Running the Rapids of the Ratama [PAGE 217]

ACROSS THE
ANDES

BY
CHARLES JOHNSON POST

A Tale of Wandering Days Among the Mountains of Bolivia and the Jungles of the Upper Amazon

Illustrated by the Author

NEW YORK
OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY
MCMXII

Thanks are due to Harper and Brothers and to the Century Company for permission to incorporate as chapters in this volume, articles appearing in Harper’s Magazine and The Century, and to the latter for the drawings and paintings accompanying such articles.

THE TROPICS

“The legion that never was listed,”

The soft-lilting rhythm and song,

The starlight, and shadowy tropics,

The palms—and all that belong;

The unknown that ever persisted

In dreams that were epics of bliss,

Of glory and gain without effort—

And the visions have faded, like this.

From dusk to dawn, when the heat is gone,

The home thoughts nestle and throb,

And the drifting breeze through the dim, gray trees

Stirs up the fancies wan

Of the old, cool life and a white man’s wife

With a white man’s babes on a lawn,

Where the soft greens please—yet each morrow sees

The flame that follows the dawn.

From dawn till eve the hot hours leave

Their mark like a slow-burned scar;

And a dull, red hate ’gainst the grilling fate,

Impulse and fevers weave;

While the days to come—in years their sum—

The helpless thoughts perceive

As an endless state, sans time or date,

That only gods relieve.

Rubber or gold—the game is old,

The lust and lure and venture;

And the trails gleam white in the tropic night

Where the restless spirits mould;

A vine-tied cross ’neath the festooned moss,

Bones in a matting rolled;

No wrong or right, the loss is slight,

The world-old fooled of gold.

“The legion that never was listed”—

The glamor of words in a song,

The lure of the strange and exotic,

The drift of the few from the throng;

The past that was never resisted

In the ebb or the flow of desire,

The foolish, the sordid, ambitious,

Now pay what the gods require.

CHAPTER PAGE [I. Old Panama, Agamemnon, and The Genial Picaroon] 13 [II. The Fighting Whale, and Chinamen in the Chicken Coop] 27 [III. Through a Tropical Quarantine] 46 [IV. A Forced March Across the Desert Of Atacama] 62 [V. Arequipa, the City of Churches] 76 [VI. Through the Inca Country] 88 [VII. Out of La Paz by Pack Train] 103 [VIII. The Back Trail Among the Aymarás] 118 [IX. Over the First Great Pass] 131 [X. The Toll Gate and Mapiri] 145 [XI. Waiting for the Leccos] 159 [XII. Off on the Long Drift] 172 [XIII. The Lecco Tribe] 184 [XIV. Drifting Down the Rio Mapiri] 200 [XV. Shooting the Ratama] 214 [XVI. Opening up the Jungle] 224 [XVII. Twenty-Three Days Against the Current] 238 [XVIII. By Pack Mule Through the Jungle] 252 [XIX. The Indian Uprising] 266 [XX. Ambushed by Ladrones] 280 [XXI. The Music of the Aymarás] 289 [XXII. Back Home] 299 [XXIII. Off Across the Continent in a Batalon] 309 [XXIV. Through the Rubber Country] 321 [XXV. A New Crew and Another Batalon] 337 [XXVI. The Falls of the Madeira and Home] 350

ILLUSTRATIONS

[Running the Rapids of the Ratama] Frontispiece PAGE [Announced that a person, a somebody, was awaiting me below] 13 [Pointed scornfully to the outside] 15 [Agamemnon] 18 [Those who refused to pay were thrown into the chicken coop] 35 [When the end lid was taken off the bodies of eight dead Chinamen were taken out] 37 [A deserted brigantine at anchor dipped slowly with the long Pacific swells] 42 [What the diplomat said was direct and voluble] 49 [A wide dusty canal which in the intervals between showers serves as a market] (facing page) 50 [Close resemblance to an army of drunken bugs] 52 [Every day our winches whirred and clattered off some dusty, sand-blown port] (facing page) 54 [Lima, a delightful city of contrasts] 58 [An Arequipa carrier] 78 [In Arequipa, the city of churches] (facing page) 80 [Hardly a day without its Saint’s fiesta] 83 [An Andean touring car] 85 [In Pizarro’s day it was probably the same—costume, craft, and barter] (facing page) 100 [Haggled with arrieros over pack mules] 104 [Prisoners along the trail up from La Paz] (facing page) 106 [Aymará driver of pack llamas] 111 [Members of a gang of prisoners] 112 [The guard for the road menders] 114 [Rodriguez and his Cholo helpers tightened the rawhide cinches and replaced the packs] 116 [Aymará herders played their weird flutes] 123 [A few streets were still plainly marked, though the village has been dead these many centuries] (facing page) 128 [Blizzards blowing from the Andean passes] 133 [Soldering the food in tin cans] 138 [Scattered in hysterical flight up and down the precipitous slope] 141 [Skirted the base of an unbroken cliff] 142 Toll gate in Mapiri 145 [An Andean mountaineer] 146 [There loomed the big mound of stones with a twig cross on top] (facing page) 148 [Slowly the rafts sank under the weight] 172 [The shrewish, leather-skinned Indian wife] 174 [There were, according to the Lecco standards, no “bad places” yet] 179 [Leccos lowering the callapo through shallows] 181 [Lecco of the twig raft] 182 [These Leccos are among the finest Indians] 184 [Napoleon, a Lecco chief] 188 [A Lecco type] 189 [We seemed to move with intolerable slowness] 203 [But it is those parts of the river that the Leccos fairly love] 209 [A rubber picker] 211 [On a rope a trolley worked back and forth from which was suspended a tiny platform] 258 [Never was there such a ride—not even in the Rapids of the Ratama] (facing page) 264 [The Tacana brides, adjusted for themselves comfortable niches in the cargo] 314 [At the tiller presided a huge Tacana] 316 [Never was such an exhibition in the history of firearms] 319 [But it was monkey that furnished them with the greatest delicacy] 323 [Often we pass a little shelter of palm leaves] 326 [Night camp on the Rio Beni on the way out] (facing page) 328 [It was only the shack of a lonely rubber picker] 330 [In the thin blue smoke, it at once turned a pale yellow] 332 [Justice is administered according to the standards of his submissive domain] 333 [The bolachas of rubber are threaded on long ropes] 348 [Dragging a batalon around the portage of the Madeira Falls] 351

