ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA
There are three such “railroads” running out of Cochabamba, though none
of them venture more than a few miles. All were brought up piecemeal on
muleback or on massive two-wheel carts, like the first steamers on
Titicaca, for it is what the natives call a “mediterranean” town. One is
a steam line with a single toy locomotive, which starts every hour from
the central plaza, for the suburb Calacala, “noted” for its baths,
splitting the ears with its infantile shriek and spitting hot cinders
upon all the bench-holders in the vicinity. A cochabambino assured me
that I could not believe it possible this “enormous” locomotive had been
brought “from Germany” on muleback; but as he had never been further out
of town than its three little lines could carry him, his conception of
locomotives was somewhat atrophied. This one was so childlike that once,
when it suddenly started up as I was crossing the street, I
unconsciously put out a hand to thrust it back until I had passed.
Cochabamba, 60,000 inhabitants by its own count, the majority of whom
have never left its suburbs, is conceded to be the second city of
Bolivia, and considers itself the first, after the South American
fashion. It is constantly quarrelling with La Paz as to which shall
furnish the country its president, a truce being usually patched up by
alternating the honor. The population of Bolivia is made up of just such
heterogeneous groups, among which there exists a profound aversion. The
rivalry is particularly tenacious between the _Collas_, those, chiefly
of the Aymará race, inhabiting the _Collao_, or northern portion of the
country bordering on Titicaca, and the south of the republic, containing
a large proportion of Quichua blood and partaking of many of the
characteristics of that timid, dreamy race. Like the Quichua in general,
the cochabambino is wedded to his native soil, with an ineradicable
affection for it, partly because isolation keeps its customs largely
unchanged. The tongue of the Incas is still the chief one of the lower
classes; the town’s name, indeed, is derived from the Quichua words
_kocha_ (lake) and _pampa_ (plain)—which the Conquistadores as usual
corrupted by pronouncing it as if they had a cold in the head. There is
little question but that the surrounding valley was once a lake-bottom.
Founded in 1574, the place was christened by a high-sounding Spanish
name, which, as so often happened in South America, failed to stick. It
has a restful, summer-resort air, with birds singing in its shaded
alamedas, reminding one faintly of Granada, with its sand and cactus and
half-arid soil requiring irrigation. The little river Cocha wanders by
the north and east sides of the town on its way to join the Mamoré; the
surrounding hills are less brown than the altiplanicie, half-clothed
with trees and with patches of green running up the sides of the range.
The showers were no highland drizzles, but perfect sheets of water for
an hour or more—fine prospects for my continued travels at the end of
wheel-going!
Yet it is a colorless place compared to La Paz. Adobe is the chief
building material; there is no structure of great importance, though “La
Compañía” of the early Jesuits has the usual ornate façade. Its houses
are of the light yellow mud of the surrounding plain, less painted than
those of the capital, and even the tile roofs are of so dull and dusty a
red as scarcely to excite the eye. On a barren knoll at the back of the
town is a ruined adobe bull-ring, once large and ornate, and still
higher up, before the monument to the “Heroes of Cochabamba,” the gaze
stretches away across a yellowish land, flat as a sea, baking in the
blazing sunshine. Costumes, too, show far less color than those of La
Paz. La chola wears a similar hat, but it is flatter and therefore
uglier, and she has neither the immaculateness, instinct for pleasing
color combinations, nor the sprightliness of her Aymará cousin. Natives
of pure Caucasian blood are so rare as to be almost conspicuous.
Important commerce is largely in the hands of Germans; even the English
vice-consul was a Teuton. The municipal library bore a large sign
announcing that it was open from 9 to 11, 1 to 4, and 7 to 9. At
nine-thirty the doddering old librarian appeared, and at 10:05, when he
had finished reading the morning paper and smoking his cigarette, he put
on his hat and remarked, “Nos vamos, señores,” and go we did, sure
enough. In the afternoon and evening he did not appear. Cochabamba has
been called the paradise of priests. Fat, coarse-featured men of the
cloth swarm, and the town is rated the most fanatical in Bolivia. As
late as ten years ago a _hogüera_ was lighted in the central plaza to
carry out an _auto de fé_ against a Protestant who had dared to preach
his doctrines in a private house, the materials, for the inquisitorial
bonfire being the holy books and furniture of the evangelist. The troops
were called upon to interfere and prevented the consummation of the act,
but they were not able to keep the “heretics” from being cruelly stoned
by the populace. The approach of the railway, however, the arrival of
many gringos, and a now firmly established mission-school with a
government subsidy is wearing down somewhat this medieval point of view.
In a corner of the main plaza of Cochabamba, where the sunshine streaks
upon it through the trees, was the “gringo bench,” a rendezvous at which
there was always to be found at least an American and an odd Englishman
or two, generally miners and even more generally penniless. For Bolivia
had proved less golden than the rumors that had oozed forth from her
interior, and there is no better climate than that of Cochabamba in
which to sit waiting for whatever chooses to turn up next. At the time
of my arrival the bench had three principal occupants. The most
permanent fixture was “Old Man Simpson,” over eighty, not merely a
fellow-countryman, but originally from the same town in which I had
spent my youth; indeed, he was still a subscriber to the weekly
newspaper I had earned more than one school-day dollar folding and
“carrying.” A “Forty-niner” who had drifted from California to Chile, he
had been in South America unbrokenly—though frequently “broke”—many more
years than I had been on earth, his fortunes rising and falling with
miner’s luck and open-handedness, his “Spanish” still atrocious. Now he
was so nearly blind that he could recognize us one from another only by
our voices; and every day he sat from sunrise to dusk, except for his
“breakfast” and siesta from eleven to one, in the shaded corner of the
plaza, a cud of coca-leaves in one cheek, his gnarled and leathery hands
folded on the head of his _chonta_ cane. All day long he would weave
endless tales of the prospector’s life, wandering disconnectedly over
all the western side of the continent, as long as he could get a single
gringo to sit and listen. When he could not, and was, or fancied
himself, alone, he sat hour after hour motionless, murmuring each time
the clock in the tower above struck, “Well, it’s —— o’clock,” and
relapsing again into silence.
After Simpson came Sampson, an extraordinary cockney, resourceful,
quick-witted, full of quaint sayings, of a strikingly personal
philosophy of life, so much of a “hustler” that his initiative often
boiled over into audacity. He spoke fluently a colloquial Spanish and
considerable Quichua, chewed coca incessantly, and came close to being
the ugliest man I had ever set eyes upon. This last mentioned quality
was enhanced by the slap-stick clown garb he wore,—faded overalls with a
bib, some remnants of shoes here and there about his ham-like feet, a
woolen neckcloth à la Whitechapel, and an Indian felt hat on the back of
his bullet head. His view of life he summed up—among friends—briefly
with, “I am strictly honest; I never tyke anything I can’t reach.” As to
his resourcefulness: in this identical garb he had gained the entrée to
the haughtiest class of natives, with whom outward appearances
constitute some 99 percent., and had talked his hypnotic way into the
confidence of a lawyer and ex-senator of Cochabamba to such an extent
that the latter contemplated giving him charge of a large tract of land
to plant with cotton.
