and tunnels that cost me many a steep scramble. In the

river-bed below passed a broken stream of Indians and cholos driving

donkeys and mules, heavy-laden, as were most of the drivers themselves,

their ponchos, chiefly of red with narrow perpendicular stripes,

standing out against the barren brown landscape. Every little green

patch on its edge was well-populated; many a hacienda or small village

having become a railway construction camp where haughty young Englishmen

gazed coldly and suspiciously at one of their race sinking his caste to

travel on foot. The Briton who has “knocked about” the world until the

corners have been blunted is an agreeable fellow; but in his youthful,

fresh-from-London days he is best avoided.

The embankment gave out, and we struck a gorge where the carts were

saved only by the vigilance of “Sandy,” astride his splendid macho, and

the mules, as by a miracle. In the blazing, dusty, river-bed, sweat

poured profusely as I plodded, clinging to the tail of a cart to be

snatched across the ever-recurring stream. The towns were miserable, yet

misery seems far less pitiful in perpetual summer. Worst of all, there

was no water a man dared drink. The banks of the river were lined for

broken spaces with large quantities of cobbles inside wire nets—an

Argentine idea, according to the Scot—to keep the river from undermining

and washing away the coming railroad. It seemed absurd to have to take

such precautions against a tiny meandering brook, but in the rainy

season this increases to a rushing torrent filling all the valley.

It was starving mid-afternoon before “Sandy” called a halt for

“breakfast,” and the peons prepared a _chupe_,—a stew of potatoes,

charqui, rice, and anything else that it occurred to them to toss into

the pot. At sunset we camped like gypsies in the stony, wind-blown,

waterless river-bed; the mules were turned loose among several heaps of

straw carried in one of the carts, and we rolled up in blankets on the

sand. The drivers were a motley gang of Bolivian, Argentine, and Chilian

cholos, each with the accent peculiar to his nationality. All had long

knives in their belts and were inclined to use them on slight

provocation. Several carried their wives, or at least their women, with

them in the carts, sometimes with a child or two in addition.

Next day as I plodded beside his long-legged mule, “Sandy” whiled away

the long, hot hours with reminiscences.

“Did they tell you in Juliaca how I cleaned out their damned hotel,” he

asked.

They had, but I wanted “Sandy’s” own version of the affair.

“Well, we were playing billiards, when some greaser said something about

gringos, and I told him to shut up. The crowd was too drunk to know

better, so I had to take a bunch of billiard-cues and clean out the

thirty-two of them. It cost me just a hundred and twelve pounds—twelve

for the greasers’ doctor-bills and a hundred to get my friend the

subprefect to lie low until I could get over the line.

“Before the railway came I used to transport across the desert from

Arica,” he went on, steering his mule around a hollow of broken rock,

“and I had a little dog named Bobbie Burns. He was a wise little dog,

and as the desert sand burned his feet he got still wiser, and used to

run way ahead of me, a mile or so, so far he could just see me, and then

dig a hole in the sand and lie in it until I was a mile ahead and almost

out of sight again; and then he would race by me with a ‘how-d’-do’ yelp

and dig another hole. A chileno greaser killed that little dog,” said

“Sandy,” gazing dreamily across the mirage-flowing landscape, “and I

never got a chance to do as much for him.”

The Capinota river we had been following, or rather criss-crossing, for

two days came to an alfalfa-green village, exceedingly restful to eyes

that had been gazing unbrokenly on the sun-flooded desert, and the trail

struck off at right angles up a branch of a stream milky with dust. That

night we camped again in the sand at the end of the haul, in celebration

of which “Sandy” shaved and put on a purple neckcloth to scream at his

red hair. There I took leave of him, with seventeen miles still

separating me from Cochabamba. It was not the problem of transporting

myself, but rather my baggage, that forced me to trot several times into

blazing-hot Parotani in quest of a donkey—all in vain. At length—strange

chances one takes in South America—I caught a total stranger bound for

the city, and he was soon lost in the dust ahead, with all my

possessions on the crupper of his mule. The sweating trail with its

plaguing brook grew in time into a road on the left bank; huts, then

entire villages sprang up beside me; troops of pack-animals increased to

an almost steady stream, and at four I overtook my baggage in Vinto,

recovered it by payment of a _boliviano_, and was soon screaming in a

little toy train on a 75-centimeter-gage track, at the terrifying speed

of an hour and forty minutes for the twelve miles, into the second city

of Bolivia.