ACROSS THE ANDES

CHAPTER I
OLD PANAMA, AGAMEMNON, AND THE GENIAL PICAROON

ANNOUNCED THAT A PERSON, A SOMEBODY, WAS AWAITING ME BELOW.

It was in Panama—the old Panama—and in front of the faded and blistered hotel that I met him again. A bare-footed, soft-voiced mozo had announced that a person, a somebody, was awaiting me below. Down in the broken-tiled lobby a soured, saffron clerk pointed scornfully to the outside. Silhouetted against the hot shimmer that boiled up from the street was a jaunty figure in a native, flapping muslin jacket, native rope-soled shoes, and dungaree breeches, carefully rolling a cigarette from a little bag of army Durham. It turned and, from beneath the frayed brim of a native hat, there beamed upon me the genial assurance of Bert, one time of the Fifth Army Corps, Santiago de Cuba, and occasionally of New York; and within my heart I rejoiced. Without, I made a signal that secured a bottle of green, bilious, luke-warm native beer and settled myself placidly for entertainment.

A panicky quarantine stretched up and down some few thousand miles of the West Coast that left the steamer schedules a straggling chaos. For fifteen dull, broiling days I had swapped hopes and rumors with the polyglot steamship clerk or hung idly over the balcony of the Hotel Marina watching the buzzards hopping about the mud flats or grouped hopefully under the quarter of a slimy smack. Once I had inspected the Colombian navy that happened to be lying off the Boca and observed a bran-new pair of white flannels go to their ruin as a drunken Scotch engineer teetered down an iron ladder with a lidless coal-oil lamp waving in discursive gestures; once I had met a mild, dull, person who had just come up Magdalena River way with a chunk of gold that he assured me—without detail—had been hacked off by a machete, but here his feeble imagination flickered out and he wrapped the rest in a poorly wrought mystery until finally he fluttered over to Colon for the next steamer of innocent possibilities.

POINTED SCORNFULLY TO THE OUTSIDE

With these the respectable amusements were exhausted and I therefore rejoiced as I confronted that cheerful, raconteuring adventurer under the battered Panama. A ship’s purser, a drummer of smoked hams, a Coney Island barker, a soldier, a drifter, and always a teller of tales, he had lain in the trenches on Misery Hill before Santiago in support of Capron’s Battery with a gaunt group around him as he wove the drifting thread of adventure from the Bowery to the Barbary Coast in a series of robust anecdotes. And they bore the earmarks of truth.

Now, in the genial silhouette framed against the tropic glare, I realized that whatever days of waiting might be in store they would no longer be dull. A true rumor had put him in a lone commercial venture somewhere down these coasts and here at my elbow was to be placed all the shift and coil of petty adventure, whimsical romance, and the ultimate results of two years of adroit piracy in and out of the Spanish Main that had ended, as I observed, in dungaree breeches, rope-soled alpargatas, and a battered Panama hat.

Therefore through the ministrations of an occasional bottle of the native bilious beer and other transactions that shall remain private, the days sped themselves swiftly and unheeded guided by the adept hand of Romance. Again, as in the trenches, I viewed the world under Asmodean influences, but what I heard has no place in these pages; it is worth an endeavor all its own. Then, one morning, the news spread that at last the Mapocho lay at the Boca and the hour of departure for the first stage to the interior of South America was at hand; the night before was the last I saw of my genial friend. In the morning he did not appear, and it was strange, for I had expected to do the proper thing, as I saw it, realizing that dungarees and alpargatas are poor armor and that our consulates offer but a desperate and prickly hospitality.

In the afternoon I went aboard, crawling down a gangway that dropped to the deck like a ladder where, in the morning, it had reared itself with equal steepness against the Mapocho’s sides. Such are the Pacific tides at the Boca. Agamemnon, the shriveled little Barbadoes darky, scuttled about importantly, stowing our baggage and giving an occasional haughty order to some steward in a nondescript patois that passed mainly as Spanish and that often served, as I learned, better than the purest Ollendorfian Castilian. Later it appeared that Agamemnon had left one of these same steamers under a cloud—a trifling matter of a few sheets and pillow cases—and now to return clothed with trust and authority over “de fixin’s an de baggage of gent’mens” swelled him with an inarticulate triumph.