The third bencher, Tommy Cox, had been “down inside” with Sampson on
some prospecting scheme that had failed. Originally from Toronto, he was
in appearance and speech a “typical Englishman,” a little sandy-haired
fellow of twenty-five, the antithesis of his companion in initiative, of
so dim a personality compared to Sampson that one barely noted his
existence when the two were together.
When I arrived in Cochabamba nothing was more certain than that I should
continue my tramp down the Andes, through Sucre and Potosí, into the
Argentine. But plans do not keep well in so warm a climate. I sat one
day musing on the trip ahead of me, when Sampson cut in:
“’Ere! If you’re looking for something new, why don’t you shoot across
country by Santa Cruz to the Paraguay river and down to Asunción and B.
A.? Least I don’t think it’s never been done by a white man alone and
afoot.”
The idea sprouted. I suddenly discovered that I was weary of high
altitudes and treeless _punas_, of the drear sameness of the Andes and
the constant repetition of the _serranos_ that inhabit them. To that
moment I had, like most of the world, conceived of Bolivia as a lofty
plateau, arid and cold; whereas more than half of it is a vast, tropical
lowland, spreading away from the slopes of the Andes to the borders of
Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, making it the third largest country of
South America. There was, it seemed, a fourth way of entering or leaving
this mediterranean land, and it was neither by way of Mollendo, Arica,
nor Antofagasta; but a route all but unknown to the world at large, yet
followed by many of its imports and exports. The _montaña_ or _yungas_
promised a new type of people, a new style of life; a knowledge of South
America would be only half complete without including in my itinerary
the immense hot-lands and river-webbed wilderness stretching eastward
from the Andes. I wished some day to visit Paraguay, anyway; the
distance to Puerto Suarez was evidently greater than to railhead in the
Argentine—by striking an average of varying information, with the
assistance of such maps as the local librarian gave me time to glance
over, I came to the conclusion that it was roughly 800 miles—but on the
other hand much of this new route was floor-flat, and I had had my fill
of climbing over such labyrinths of mountain ranges as lay to the south.
True, in this season the region to the east would be wet and muddy, but
with no bitter cold nights in prospect I could throw away much of my
load, and at least there would be brilliant sunshine most of the time,
which is half of life. Besides, is not the chief joy of travel the
privilege of suddenly and unexpectedly smashing fixed plans, to replace
them with something hitherto undreamed?
To all these arguments there was added another still more potent. When I
began to make inquiries, I learned that the proposed trip was
“impossible.” Several of my informants quoted recently received letters
to prove it. The last hundred leagues would be entirely under water; the
wild Indians of the Monte Grande would see to it that I should not get
so far, to say nothing of miles of chest-deep mud-holes, “tigers,” and
swarms of even more savage insects, and many days without food or human
habitation. That settled it. In Bogotá the tramp down the Andes had been
“impossible,” but had long since lost completely that charming quality.
I decided to strike eastward in quest of the Paraguay.
“I wouldn’t mind tackling it myself,” sighed Tommy, when I mentioned my
decision to the benchers. “I’m badly needed in B. A. But I’m stony
broke. Of course if I could find anyone who would take along a
steamer-trunk-size man as excess baggage—”
“If the senator doesn’t make up his wandering Bolivian mind soon, I’ll
quit embellishing this plaza myself,” put in the cockney, though there
was a glint in his eye that suggested, long afterward, that he had meant
the hint as a hoax, and considered the trip as impossible as did the
rest of Cochabamba.
Were I to have a companion, I should not have chosen Sampson. He was a
man with far too much mind of his own to be good company in an
uncivilized wilderness. Tommy, diffident, unresourceful, totally lacking
in initiative, without self-confidence, wholly innocent of Spanish, to
all appearance tractable and harmless, was much to be preferred.
Moreover, he was better looking. Though I was thinly furnished with
_bolivianos_ and the nearest possible source of supply was Buenos Aires,
I concluded that the code of world-wanderers forbade me to leave Tommy
to waste away on the “gringo bench,” and we joined forces. He was to
carry his proportionate share of such baggage as I could not throw away,
including the tin kitchenette and the bottle of 40 percent. alcohol that
went with it—if experience proved I could trust him with that—leaving
me, thanks also to the offer of a fellow-countryman to carry the
developing-tanks to Santa Cruz on his cargo-mule, only a moderate load.
I should have bought a donkey, or another _chusco_, rather than turn
ourselves into pack-animals, but for two reasons: first, such a purchase
would have relieved me of most of the billetes I had left; secondly, the
fate of “Cleopatra” and “Chusquito” caused me to doubt whether any
four-footed animal could endure the journey.
It was two months from the day I had walked into Cuzco that one of
Cochabamba’s toy trains carried us past adobe towns and mud fences, with
dome-shaped huts that gave the scene an oriental touch, and set us down
in Punata in time for dinner in the _picantería_ where Tommy had once
before washed down a similar plate of stringy roast pork with a glass of
chicha. Then we swung on our packs and struck eastward into the unknown.
Beyond Arani next morning came the real parting of the ways. The trail
that swung to the right along the base of the hills went on to Sucre and
the silver mountain; that by which we zigzagged up the face of a stony
range led across the continent. Here the mountains closed in, and the
vast, fertile, yet dreary and desolate plain of Cochabamba, that had
seemed to stretch out interminably in the brilliant sunshine,
disappeared at length below a swell of land and was lost forever behind
us.
For a week the going was not unlike that down the Andes, though it grew
gradually lower as the endless ridges of the eastern slope calmed down
slowly, like the waves of some tempestuous sea. It was only on the road
that I began really to make the acquaintance of Tommy. In spite of his
Canadian birth he dressed like a Liverpool dock-laborer, with a heavy
cap, a kerchief about his neck, and a heavy winter vest—that is,
“w’stc’t”—which he could not be induced to shed, however hot the
climate, though he readily enough removed his coat. He spoke with a
strong “English accent,” and a man following behind with a basket could
have picked up enough H’s to have started a supply-store of those scarce
articles in Whitechapel itself. He had given Cochabamba ample
opportunity to show its gratitude at his departure, but the fourteen
_bolivianos_ of his last eleemosynary gleanings turned out to be barely
sufficient to keep him in cigarettes on the journey. His share of the
load he carried in the half of a hectic tablecloth, of mysterious
origin, tied across his chest, as an Indian woman carries her latest
offspring. His own possessions consisted wholly and exclusively of a
large, sharp-pointed, proudly-scoured trowel; for Tommy was by
profession a bricklayer and mason. This general convenience, weapon,
sign of caste, and hope of better days to come, he wore through the band
of his trousers, as the Bolivian peon carries his long knife, and the
services it performed were unlimited. I was never nearer throwing my
kodak into a mud-hole than when it failed to catch Tommy solemnly eating
soft-boiled eggs with the point of his faithful trowel.