AGAMEMNON

In the long months that followed none could have given more faithful service or loyalty than this skimpy Barbadoes darky. That is within his limitations, for he could no more resist liquor than a bear can honey, but nevertheless when he had transgressed, his uncertain legs would bring him back to his duties, speechless perhaps, but with arms wavering in gestures of extenuation.

Also to Agamemnon wages meant nothing; a shilling now and again—sometimes even the equivalent of a whole dollar—advanced him with the specific understanding that it was for gambling and not for liquor. Once, in La Paz, he won a hundred and fifty dollars, Mex, and became an impossible animal until it had been frittered away. In the same city he went to the bull fight and joined in the play against the final bull that is “dedicated to the people” and fought so cleverly that we became prominent by reflection and gave a party at the corrida the following Sunday to see Agamemnon’s promised performance.

By this time Agamemnon had become a character and a score of little boys scrambled over the barrier eager to hold his hat, his coat, and his cuffs. With a flourish he handed each to its eager guardian and then, with a coat held as a capa, gave a flourish and advanced toward the bull. The crowd applauded. Agamemnon made a bow and a flourish and waggled the coat. The bull snuffed briskly and charged. Alas! The hand had lost its cunning, for Agamemnon shot ten feet skyward, turned an involuntary somersault at the apex of his flight, and then sprawled back to earth. A half dozen of the toreros drew off the bull; the small boy custodians flung his garments at him scornfully, while the Bolivian audience laughed itself hoarse as the dusty, dishevelled figure hobbled out of the ring and away from the crowd.

For himself Agamemnon asked but little although where he felt that the dignity of his position was involved he became a tower of strength. It was in the same city that he felt the hotel people were not treating him fairly, as they were not, and his remonstrance was met by a Cholo mozo who hurled a sugar bowl at his head and followed it up with a knife. Agamemnon dodged and beat down the Indian with a chair; on the instant a half dozen Cholos poured at him and the kitchen was in a riot. Backing away, he denuded the dining tables of service and used it as a light artillery fire. By the aid of an earthenware jar, some handy crockery, and a chair he was able to retreat safely across the patio and up the stairway that led to our rooms. A water pitcher laid open a skull and a wash-bowl stopped the rush long enough for him to grab a gun from the pillow when we arrived, together with some stubby Bolivian police and the bony Russian proprietor; order was restored, fortunately, for it might have been serious.

Agamemnon explained satisfactorily and incidentally showed only a minor bump or so, but his Cholo and Aymara antagonists bore most proper marks of the conflict. That night in the midst of his shoe-polishing and packing he remarked briefly: “If you gent’mens hadn’t er-come jes’ den I cer’nly would have licked dem fellers, bahs!” Apparently no victory was complete to his mind until he had accomplished a massacre.

At another time he waded into a crowd of Cholos in the interior and took from them their machetes and shot-guns, acting on his own initiative, because he knew that in that far interior laborers were too precious to waste by their own fighting. From our tent we heard two shots and the rising yells of a small riot and then, before there was time to grab a gun or gather the few white men, the figure of Agamemnon staggered up the crest of the river bank with his arms full of the commandeered machetes and trade-guns.

There was the time when a balsa upset in a boiling eddy and Agamemnon jumped in as a faithful rescuer only to still further complicate matters; also when—but it is useless, Agamemnon is a story in himself. Tireless, uncomplaining, honest, loyal, yet of the aimless tribe of bandar-log, apparently only merely the mouse of a man in a wrinkled black skin and yet the paragon of retainers. Peace be to him wherever he has drifted.

At the table that evening on the Mapocho the few passengers looked each other over in the customary, stand-offish way,—a couple of fresh faced young Englishmen adventuring to clerkships, a German commercial traveler—an expert in those Latin countries who makes one blush for the self-complacent, brusque, greaser-hating jingoes that are only too typical of our export efforts—three mining engineers, a returning Peruvian diplomat for whose presence we later blessed him and a couple of native Ecuadorean families, wealthy cacao haciendados, who flocked by themselves in a slatternly, noisy group.

But by the next evening, drawn together by the prospect of a tedious, uncertain voyage through erratic quarantines, we were one large family. We lay back in our canvas chairs under the galvanized iron roof of the upper deck—so generally peaceful are those seas that the awning is permanent—and watched the Southern Cross flickering dimly above the southern horizon. The cigars glowed in silence for, though it was the hour for yarning, each bashfully hung back. Then an engineer started. The Philippines, Alaska, the boom camps, Mexico rose in successive backgrounds and then the talk shifted round to our respective objectives down this long coast. One was for the nitrate fields, one for the Peruvian silver mines, and one for the rich placer banks of the far interior. The one who was bound for an examination of Peruvian silver mines—a mountain of a man—finally made a confidence:

“Gold,” he remarked as an obvious preliminary, “gold—or silver, I’m a Bryan man—is generally good enough for anyone, but if I had my choice I don’t mind saying that I’d rather have a coal mine down here in South America than either or anything!”

The others sighed enviously. A coal mine in South America where there is no coal except that from Australia and Wales and where a couple of hundred miles from the coast it is worth twenty dollars, gold, a ton! A coal mine—well—it is the stuff of which dreams are made in South America.

“Yessir,” he went on raptly, “coal is the thing. And I don’t mind admitting that I’ve got it.”

He hauled a black object from his pocket and held it out. Eagerly it was snatched from his hand. There it was, hard, shiny, black, varying in no way from those in the kitchen scuttle at home—a splendid sample of anthracite coal! It was too good. They laughed.

“Bring it from home?” they asked pleasantly.

The mountainous engineer chuckled contentedly. “That’s anthracite and as fine a specimen as I ever saw. I don’t mind talking a little freely since I’ve got it covered in an iron-clad contract.

“You see,” he went on good-naturedly, “I’m always wide awake and the morning we left the Boca a young chap came aboard—American, too, and right pleasant spoken—where I was sort of loafing and we got acquainted. To make a long story short, he’d been wandering around up in the back country of Colombia and had located this coal. He didn’t have any special idea of what coal meant down these ways—he was from Pennsylvania, son of a pit boss or something and coal was as common to him as water to a duck—but when he pulled out a couple of these samples you bet I froze fast. He tried to be mighty quiet and mysterious when he saw I was interested—you know how such a chap is when he thinks he’s got a good thing, and he was sort of on the beach, down on his luck you know—but I pumped him all right.

“He had a fool idea of going home as best he could and then taking the family sock and combining it with other family socks and coming back and opening up his coal mine.” The big engineer chuckled again. “Why there’s a king’s fortune in that mine, so your Uncle Jim stepped right in and tied him up close. I cabled my principals and I’ll get a cable when we reach Callao. This coal makes their silver look like thirty cents. Of course, I wasn’t going to take any chances at this stage—it might be phony—but that fellow is on the level. Said he wouldn’t take any money down—not that I’d have given it by a long shot—but after I got back he’d join me and come back into Colombia. He gave me a map of the location in case of accident.”

“Gave him no money—poor fellow, art for art’s sake?” asked one.

“Well, yes,” the big man nodded good-humoredly, “thirty dollars—enough to take him back to the States steerage—I felt almost ashamed. Said he didn’t need any more to get home with—that sounded on the level, didn’t it? He’d had a tough time all right—fever, grub and etcetery back in the country—and was down to dungaree breeches, rope-soled shoes, and one of these slimpsey native calico jackets.”

“And he could roll a cigarette with one hand better than most can with two?” I asked.

The big engineer paused for an instant’s thought and then suddenly sat up. No wonder my friend of the Fifth Army Corps and the dungaree breeches, alpargatas, and battered Panama and muslin jacket had suddenly disappeared. Thirty large, golden dollars of real money, good at par in the States or for three pecks of local paper collateral anywhere on the Mosquito Coast! And all that for one paltry little yarn.

CHAPTER II
THE FIGHTING WHALE AND CHINAMEN IN THE CHICKEN COOP

The hot days drifted by in easy sociability, dividing themselves into a pliant routine. The morning was devoted to golf on the canvas covered deck over a nine-hole course chalked around ventilators, chicken-coops and deck-houses. Crook-handled canes furnished the clubs and three sets of checkers were lost overboard before we reached the Guayas River, the little round men skidding flatly over the deck with a pleasing accuracy only at the end to rise up maliciously on one ear and roll, plop, into the sea. In the white-hot afternoon, when the scant breeze would quite as likely drift with us, the hours were sacred to the siesta, and the evenings were devoted to standardizing an international, polyglot poker.

A rope stretched across the after-deck marked off the steerage. There was no second class as a thrifty French tailor, a fine young man, and his soft-voiced Mediterranean bride found out. They had bought second class through to Lima and at the Boca were flung in aft among the half-breeds, a squabbling lot of steerage scum, together with a gang of Chinamen. A line of piled baggage ran lengthwise, on one side of which were supposed to be the bachelors’ quarters, though somewhere between decks were hutches where, if one really insisted on privacy, the tropical night could be passed in a fetid broil.

Through a surreptitious connivance this couple were allowed quarters forward and evening after evening the little bride would bring her guitar out and play—and such playing! She had been on the stage, it seemed, and from opera to opera she drifted and then off into odd, unheard folk songs, or the vibrant German or Russian songs. Never before or since have I heard such playing of a guitar or felt its possibilities. For us the guitar is an instrument lazily plunked by the end man against two mandolins. Yet there was a time when Paganini deemed it worthy of mastery.

She was playing late one afternoon and we were all gathered around in the dining hall. There came a rush of feet overhead and a shrill, excited chattering. We broke for the deck, expecting a mutiny among the Chinamen at the very least, and there in full view, not five hundred yards away, was a battle between a whale and three thrasher sharks. In a great circle the sea was churned to a foam, boiling with the stroke of fin and fluke as the sharks outflanked and harried the whale.

In a steady succession the sharks would shoot high out of the water in a graceful, deadly curve and, as they fell back, suddenly stiffen in a whip-lash bend that instantly straightened at the moment of impact, sending a flying mass of spray like that when a solid shot ricochets in gun practice. A few such blows and even a bulky, blubber-coated whale would feel it. Sometimes a shark would strike fair, though more often he would waste his energy on the empty water as the whale dove.

But the steadiness of the battering attack, sometimes all three sharks in the air as though by a signal, sometimes a steady procession pouring up from the sea in a wicked arc as regular as a clock’s ticking, and sometimes the frantic whirling of the whale showed the submarine strategists at work, while only a single shark shot up in a well-aimed, whip-lash stroke. In desperation the whale would stand on its head and beat the air in terrific blows with its flukes while the sharks would merely wait till the flurry was over and then renew their steady, wearing, pounding battle.