The hospitality of the Bolivian soon proved low, even in comparison with
the rest of the Andes, and every meal and lodging cost us a struggle. At
Pocona, for example, I ended a 36-mile walk down the nose of a range on
which a coach road descended by never-ending S’s to a narrow valley
bottom below. Tommy had fallen behind, and I had begun to wonder whether
he could endure the pace our scantiness of funds made necessary. As I
debouched into the grass-grown plaza, I paused to ask a dim-minded
person drowsing before one of the doors where one could find a night’s
lodging. He silently projected his lips toward a building before which
stood the empty stage-coach. There a group of supercilious, unwashed
cholos of varying stages of insobriety informed me, with an air that
plainly said “We are purposely deceiving you,” first, that there was no
tambo in town, then that there was accommodation only for travelers “á
bestia.”
“For horsemen only, eh?” I cried, in the voice natural to an all-day
fast. “Where does the corregidor live?” What are gobernadores in Peru
become corregidores in Bolivia.
“Down the street,” mouthed a half-drunken fellow, with a lazy toss of
the head in no particular direction.
I snatched a youth out of the group and pushed him before me. Some way
down the foot-torturing cobbles he halted at the open door of the usual
slatternly, earth-floored room, saying:
“The corregidor lives here.”
“Go in and fetch him,” I answered, blocking his attempted retreat. He
called out two or three times in the singsong with which neighbors greet
neighbors in the Andes, then obeyed my order to enter and summon the
“authority”—at least he disappeared inside the building. Some time later
two chola girls appeared at the door to ask in pretended surprise what I
desired.
“Where is the corregidor?”
“He is in the country. He doesn’t live here,” they replied respectively
in one breath, betraying themselves by their carelessness in not
rehearsing the reply before appearing.
“Where is the boy who brought me here?”
“Escapado—he escaped—through the back door.”
I had long ago learned this trick of local “authorities” in Andean
villages of hiding away at the approach of a stranger bearing orders
from the government, and the complicity of all the population in the
concealment. But I had learned, also, one means of bringing him to
light. I marched into the house and, throwing my pack on an adobe divan
covered with blankets, announced that I should sleep there. The cholas
would call the corregidor at once, they had called him, they couldn’t
call him, he was coming in a minute, he did not live in town, and a
dozen other falsehoods poured in a chaotic flood from their lips. For an
hour I held to the divan. But as evening settled down, it became evident
that the ruse of Peru would not work in Bolivia; that though I might
sleep there by force, I should remain thirsty and hungry. I shouldered
my bundle and hobbled back to the plaza. There ten centavos spent for
chicha convinced the sceptical inhabitants that I was not penniless, and
in time it paved the way to a request for food.
“Cómo no?” came the mechanical answer, and a long time after dark a big
bowl of broth, luke-warm of temperature but sizzling hot with _ají_, was
followed by some hashed black _chuño_, or frozen potatoes, mixed with an
egg, and some bran-like bread.
“How much do I owe?” I asked when I finished.
“Pues—ah—será setenta centavos.”
“Está bién. And who is going to sleep on those beds?” I continued,
pointing to the long adobe divans, each with a roll of thin mattress and
blankets, at either end of the room.
“Nadie.”
“No one? How much do you charge for a bed?”
“Un boliviano, no más,” replied the chola in that droning, soothing
voice in which the Andean always names an exorbitant price which he
knows the traveler cannot refuse to pay. “Voy á tender, no?” “Yes,
spread it out.”
I was stripping to crawl into the “star” bed of the tambo—in which only
horsemen are accommodated—when there sounded at the door I had fastened
ajar with a bench, the worn and humble voice of Tommy. Having fallen
behind because of a half-sprained ankle, he had stumbled on into town
down that stony, looping descent which I had found bad enough even by
day. Fortunately there was a bit of cold broth and some chuño left,
after devouring which he turned in on the other divan.
Next day we passed a wind-blown, rain-gashed plain, with a few huts on
which to practice my neglected Quichua and, early in the afternoon,
reached Totora, so named from a long rush which grows in swampy ground.
It is the largest town between Cochabamba and Santa Cruz and capital of
a province, with several thousand inhabitants. Set in a hollow of the
treeless hills, it was dreary and colorless as a mining town, with
breakneck cobbled streets, and a little tile-paved plaza surrounded by
what Tommy called “drapers’ shops,” all with the selfsame display of
bayeta and other crude-colored cloths. The vista of many a street was
enlivened by swinging red signs, like Japanese or Chinese banners, above
the doors where chicha was for sale. Far better, and almost given away
in Colombia, this native drink had come to cost twice what a larger
glass of beer would in the United States. In the upper corner of the
plaza we spread ourselves at ease on a shaded bench. Around the _pila_
in the center of the square a constant crowd carrying earthen jars
fought for the two trickles of water. Behind us stood what dared to call
itself the “Hotel Union,” consisting of a billiard-table and an absent
proprietor, who, according to the disinterested cholas, might be back
during the evening to discuss with us our offer to spend the night with
him. The neighboring tambo was closed “because of a wedding in the
family,” so rare a ceremony in Bolivia that we had not the heart to
complain. Tommy tired of sitting, and went to lie down in frank “hobo”
fashion in the plaza band-stand. As dusk came on we made a round of the
shops, warned that there would be none for some days ahead. We bought
eggs, and blocks of crude sugar, now called _empanada_, coca to chew
when thirsty, several loaves of the bran-like bread that weighed us down
like grindstones, and some shelled peanuts which we found next day to be
unroasted. Any chip of stone or scrap of iron served as weights in the
shops, though some had brass cups full of shot, over which a paper was
pasted by the rare government inspector, soon to “break itself” until he
came again. That purchaser who got twelve ounces to his pound was as
lucky as the one whose _vara_ came anywhere near being a yard long. A
half-pound weight was commonly the heaviest on hand, and the old woman
who sold us sugar poured that amount in with the weight in the other
side of the scales, and so on until she had made up the unprecedented
quantity we demanded.
A telegraph wire strode bandy-legged over the hills with us on the
twenty broken and panting miles to Duraznillo. Across a flanking valley
the range was mottled with all colors from deep red to Nile-green, the
depths of its gullies purple under dense cloud-shadows, while all the
rest of the world lay in brilliant sunshine, and vast banks of
snowy-white clouds took on fantastic shapes which the imagination could
animate into all manner of strange beings, or people with innumerable
plots and fairy-tales. One mighty descent brought us to a “river,” but
at the very moment we reached it, it turned suddenly muddy from rains
somewhere in the hills above and spoiled our plan for a “bathe,” as
Tommy expressed it. In the dry, burning hills beyond, my companion went
astray, but found himself again by following my hob-nailed footsteps. He
had so little initiative that he would not lead the way, and his
favorite plan of plodding at my very heels having been vetoed, as he did
not mix well with the landscape, he commonly trailed a half-mile behind,
usually taking care not to lose sight of me.