Off at one side of the circle of beaten foam was a little dark patch that paddled nervously about and that we had overlooked—a whale-calf. And now it was apparent why the fight was fought in the diameter of a ship’s length; always the bulk of the grim old mother was between the attack and her clumsy baby; there was the reason why she did not make a running fight of it that would have given her a more even break—for the speed of a squadron is that of its slowest ship. All the advantage lay with the sharks; it was easy to see they were wearing the whale down. Less often she stood on her head to batter the foam hopefully with her ponderous flukes; the sharks redoubled their efforts until they curved in a steady, leaping line.

Along the rail of the Mapocho the passengers, deck and cabin, cheered the battle as their tense sympathies dictated or drew whistling breaths as some crashing whip-lash went home. The deep sapphire of the sea rippling under the brisk evening breeze, the turquoise heaven that swept down to the horizon softly shifting against the sapphire contrast to a mystery of fragile green, the field of battle boiling and eddying in the mellow orange glow of the long rays of the setting sun and bursting into masses of iridescent spray made a noble setting worthy of the cause, and in it eighty tons of mother-love and devotion measuring itself in horse-power and foot-tons was slowly drooping under the hail from a slim, glittering, iridescent arc.

Smaller grew the fight in the distance—a mile—a mile and a half—then two-thirds of the whale’s bulk shot clear of the surface and she fell back heavily. Once more the head went down and the flukes raised themselves, lashing the air in frantic desperation. The curving, confident line of sharks shot upward in a graceful curve, but this time, overconfident, they had miscalculated. The great tail caught one shark and he hurtled through the flying spray with a broken back; the flukes crashed down on a second as he struck the water. Once only the surviving shark leaped and missed. Alone he could do no more; the whale in one lucky stroke had won. Through the glasses we could make out its low mass slowly swimming off, every now and then spouting a feather of spray from her blow-hole as though saluting her own victorious progress with a steam-whistle.

Five days out from Panama and we awoke to find the Mapocho swinging to her anchor in the Guayas River and awaiting the pleasure of the port-doctor. On one side a distant shore loomed through the heated, humid haze, on the other a sluggish tide-water creek disappeared in the jungle of the bank an easy rifle-shot away. A ramshackle church with a huge crucifix showed at one side of the port-doctor’s house and here and there a few houses and thatched roofs appeared above a stretch of white beach. A few black pigs wandered about, showing the only signs of life. Somewhere beyond this dismal outpost was Guayaquil. Already in the captain’s quarters was a conference of the skipper, the young Chilean ship’s doctor fresh from school and on his first trip, and the port doctor.

Presently they emerged, the captain feebly expostulating. We were to be held “under observation” for forty-eight hours as yellow fever and bubonic suspects. That Guayaquil should quarantine against anything is—at the least to an ordinary sense of humor—funny, for Guayaquil has never seen the time that it was likely to catch anything it did not already have, except a clean bill of health.

We learned for the first time that there were three Chileans abroad who were being returned to Chile by their consul. They were anemic, destitute and sick with malarial fever; although the whole coast was in a panic over yellow fever and the bubonic, yet this time had been chosen to ship them home some two thousand miles to a Chilean hospital! They had been stowed between decks and the young ship’s doctor had made the mistake of attempting to gloss over their existence, or at any rate to split the difference between truth and expediency, and had succeeded only in exciting a peevish suspicion in a marooned gentleman who had some power. He did not even look at the cases—quarantine forty-eight hours, and then he would return with advices from the government.

A few of us went down to take a look at the Chilenos whose appearance had held us up. There was no formal hospital on board so a little compartment had been hastily thrown up between decks. It was built of the loose planks on which the cattle stand during the voyage; it was closed on all four sides, windowless, and with but a single opening for a doorway curtained by a filthy piece of canvas. This black hole, reeking with filth, was the hospital; a couple of figures lay on the floor and looked up dully at the sudden flare of a match while, from an open cargo port, the third was tottering, a shrunken wreck with the ghastly teeth of a skull and socketed eyes.

At noon the purser presented each first cabin passenger with a little bill for half a sovereign—two dollars and a half, gold—which amount we were charged for as demurrage every day in any quarantine. The deck steerage paid a shilling, gold, each day.

THOSE WHO REFUSED TO PAY WERE THROWN INTO THE CHICKEN COOP.

The purser, a pleasant young Chilean with an Irish name, yet who spoke no word of English, was the one busy man on the idle ship. In expectation of quarantine the occupants of the port chicken coop had been transferred and now the purser appeared with the first officer, the boatswain, and a few of the crew. They climbed the rope and the purser jangled a chain and padlock suggestively. One by one the shillings came out. He reached the Chinamen; some were dragged from below or hauled out from the partition of baggage in which they had tried to hide, all protesting sullenly. Those who refused to pay were thrown into the chicken coop until about a dozen were jammed into its close quarters. It was too low for even a small man to stand upright, while its condition made it impossible to lie down so that the Chinamen squatted on the floor or huddled up on the perches. Then as they decided to pay, if the purser had nothing on hand more pressing he would come up and let them out.

Of those who witnessed this wretched steamship extortion the German really enjoyed it; he clucked and mimicked before the coop with great gusto and then scuttled below for his camera. He had scarcely focussed before the free Chinamen who knew a camera were chattering shrilly in hostile groups, the caged Chinamen clacking angrily back, and the first officer pounced upon the photographic outfit. This collecting of shillings from the Chinamen and the method of enforcement is no light-hearted morning’s pleasure and is likely at any time to end seriously. Also it could be noted that in the immediate background were others of the officers and crew following operations, and the arms rack aft of the chart-room was unlocked.

WHEN THE END-LID WAS TAKEN OFF, THE BODIES OF EIGHT DEAD CHINAMEN WERE TAKEN OUT.

Much may be said in favor of the chicken coop method for there was one time, the purser related, that another purser in collecting the shillings used the fumigating boiler of the upper deck. Eight obstinate Chinamen were shoved in and the end-lid clamped on. An hour of a dark dungeon would be better than the airy chicken coop, argued the astute collector—for the chicken coop has been known to prove so alluring that Chinamen have begun serving on their second day’s shilling before they had paid the first—and he was pleased at the frantic scrabbling that sounded through the iron sides. Then it died down—ah, the sullen apathy of the race—and when the end-lid was taken off the bodies of eight dead Chinamen were taken out, suffocated. It was no end of trouble to that purser for he had to juggle with his passenger sheet and the various port officials so that the ship wouldn’t be held in quarantine and make the captain and owners peevish and thereby lose his job. Caramba, it was lucky they were Chinamen!

Slowly the forty-eight hours on the broiling river passed away. In the morning of its close we looked anxiously to the nearer shore for the sign of official life. Except for the straggling black pigs, all was lifeless beach and jungle. The hours passed. It was noon. We breakfasted at that late Latin hour irritably. Presently the placid captain sent a string of signals up the foremast. Still the creek, the strip of beach, and the jungle gave forth no signs of life other than the black pigs. More time passed and the captain had the whistle blown at intervals. No result. As a desperate measure he had the capstan turned—a bluff for it was free of the cable—but as the dismal clank of the pawls carried to shore, half a dozen figures scuttled down to the creek and tumbled into the official boat. A few minutes later it was at the companion ladder and the port doctor was mounting haughtily.

Why this uproar? The sanitary junta had been notified of our arrival—what could one more? A reply had been received this morning—or was it the day before?—that the sanitary junta was very busy, but would consider the quarantine of the Mapocho at a meeting this very night. In the meantime——! He spoke with a patient, restrained peevishness as to an unreasonable child.

The august sanitary junta sat augustly at Guayaquil. From this port doctor’s station to Guayaquil was some distance. To telegraph one made one’s report, then it was paddled across the muddy tide-water creek in a dugout; then it was carried on foot across the island—for this strip of beach and home of the straggling black pigs was but a portion of an island of some size—and then across more water in a dugout and there was a telegraph station! Naturally all this took time. The port boat put back and the captain returned to his quarters. From the stern again came the sickening pop of firecrackers where the Chilean crew resumed their fishing, hauling in a slender, stupid variety of catfish and then tossing it back with a well-timed firecracker thrust in its gaping throat.

We watched the shabby boat run on the beach and the port doctor disappear in the jungle path. The crew gathered up the oars when suddenly the doctor darted back, the crew tumbled into the boat, and in a flurry of ragged rowing they came splashing toward us. Hope revived—a release from the august sanitary junta! A biscuit toss off they stopped. The doctor rose in the sternsheets and grandly ordered us out of Ecuadorean waters; if we did not leave at once we would be fired upon—by what there was no intimation, it might have been a black pig from a bamboo catapult for there was nothing else in the way of artillery—but it sounded formal and terrible. So we left. And with us went five thousand packages of freight and ninety sacks of mail intended for Guayaquil, and the furious Ecuadorean passengers.

The Peruvians were complacent. “It is better for us,” they said, “than to have to put into that wretched Guayaquil. Had we touched that fever-infected port we would have had much trouble in the Peruvian ports. Now we have our clean bill of health from Panama.”

It was beautiful optimism. I took another look at the reeking hospital between decks and wondered if we could ever get into any port and, as I turned away, two wretched, tottering skeletons passed on their way to the open cargo port. They were convalescing. I hoped for the third.

Some time during the night we passed over to the Peruvian coast and anchored off Payta early the next morning. Two miles away a white thread of slow surf broke on a thin line of blazing yellow beach; beyond rose a low range of brown-and-yellow bluffs, the hot and arid fringe of the long dessert that edges the west coast of South America. Back from the edge of surf spraddled a shabby, sand-blown, flea-bitten town with only here and there a patch of gay red-tiled roof; nowhere a strip of green or frond of palm to relieve the arid deadliness of the brown-and-yellow hills.

Off shore—there was neither bay nor bight in the even line of surf—a deserted brigantine at anchor dipped slowly with the long Pacific swells, its yards and decks whited like a leper from the unmolested frigate-birds and sea fowl that made it home. Beyond, here and there, a patched sail of no particular size or shape was barely filled by the lightest of breezes; occasionally, as one crept past, the outfit developed into a raft on the after part of which was a rough platform of palm on which were housed the Indian fisherman and his crew or family. A few abandoned square tins—the well known export tins of Rockefeller—held the drinking water, an earthen pot their food, and on this flimsy contraption they would put out miles to sea. In beating to windward a loose board or piece from a packing case is poked through the crevices to act as centerboard.