Duraznillo had a public “rest-house” that had once been an adobe chapel,
but which was now as bare as a millionaire’s room in heaven. I boiled
oatmeal and eggs in the water Tommy brought from a stagnant pool not far
away, but waited in vain for the return of the only European-clad
resident, who had volunteered to “arrange us.” As the shades of night
spread, the beaten-mud floor looked harder and harder, and in nosing
about we were astonished to discover several once-imported mattresses
covering a pile of adobe bricks in the back _corredor_ of the chief
house of the village, apparently uninhabited. Still, it was possible
that the local “authority” would in time come out of hiding, and we
lolled patiently, if road-weary, in the moonlight.
We had waited until—well, perhaps eight, though without a watch it
seemed hours later, when patience ceased to be a virtue, and we slipped
through a hole in the mud fence, each to embrace a mattress. It may be
that a trap had been set for us. As we approached the wall again, an
unusually large half-Indian, wrapped in a poncho, loomed up on the other
side, and shouted in an authoritative voice:
“What are you doing inside that fence?”
Now I do not like any man to address me in that tone, least of all a
South American Indian. It is neither good training for his own primitive
character nor advantageous to future gringo travelers.
“Speaking to me, indio?” I demanded.
“I am corregidor of Duraznillo, also guardian of this house.”
“Corregidor! Then you are the very fellow we have been looking for these
last four hours. You will kindly lend us two mattresses to sleep on.”
“I will not lend you _one_ mattress to sleep on. What are you doing?”
Plainly he was of Aymará rather than meek Quichua blood.
“And where have you been hiding yourself, señor corregidor? We have a
letter for you from the government.”
“Ugh!” he snorted, with an effort at sarcasm. “Let’s see that letter
from the government.”
“It is in my pack in the chapel.”
“Bring it over here.”
“Since when have caballeros run after Indians to show them government
orders? Are you going to lend us two mattresses?”
“Not one!”
“Tommy, chuck them over.”
He did so with trembling hands, for something had given the diminutive
bricklayer an extraordinary respect for “authorities.” The corregidor
followed at our heels, bellowing, as we carried our finds into the
ex-chapel and spread them out. A stocky youth and a woman with a
flickering candle appeared behind him in the doorway, and the Indian
demanded my papers.
“Can you read?” I asked.
“I can,” he snarled; which he could, to the extent of spelling out the
order at about a line a minute.
“Bien,” he admitted at last, in a surly voice, “but you are to ask for
things, not take them.”
“From a corregidor who hides himself?”
“And the prefect orders that you be furnished what you need _at a just
price_,” he added triumphantly, ignoring my reply.
“Exactly.”
“Then you will pay two bolivianos for each mattress.”
“Very well; but you will first make out a receipt for that amount, that
I may send it back to the prefect.”
It was not the first time I had played this unfailing card against an
Andean “authority” attempting extortion. He knew he was beaten; for
though he could read, after a Bolivian fashion, he probably could not
write, and certainly would not dare let such a document reach the
prefect. Like a true Latin-American, however, he saved his face as long
as possible:
“Very well, give me some paper to write it on.”
“As corregidor, you should furnish your own paper. I have none.”
“Well, you may use one mattress, but not two,” he growled.
“You lose. In _my_ country we are not accustomed to sleep two on the
same mattress.”
A shiver of rage seemed to pass over him, while his Castilian pride
struggled for expression behind his mask of Indian features. Then he
faded away into the night and was heard no more, though I was not so
certain of him as not to prop a heavy wooden beam against the door in
such a way that an attempt to sneak in upon us during the night would
quite likely have been followed in the morning by the intruder’s
funeral.
Never-ending spiral descents, so steep we had to set the brakes
constantly, making our thighs ache, brought us at last to a hot and
stony river-bed across which a luke-warm, knee-deep “river” snaked its
way incessantly. We stuffed leggings and _Fusslappen_ into our bundles
and walked all the rest of the day barefoot in our unlaced boots,
crossing the stream perhaps a hundred times, and envying the hoof-soled
natives as often as we paused to pull on our footwear. Tommy found it
too much trouble to roll down his trousers after each crossing, and
complained of sunburned legs for days to come. But at least the going
was level. The stillness and lack of population recalled Jaen in the far
north of Peru. For hours we tramped stonily between ever lower
cactus-grown hills, only the mournful note of the jungle-dove breaking
the silence. The first gnats and giant-jawed insects we were doomed to
endure more and more as we advanced to the eastward began to annoy us.
As scrub trees thickened, bird life grew more prevalent. Bands of
parrakeets screamed by, as always along these dry, tropical river-beds;
now and then a parrot or two, forerunners of many to come, passed
overhead. The rare huts squatting in scant patches of shade were now of
mere open-work poles. To sleep in them was far less inviting than to lie
on the ground under a shrub.
[Illustration:
“Sandy” leading his train of carts loaded with construction material
for the railroad to Cochabamba]
[Illustration:
The “gringo bench” of Cochabamba,—left to right, “Old Man Simpson;”
Tommy Cox; Sampson, the Cockney; Owen, and Scribner]
But the Andes did not subside so easily. Next morning the trail shook
off the river and climbed wearily to a wind-swept puna, then dropped by
a leg-straining _bajada_ into another cañon with a muddy, lukewarm
brook, only to pant upward again to another summit. Several times each
day we sweated to a hilltop and lay down in a cool breeze we should not
often enjoy in the days to come. Range back of blue range spread away
into ever-bluer, purple distance. The region recalled the Malay
Peninsula—with all its romance rubbed off and even more inhospitable
inhabitants tucked away in the undergrowth. Yet surely, if slowly, the
Andes were flattening down, and each summit was less lofty than the
preceding.
One afternoon passing arrieros told us that three of our _paisanos_ were
not far ahead. We increased our pace and strode at five, with thirty
miles in our legs, into the miserable mud town of Chilón. In the corral
and corredor back through one of the dismal dwellings we found, camped
with their four mules, the American prospectors, Scribner, Kimball, and
Owen, who had burdened themselves with my developing-tank. We foraged
together. These interior villages are less useful to the seeker after
supplies than a lone country hut, for in them each native “passes the
buck” by sending the inquirer on to someone else. The traveler who has
lived for days chiefly on the anticipation of what he will eat in the
town he has been assured is “provided with everything,” is fortunate to
collect the ingredients of even one real meal, and that only at the
expense of wandering from door to door, like a Buddhist priest with his
begging-bowl. Chilón was even more anemic and indifferent than usual. It
is rated the most fever-stricken region of Bolivia, and the government
has striven in vain to drive out the almost universal _chucho_ by
planting the eucalyptus and sending doctors to study its cause. The only
water to be had was a yellow liquid mud dipped up in the back yard.