A DESERTED BRIGANTINE AT ANCHOR DIPPED SLOWLY WITH THE LONG PACIFIC SWELLS.

Slowly creeping over the ground swells was the port officer’s boat; it had a uniformed crew and rowed well. The Peruvians watched it contentedly; por Dios, no such stupid work here as in that Guayas River—buenos dias, Señor Comandante, buenos dias, Señor Doctor—and they stood aside as the captain led the way into his quarters, the procession closing with the nervous ship’s surgeon and a steward with a bottle of warm champagne—for there was no more ice.

Presently they emerged amiably and the port officers put back to shore. We would be incommunicado until that very afternoon and then we would hear. The little boats that had clustered around the Mapocho with Panama hats, fruits, and suspicious looking native candy were waved ashore in a cloud of disappointment. In the afternoon back came the boat and the young surgeon prepared to meet them ceremoniously at the foot of the companion ladder. He could have spared himself the trouble; the little boat stopped fifty feet off while the port doctor handed out a judgment of five days’ quarantine. Twelve dollars and a half a head for the first cabin and a dollar and a quarter, gold, for the steerage, and all additional! Going into quarantine was not, from a purely business standpoint, without its profits. And also the Ecuadorans and the Peruvians once more met with a common bond of sympathy.

A barefooted Chileno sailor who had been already to haul down the big yellow pest flag at the foremast belayed the halliards permanently to the bridge pin rail and trotted off to help in putting over a small boat. This boat flying a small yellow flag, was anchored a half-mile away and during the days of quarantine was the only means of communication with the shore. Each morning through the medium of this anchored boat we did the ship’s business with the shore and from it the steward would return with watermelons, eggs, turkeys, ducks, and vegetables and quinine for the doctor. Occasionally from day to day the port doctor, the port captain, or a member of the sanitary junta would be rowed out in the official boat to look us over and the tottering wrecks between the decks would be mustered at an open cargo port for a distant and sceptical inspection. The local steamship agents, through the daily messages in the anchored boat, kept us interested with the daily rumors—we were a plague ship, a floating charnel house plying our way shamelessly from port to port, a leper of the high seas shunned even by Guayaquil—and one vague and indefinite that seemed to suggest that a port official contemplated a sea trip in a week or so and was engineering this means of giving us the pleasure of his company when he was ready. It was interesting.

CHAPTER III
THROUGH A TROPICAL QUARANTINE

One morning when the official sanitary junta—the port doctor, the town druggist, and three shopkeepers, all of whom except the first, were contentedly selling us supplies—were making their inspection within easy hailing distance the returning Peruvian diplomat dealt himself a hand in the game. In a few pointed remarks he demanded that they send a doctor on board to make an examination. The port captain returned an indignant oration in which, after paying tribute to the ancestral deeds of the diplomat’s forebears, he hurled shame at the diplomat for his selfish lack of patriotism in so distrusting the conclusions and acts of his countrymen, obviously he had been so enervated by effete foreign associations that—that—well, it sounded like good oratory anyway. There was no doubt in their minds that we were concealing yellow fever.

Slowly the five days of quarantine passed with this solemn official mockery. The Chinamen ceased from troubling and yielded the daily shilling, the chicken coop was returned to the authority of the steward—although once, for variety, a Chinaman shared it with a couple of turkeys for some hours—and then the final day arrived.

Leisurely the official boat rowed out. The passengers for Ecuador, it announced, were to be transferred to the leprous-looking brigantine where they would remain in quarantine until they could be transfered to a northbound steamer. Incidentally they were privileged to pay twelve sols a day, each, for board. Then the official boat was rowed back; and that was all.

Indignantly the passengers met and decided to pay no more daily quarantine charges—it seemed as if the company needed a little stimulating, perhaps; the purser chuckled sympathetically and then a self-appointed committee looked over the chicken coop with a speculative eye. It was heartening, for at least the monotony would be broken. That night an unofficial boat stole out of the darkness alongside; confirmed the rumor that the port captain was holding us for a week longer to suit his convenience; then the messenger disappeared in the night. This was interesting as pure news matter and that was all.

Came the morning of the sixth day without change. And then the diplomat’s cables to Lima had effect. A doctor had been appointed on a cabled order from Lima to make a real examination; he came out accompanied by a sanitary junta of very sour officials, climbed on board, and began his work. They pulled away and returned in the afternoon.

The young ship’s surgeon and the new doctor shouted the report across the water. Barring the three cases of malarial fever between decks we had a clean bill of health. The official boat drew a trifle nearer; in the stern sheets the port doctor scanned a formidable looking medical volume that lay open on his knees and the druggist bent his head over the same pages. Solemnly they accepted little test tubes that the ship’s surgeon passed across to them and examined them gravely. They turned a few pages of the book and asked a question. The new doctor answered it promptly. Again they shuffled the pages and came back with another; another answer, and then more hasty poring.

WHAT THE DIPLOMAT SAID WAS DIRECT AND VOLUBLE.

At length came their decision: it was true that the excellent doctors had described no such symptoms as were standardized for either yellow fever or the peste bubonica, but there was nothing to prevent those doctors from stating and confirming that which was not true; therefore be it resolved that we had yellow fever, but were concealing it! They were the incorruptible guardians of a nation’s health.