Kimball prepared to cook in it some of the _charqui_ he had bought at
blockade prices, only to bring to light a swarm of maggots. A can of
peaches from Chile—some time in the last century—cost two bolivianos;
four ounces of tea, a boliviano, a pound of sugar as much, and at that
it was a coarse, dirty, stony stuff, so hard an ax was required to break
it. One slattern a bit less sullen in aspect than the town in general
asked if we “knew how” to eat _mote_ and _charol_. We assured her we
knew how to eat anything we could get our fingers on, and she set before
us a single plate of boiled shelled corn and little cubes of fried fat
pork, which we ate with the spoons nature had provided us. In the entire
town we gleaned two whole eggs. Most of the huts that displayed them
answered with that clumsy old Andean lie, “Son ajenos—They belong to
some one else.” A woman squatting behind one of the huts admitted she
had eggs to sell, but said she did not feel like getting up to sell
them. That was the attitude of all Chilón. It may be that the hookworm,
as well as the _chucho_, was prevalent.
When I awoke at dawn, Kimball, in retaliation for the state of the
charqui, had already picked a chicken from one of the trees in the
corral and managed to stuff it into his alforjas without a squawk. By
the time we were off, it began to rain. A half-sand, half-mud road
splashed and skated away through semi-tropical scrub woods, caking our
feet with glue-like mud, and soaking our garments from both inside and
out. In spite of the rain the tropical heat weighed down upon us like
water-logged blankets, and nowhere was there water to drink. Rarely
among the spiny scrub trees we came upon a miserable hut of poles and
sticks, in each of which lounged a dozen or so of the colorless, mongrel
natives of the region. _Rancho_ was being cooked in one such hovel, and
though the householders showed no joy, or any other species of emotion,
at our presence, when the meal was ready, a small wash-basin of rice,
charqui, and pepper stew was set on the ground before us, and we were
each silently handed a wooden spoon. There was, of course, no bread, but
a gourd bowl of _mote_ was added for our competition. This was one
contest in which Tommy was easily my superior. The languid, fever-yellow
chola would not accept payment for the food, though she did so readily
enough for the chica we had drunk, calling up to Tommy far-off memories
of the land of “free lunch,” so that several times during the blazing
afternoon I heard his sheet-iron voice torturing the wilderness behind
me with his own version of a one-time Broadway favorite:
“_S_take me back to New York town....”
Not two hours beyond we drifted into a saw-mill hacienda, and before I
knew it Tommy had told his tale so feelingly to the Italian owner, who
had the misfortune to understand a little English, that we must go in
and have a plate of cold spaghetti, imported to these wilds at
nerve-shaking prices. Best of all, after nothing better than liquid mud
for days, was several glasses of almost clear water. The Italian was
bubbling over about some new invention by one of his countrymen that
would forever abolish war. Half the world might be abolished without our
hearing of it in these wilds. Before we left he inquired whether we had
quinine, and forced upon Tommy a box of pills, with the urgent advice to
take one every morning. I had already begun to dose myself daily, but
was never able to convince my companion that ills might be forestalled
far more easily than they could be ousted after they had staked their
claims.
It was December 21, the longest day of the year, and the sun was still
high when we again overtook our “paisanos,” camped this time along a
brick-floored corredor under the projecting eaves of a large tile-roofed
hacienda-house, among scrub trees and scattered huts to the right of the
trail. The building was imposing for the region, for the owner held
title to a vast tract and many cattle. I recalled the plump hospitality
of many a similar hacendado of Peru, but was quickly reminded that we
were in Bolivia. Our “paisanos” had already eaten. Having come on foot,
Tommy and I were too low caste to be invited into the brick-floored
dining-room with the swarming family. After much reconnoitering I found
a hut where a lean chicken could be bought at a high price, and the
señora of the hacienda grudgingly agreed to have her servants cook it.
Here, too, the only water was a thick yellow liquid flowing behind the
house and common to all its animals. At sight of it we had abandoned our
plan to bathe, yet we must drink it and cook in it. The apathy of life
in these parts is exemplified by the fact that an hacendado of
comparative wealth will drink mud all his life, rather than dig a well.
Long after dark an unwashed chola came waddling into the corredor with a
single bowl of charqui stew and two wooden spoons. Tommy fell upon this
gratefully, as he would have upon a bone discarded by a dog. Personally
I was not pleased with the metamorphosis the fowl had undergone, and
calling out the haughty hacendado, I thrust a handful of bills toward
him, asking if he could not sell us something fit to eat, even if he did
want the chicken for himself. The hint caused him to turn a livid green.
These landowners of the interior, too “proud” to sell food to travelers,
are yet too tight-fisted to give it away; and a lifetime on their own
broad, if worthless, acres, with only a few cringing Indians about them,
lording it over even their own women, causes them to consider themselves
vastly superior to all mankind, and to treat travelers accordingly. So
thoroughly had I ruffled his pomposity that the fellow, visibly shaking
with anger, went to sit under a scraggly tree in the grassless sand
before the house and rage in silence, then took to pacing back and
forth, in and out of the building, and kept it up until well into the
morning. He might have vented his rage more effectually, for law has but
slight foothold in these wild regions, but for the half-dozen revolvers,
rifles, and pistols lying about us in the corredor. Meanwhile a servant
brought my chicken in a pot, and though it was tougher than life in
Bolivia, we drank the broth and hung the remnants of the fowl to a
rafter above our heads, out of reach of dogs, Indians, or ants.
It rained most of the night, and the wood we could find in the chill
slate-tinted dawn was so wet that it was a good hour before we boiled
tea and rice in the yellow mud—and coaxed Tommy to get up in time to
eat. Barely two hundred yards beyond, we came to the muddy river, must
unshoe the feet we had just carefully shod for the day, and had a
provoking task dressing them again on the mud-reeking further bank.
Tommy went to hunt cigarettes—which are to be had in these parts only by
inquiring at each hut until one has found some old woman who has
inadvertently rolled a dozen or two beyond her own consumption—and it
was hours later that he overtook me. We undulated on over half-sandy
country, a thorn-tree desert without sight or sound of human life, grown
with thousands of immense cactus trees of the pipe-organ species from
which fell myriads of _tunas_, an “apple” Tommy called it, the outer
spines of which fall off when ripe, the juicy interior, full of tiny
black seeds, with mildly the taste of strawberries, effective at least
in quenching the thirst.
At a scattered cluster of huts called Mataral we found a group of
drunken Indians, male and female, celebrating the customary wake in and
about a hut where a baby had died. The corpse of the _angelito_ lay
pale-yellow and half naked on a bare, home-made table, a lighted candle
on either side of its head, its nostrils stuffed with cotton, and
already beginning to make its presence known to another of the five
senses, while all about the premises rolled maudlin, fishy-eyed
half-breeds, only too glad of any excuse for consuming gallons of
overripe chicha. Outside, a half-sober cholo was piecing a coffin
together from the odds and ends of boxes that had once held foreign
imports. The priest’s assurance that infants, properly baptized, go
directly to heaven makes such a death the cause almost for rejoicing
among the ignorant population of Bolivia, even if it leads to nothing
worse than passive infanticide.
Frequent ridges and a stream that forced us to unshoe and shoe a score
of times, reddening our legs where our leggings should have been,
decidedly reduced our pace. Not without surprise, therefore, did I sight
at dusk, among the trees on a low bluff across a nearly waterless
river-bed, a village of moderate size, thirty miles from where we had
started in the morning. It was Pampa Grande. My fellow-countrymen had
already commandeered a mud room on a corner of the second street, and
chucked their possessions pell-mell into it. Among the luxuries the
place offered was bread, soggy and gritty, dark of complexion as the
inhabitants, but bread for all that. While we were swallowing chunks of
this and of _empanada_, some one discovered that it was Christmas Eve. A
celebration was imperative. Kimball dug up an ancient fife from his
pack, I still possessed a battered mouth-organ, and all but Owen, who
had none, lent their voices to the lusty, if not musical, carols that
astonished the apathetic hamlet so thoroughly that a few found energy to
gather in a drooping group in the noiseless street outside. We ended
with our patriotic anthem, in the midst of which Kimball’s fife suddenly
broke off its wail long enough for him to assure Tommy:
“Here, young feller, don’t get it into your nut that’s ‘Gawd save no
King’ we’re treatin’ these greasers to!”
The prospectors pushed on in the morning, but finding ourselves a day
ahead of our schedule, and that we could still reach Santa Cruz before
the end of the year, we decided to spend Christmas in Pampa Grande. It
was ideal Christmas weather. The village stands on the eighteenth
parallel, at an altitude of some 4000 feet, giving it a soft midsummer
air, with a caressing breeze and a most restful atmosphere. Life had
slowed down to a snail’s pace. The mud-housed inhabitants were too
indolent to make a noise or disturbance; even our next-door neighbors
were too apathetic to come and satisfy their curiosity by staring at us.
Lying on the adobe couch under the eaves, we could let our eyes roam
lazily over the surrounding sandy, scrub-wooded country of unabrupt
hills, utterly silent but for the occasional faint note of the mourning
jungle-dove.
But the all-important question was Christmas dinner. The boyish
corregidor was duly impressed by my papers, and assured me we could have
“anything we might desire.” I took him at his word and handed over a
boliviano with a request for eggs. He called in a sandaled youth and
sent him away with orders to round up a basketful. Then he wandered
home. After a time the youth came shuffling back to say he could not
find a single egg; and thrust the coin toward me. I was too experienced
an Andean traveler to accept it and thus absolve the “authorities” of
any further aid. Blocked in his turn, the corregidor came again in
person to suggest a chicken at a boliviano. My extravagance in accepting
this offer startled him, but he dropped the coin deftly into my hand and
hurried languidly off, ostensibly to look for the fowl, really to sneak
home by a roundabout route. He could not be blamed much for such
conduct. Appointed by force and obliged to serve without emoluments, the
rural “authority” lives between two millstones, the lower composed of
his fellow-townsmen and lifelong friends, with whom he must continue his
existence, a far more tangible and permanent reality than the somewhat
nebulous government that furnishes travelers with imperative orders from
far-off La Paz or Cochabamba.
But a Christmas dinner is nothing to grow sentimental or sympathetic
about. When I had loafed and drowsed and read an hour or more longer, I
wandered a few yards up the sandy street to the corregidor’s hut.
“No,” he mourned regretfully from his hammock, “I have not been able to
find a chicken. Nobody wants to sell.”
“But, señor corregidor,” I protested, “we haven’t a thing with which to
make dinner—Christmas dinner, and the Minister of the Interior in La Paz
told me—”
The official name brought him slowly from the hammock to his feet, a
worried look on his face.
“Very well,” he sighed, “then we will make you an almuerzo here in my
house, which is your own.”
“Not at all, señor; we would not dream of troubling you. But if you have
wherewith to make an almuerzo, let us have the ingredients and we will
cook them to suit ourselves.”
“Well, there is charqui—”
“Don’t mention it. We don’t want to insult our stomachs, even on
Christmas. I was speaking of food.”
“Well, there is a house down at the edge of the river where they have
killed a beef—”
“Yes, three days ago; and the lump of it my compatriots bought this
morning all but lifted the roof off our hut. A slice carved out of the
middle of it was grass-green. The yellow dog that picked up both chunks
of it when we threw it into the street may have had the Christmas dinner
of his life, but he is not likely to see another.”
“Ay, Diós, señor, then there is nothing else.”
“Now, for the good of Pampa Grande, I advise you! There are plenty of
chickens in town.”
“The people will not sell. The only way is for you to go out and shoot
one with your revolver.”
“I never risk my aim on anything smaller than a bullock. Cartridges are
expensive in the wilds of Bolivia.”
Such gringo persistency was annoying. Native travelers needed only to be
told the same lie two or three times before they left him in peace to
drowse in his hammock. With a badly concealed sigh he wandered into the
street, and led the way across the noiseless sanded plaza to the house
of his friend the alcalde. The two conferred together and finally sent
out a cholo with orders to run down a chicken—“anybody’s at all.” The
emissary returned by and by to report that he could not find one. The
pair looked at me as much as to say, “There, you see the last hope has
failed.” I ignored the hint. In despair they called in another cholo and
with a mumbled order handed him a shotgun. A long time later a report
was heard some distance off. The two officials shivered. By and by the
cholo returned with the shotgun and announced that “it was badly
loaded.” He said nothing about the aiming. The officials looked at me
imploringly. I remained like a statue of patience seated on a cactus. At
last the alcalde, with the air of a member of a suicide club who has
drawn the black bean, snatched up the gun and, calling upon the cholo to
follow, disappeared into the sunshine. For a time only the chirp of an
insect in the thatch above sounded. Then a shot was heard, and a moment
later the alcalde dodged into the room like a man pursued by bandits,
thrust the weapon quickly under a reed mat, and assumed his seat and his
most innocent air. Legally he might shoot all his neighbors’ chickens on
government order; practically he was not anxious to be seen at it. The
corregidor looked sorrowfully but appealingly up at him. His voice was a
weak whisper:
“Yes, we got him. It was Don Panchito’s red one. No, the pullet. No,
none of the family seemed to see me, but quién sabe?”
For a considerable time more nothing happened. I began to wonder if
this, too, had been a well-acted ruse. Now and then the alcalde or the
corregidor rose and peered anxiously down the street through the crack
of the door. Whenever the patter of footsteps sounded outside, the pair
grew stiff with misgiving.
Then suddenly in burst the cholo, carrying under his poncho the _pollo_,
already relieved of its feathers, thus accounting for the last delay. It
was a tolerably plump bird, and the corregidor thought fifty centavos
would be a just price. He would give it to Don Panchito to-morrow, when
his wrath had cooled. I paid it and hurried home. There followed an
hour’s wandering and pleading, all of which I must do in person, since
Tommy spoke no Spanish, and several more appeals to the corregidor
before I got lard, rice, tiny potatoes at ten cents a pound, as well as
an unexpected bowl of what purported to be stewed peaches. The pot the
corregidor could lend us was large enough for an army. Tommy, who had
once been second cook on board ship—after they had found him—was
appointed fireman and general assistant, and soon had the three-stone
fagot cook-stove out under the back porch roaring. Then with plantains
fried in lard and —. But why enumerate? By the time we had fed the
ragamuffins at the back door and hung the not yet empty kettle on the
top of a hammock-post, even Tommy’s inclination to make tea had
evaporated. It may not have been a genuine Christmas dinner. Pumpkin
pie, for instance, was painfully conspicuous by its absence. But it
produced the same effect. While Tommy stretched out on a mud divan, I
spread my poncho on the sand under a tree in the back yard, where the
gusts of breeze came often enough to lull me quickly into a siesta.
I had barely fallen asleep when the chicken-shooter came to “give me
information about the town,” and I must get up and go back to the room
with him. There he picked up the scattered pages of Ibañez’ “Flor de
Mayo” I had discarded as I read, then clawed out my copy of a Cochabamba
newspaper. When he had perused that he took to fingering my note-book,
which fortunately he could not read, until at last in disgust I spread
my poncho again on the brick floor and was soon sound asleep. When I
woke again at sunset both informant and information had faded away. I
went out on the porch to write, and a neighbor came to pull the
note-book out of my hands and solemnly “read” it, quite oblivious in his
illiteracy to the fact that there was hardly a word of Spanish in it,
besides being legible only to the elect. Then he must inspect my
fountain-pen and learn all its inner secrets. When I recovered it and
continued writing with what ink was not smeared over his person, he
thrust his nose between the pages, inquiring:
“Are you noting all the inhabitants of Pampa Grande?”
“No.”
“Ah, only the notable ones, then?”
“Alas, no; you see I have only a moderate-sized note-book.”
[Illustration:
The home and family of the _alcalde_ who could not read]
[Illustration:
Our impromptu celebration of Christmas Eve in Pampa Grande]
In the cool of evening the corregidor came again to share his troubles
with me, bewailing the fact that Pampa Grande no longer had a Christmas
celebration, because they had no cura. By the same token there was no
longer a public market on Sundays and feast-days, “for the Indians only
come to town to sell if there is a church fiesta at which they can drink
chicha.”
“God save us,” he sighed as he rose to leave, “for want of a priest we
are all turning Protestants!”
I respread my “bed” early. But the aftermath of the Christmas dinner had
not yet run its course. Some time far into night I was for a long time
half-conscious of some hubbub, and at last woke entirely. On his piece
of blanket on the floor Tommy was rolling from side to side, in one hand
his precious trowel, which he was beating on the flaggings until it rang
again, while shouting at the top of his voice:
“Mortar! Mortar! How in —— can I lay bricks if you don’t keep me in
mortar?”
All next day he dragged far behind in the twenty-five miles to
Samaipata, second largest town of this leg of the journey. Ahead of us
was a five-days’ tramp without the suggestion of a village, and we were
forced to weigh ourselves down under such supplies as we could purchase.
Some two hours beyond Samaipata, 3000 feet or more above the road, up
the range on the right, stands what the natives of the region call “El
Fuerte.” Here, in a splendid strategic position, covering the flat top
of an entire hill, were and still are extensive terraces and the mostly
fallen remains of what must have been important buildings, now overgrown
with brush, though there are few or no real trees. Scattered about this
cold and barren plateau, some 10,000 feet above sea-level, are many
carved seats, similar to those of Cuzco and vicinity, and figures cut in
sandstone, among which jaguars, ostriches, and other fauna of the Andes
can still be distinguished, though many are time- and weather-worn
beyond identification. Practical miners who have visited the spot report
the existence of ore-washing apparatus of hewn stone. According to
tradition the Incas had here their easternmost stronghold, built by
Yupanqui, the emperor who aspired to conquer the hated _huara-ni_, the
“breechless” tribes of the tropical lowlands. At present “El Fuerte” is
utterly uninhabited. For many years one aged Indian lived here, long
reputed to be more than a century old. The people of the region called
him “the Inca” and credited him with supernatural powers and untold
wealth. The usual rumors of hidden gold and jewels, and of subterranean
passages from temple to treasure-house, hover about the place. So far as
is known the site has never been visited, or at least explored, by
archeologists, to whom it might bring rewards not inferior to those of
Machu Picchu.
As the Andes flattened down, ever slowly and as if under protest, the
population showed more African blood; and if the people did not grow
more friendly, at least they were less incommunicative than those of the
highlands. The women took to smoking, a custom almost unknown to the sex
on the _altiplanicie_, until it become quite the fashion. Quichua had
finally died out near Totora. Real tropical heat, such as I had all but
forgotten the existence of, weighed down upon us, though it did not
induce Tommy to be seen without his winter vest. We moved forward
steadily, but no longer pushed the pace; the tropics is no place for
that. Wandering comfortably along sandy trails through half-woods, we
came now and then upon a cluster of weather-blackened wooden crosses
tied together with vines, with rudely carved and misspelled lettering,
such as:
“Rogad adiós por el alma de Pablo Morales
Fallesió 22 julio de 1911.”
The alcalde of Monos, which consisted of a single hut at the top of a
stiff zigzag, had already held that honor for years, in spite of his
protests. When I handed him the order from his chief in Samaipata, he
returned it, asking me to read it aloud, as he could not. I did so
fairly, without taking advantage of the occasion to include a command
from the president of the republic for him to stand on his head, and,
duly impressed, he spread a sun-dried cowhide for us on the unlevelled
earth floor of his wall-less lean-to, and set his women to preparing us
a caldo, of which we furnished the rice and they the fire, labor, and a
bit of what looked and tasted like grass. Food had grown so tasteless
that we had to force it down like medicine, simply because we needed the
strength. To me fell the task of making the family understand why we
should wish to eat again in the morning, before we started.
A couple of hours beyond, I came upon Tommy, who for once had forged
ahead, seated beside the trail and overcome with sadness. With reason,
as the Spaniard says. Far away across the bottomless wooded hole in the
earth at our feet rose a sharp range with red rock cliffs up which the
trail climbed to the very gates of heaven—which we should find locked no
doubt when we arrived. As Tommy put it, “I think they must have to take
part of that hill away when the moon comes over.” We slept that night
higher than Samaipata. But this was the last surge of the Andean
billows. Next morning we came out on a wonderful vista of tropical South
America, an unbroken sea of green, rolling and more hilly than I had
imagined it, spreading away in all directions into the purple haze of
vast distances. We had come at last to the end of the Andes.
Now and then thereafter came a short descent, but no more rises, and we
were soon in real jungle, with palm-trees of many species. Banana plants
appeared; and insects bit us from hair to ankles. Upon us came that
care-free languor of the tropics, and for the first time I realized the
strain of living and tramping two or three miles aloft. Dense vegetation
crowded the trail, now heavy in sand in which the constant slap of our
feet grew monotonous, close on either hand. Night had no terrors now,
for we could lie down anywhere. Fruit of many kinds grew,—plantains,
bananas, melons, oranges green in color, papayas,—but was rarely for
sale. The rare inhabitants had a more kindly air, addressing us as
“Ché”—“Hola, ché gringo!”—the familiar and affectionate term, evidently
from the Guaraní for “Look!” or “Listen!”, which we were to hear often
from now on clear into the Argentine, but they were still not noted for
unselfishness. A belligerent attitude might have won more, but that we
had left behind with the bleak highlands. Besides, through it all Tommy
would have hung on my coat-tail, had I worn one, shuddering in his
English, laboring-class voice, “Don’t! Don’t tyke it! The police!”—and
once anything had been obtained, he would have made away with it so
swiftly that I should have caught little more than its vagrant aroma.
The desire for sweets was alarming. Indeed, it was a craving for food,
rather than hunger, that troubled us. We ate great chunks of
_empanisado_, and an hour after the best meal we should have jumped to
accept an invitation to a fifteen-course dinner.
We were following now the course of the little, all but waterless,
Piray, some day to join the Mamoré and the Amazon. There were many
pack-trains of donkeys and mules going and coming. Thunder grumbled
frequently far off to the east. Toward sunset we came upon an
hacienda-house before which hung a bullock on a clothes-line—in the
process of being charquied, and already as succulent as the sole of an
old boot. The haughty hacendado grudgingly sold us chunks of the
already-too-long-dead animal at the breath-taking price of fifty
centavos a pound, and steeping tea in water so thick it could all but
stand alone, we cut off slabs of the meat and thrust them into the fire
on the ends of sticks, to eat it half-raw and unaccompanied, like
gauchos of the pampas.
About the house was thick grass, an unusual feature in South America,
for ordinarily either the altitude is too great for it, or the jungle so
thick it cannot grow in the constant shade. The hacendado gave us
permission to lie anywhere in the yard, with a graciousness that implied
we might also eat the longest grass if we chose. All the corrals in the
neighborhood were filled with donkey- and mule-trains, with arrieros
speaking both Spanish and the Quichua of the highlands, on the way to or
from Santa Cruz with cargoes of alcohol, hides, and tobacco coming out
and foreign merchandise going in. For a long time we sat in the velvety
air of a jungle evening, listening to the singing of tree-toads and
crickets and the occasional faint tinkle of a grazing lead-mule’s bell,
with now and then the sharp, excited chorus of birds,—all interwoven
with the wind-borne voices of the arrieros. Then I picked a spot, as apt
to be free from snakes, on the clipped grass a few yards from the house,
and lay down on my rubber poncho. The soft breeze soon lulled me to
sleep, in spite of the itching of countless insect-bites. I had not
slept long probably, when I was awakened by rain striking me in the
face. It would not last long, I fancied. I pulled the poncho over me and
let it rain. It did. Quickly it increased to a hollow roar; trickles of
water began to tickle me along the ribs. Evidently I had picked a slight
slope, for the water was soon pouring in upon me in streams. I caught up
my scattered belongings and dashed for the house, the wet poncho lapping
up all the mud in the vicinity, and some of my effects dropping at each
step, forcing me to await the next flash of lightning to find them.
Under the corredor roof there was barely room to roll up beside Tommy on
the earth floor, trampled hard as an iron casting, and for an hour there
roared such a tropical deluge as I had never known in the western
hemisphere.
The Piray, now a wide, raging river of red mud, forced us to strip to
the waist, and even then splashed us redly far higher as we breasted the
powerful current. All day we plowed through dense forest, wet and soggy,
singing with insect life, a roaring tropical shower bursting upon us now
and then, after each of which the red sun blazed out through the thick,
humid air. With dusk we waded heavy-kneed into La Guardia, sticky and
sweated as the dweller in the tropics must always be who cannot spend
the day in a hammock; fighting swarms of gnats while we waited patiently
for the promised antidote for our raging appetites. Twice during the day
we had climbed padlocked bars across the trail. I had fancied them
toll-gates, but found they were _aduanillas_, little custom-houses for
the collection of duty on goods entering, or produce leaving the
department of Santa Cruz. Each hide exported paid about 65 cents; the
flour that had come all the way from Tacoma, Washington, by ship, train,
and mule had added to its already exorbitant price a high departmental
duty. No wonder chunks of boiled yuca commonly took the place of bread.
Beyond La Guardia the country was more open, the forest at times giving
place to half-meadows, with single trees and grazing cattle, across
which drifted a breeze that tempered the midsummer heat. The way lay so
straight across the floor-flat country that the line of telegraph poles
beside it looked like a single pole standing forth against the horizon.
There were many huts now, roofed and sometimes entirely made of palm
branches. Warm, muddy water was our only drink, for we had descended so
low that the inhabitants were too lazy even to make chicha. Once we got
a watermelon, which are small here and far from being on ice. In passing
another hut I was startled by a cry of “Se vende pan,” and went in to
pay two females, whose faces were a patchwork of gnat-bites, an
astounding price for some tiny, soggy biscuits. Ponderous ox-carts with
solid wooden wheels crawled by noiselessly in the deep sand behind three
and even four pairs of drowsy oxen. Everything, even the breeze, moved
now with the leisureliness of the tropics. The jungle ahead was so flat
and green, so banked by clouds, that one had the feeling that the sea
was soon to open out beyond. We loafed languidly on, certain that our
goal was near, yet though there were other evidences that we were
approaching a city, there were no more visible signs of it than in
approaching Port Saïd from the sea.
At last, so gradually that we were some time in distinguishing it from a
tree-top, a dull-colored church-tower grew up in line with the vista of
telegraph-poles. We drifted inertly into a sand-paved, silent, tropical
city street, past rows of languid stares, and on the last afternoon of
the year, with Cochabamba 335 miles behind us, sat down dripping, a
week’s lack of shave veiling our sun-toasted features, in the central
plaza of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.
Tommy had heard so many stories of the generosity of the cruceños that
he was astonished to have reached the center of town without being
invited from some doorway to come in and make his home there as long as
he chose. This was doubly annoying, since rumor had it that white men
were so in favor with the gentler sex that a sandy-haired one as
handsome as Tommy fancied himself to be was in danger of being damaged
by the feminine rush his appearance was sure to precipitate. After a
time he rose to carry his perplexity back to where we had seen the
British vice-consular shield covering the front of a house. When I met
him again he had told his sad tale so effectively that he had been “put
up” at both hotels by as many compatriots and was eating regularly at
each, though taking care not to let his right hand know what the left
was carrying to his mouth. After dark, in a humid night made barely
visible by a few candle street-lamps, I splashed out to the hut of
Manuel Abasto in the outskirts, to sleep under the trees in the
canvas-roofed hammock of one of the American prospectors, the legitimate
occupant being engaged in the rôle of Don Juan in the city. The hut was
crowded with peons already half drunk, languidly fingering several
guitars and now and then raising mournful voices in some amorous ballad.
At midnight church-bells rang, and one distant whistle blew weakly to
greet the incoming year, but the music of the tropical rain on the
canvas over my head soon lulled me to sleep again.