What the diplomat said was direct and voluble and carried perfectly across the calm evening sea: Heaven was a sad witness of his unpatriotic perfidy for he threatened them with a touch of patriotism direct from Lima upon the hour of his arrival—however distant or uncertain that might be. A little conference and they voted on our admission, two and two—could anything be fairer! Their honest hearts thanked Heaven for the thought of this simple and adroit deadlock that preserved their official activities and at the same time kept us in a profitable quarantine. Tersely it was pointed out by the diplomat that by virtue of the cabled commission the new doctor was a member of the board—vote again!

That evening we wandered through the dust and sand of Payta and rode grandly, and briefly, to the out-skirts of the town in the single mule-and-rope tram that skirted the beach. It is well in the troubled times of quarantine on the West Coast always to travel with an accredited diplomat on board.

A Wide, Dusty Canal Which in the Intervals Between Showers Serves as a Market

All next day the whirr and clatter of the steam-winches and the bang of cargo kept up and again we visited the dusty port, wading through the lines of Panama hat sellers that lined up to greet the landing of our small boat. Of hotel runners there were none, this being due to the fact that there was but one hotel to which the stray custom is bound to drift. At the hotel we saw a few palms and tropical blooms in tubs and in a carefully irrigated patio, for Payta is—like all that West Coast—rainless. As a cold matter of meteorological fact it does rain sometimes; I accidentally started an acrimonious discussion by a merely polite remark on the weather as to whether it had been nine, eleven, or fourteen years since the last rain. In apparent proof of this there is a wide, dusty canal bulkheaded with piling on either side which in these intervals between showers serves as a native market. Little red flags flutter from the chicherias where the opaque, yellow, Indian corn beer is sold, ranging in flavor and potency from warm buttermilk to the wicked “stone-fence” of New Jersey.

Back of the town a trail wades through the sand to the crest of the long bluffs; the feet of countless pack trains have worn a driveway through the ridge until, stepping through, there are suddenly spread before the view the endless stretches of a dried and dusty desert that has been an ocean’s prehistoric bed. The hot airs quiver and boil from the twisting valleys or ridges of blistering sand and rock and through the pulsing heat the occasional pack train in the distance turns to a wavering, shimmering thread. To the imagination a desert rises as a dull, gray expanse endless in its colorless monotony; here there was a riot of color, every hue, raw and gorgeous—except green—from the soft purples and cool sapphire of the shadows to the blazing yellows and reds and white of the open spaces. And in the garish stretch of a dead ocean there slowly rises like a parching thirst a longing for a sweep of tender green.

CLOSE RESEMBLANCE TO AN ARMY OF DRUNKEN BUGS.

The little governmental touch from Lima had cleared the path of quarantine and we began a dot-and-carry-one course down the coast from Payta; every day our winches whirred and clattered off some dusty, sand-blown port. Before our anchor had touched bottom in the open road-stead a fleet of lanchas, heavy, double-ended, open lighters of from ten to twenty-five tons capacity were crawling over the water; the dozen long oars that were their means of locomotion—and that were manipulated on an independent competitive basis—spraddled on each side gave the fleet a close resemblance to an army of drunken bugs struggling forward on uncertain legs. There was always a race to the Mapocho’s side and the first to get there caught the heaving line.

Once a lancha defeated in a close finish came on and cut the heaving line so that its rival was left with the useless section while it hurriedly hauled in on the hawser. Instantly a fine naval engagement was in progress as the lanchas locked like a couple of old Carthaginian galleys. By the aid of force peace was established and the rightful and original award of the hawser sustained; had it not been, as the first officer explained, they would need a new heaving line at every port.

The bluffs of the coast gave way to hills and these in turn to higher ones; the Andes were closing in on the Pacific. At times the great mountain chain towered from the very water’s edge in a succession of steep cliffs, each receding tier softening in the distance and rising through the slowly shifting strata of clouds until only the gashes of white snow picked out the towering peaks. Here and there steep, rocky islets fringed the coast line and we stood far out to save the chances, and yet there was no appreciable change in the proportions of the tremendous mountain range. The sense of proportion and distance was lost in the comparison of these vast reaches. A rocky islet, a steep sugar-loaf affair, rose from the ocean perhaps five feet—not much as an island or a mountain peak. Through the binoculars a tiny unknown speck at the base developed into a full-rigged bark with tapering masts above which the sugar-loaf rock rose for thousands of feet in the clear air, and on it was a wretched colony of guano workers.

Then the coast opened out into level reaches again with occasional lines of irrigation ditches showing a thread of green. Occasionally—twice I think—there was actually a landlocked harbor. It was one of these, Chimbote, that James G. Blaine proposed to use or secure as a naval base and coaling station. It is perfectly sheltered with a narrow, bottle-neck entrance guarded by a rocky island in the middle which is covered with a wriggling film of seals that are perfectly indifferent to the close passage of ships or men.

Every Day our Winches Whirred and Clattered off some Dusty, Sand-blown Port

In this harbor rode the queerest of sea-going craft. In Mexico I had once seen a Chinaman fit himself up a home from about eight feet of one end of a hopelessly wrecked dugout, take in a partner, and then the two of them paddle off up the river in the fishing business, sleeping and eating aboard the flat-iron shaped thing. Here in this case was a bow and stern bolted together without a midship section. And both the bow and stern were those of a fairly full size tramp freighter. The bow was the ram bow of a war ship and back of it there was barely room to squeeze in a capstan and a tiny hatch; the foremast shared the bridge, a funnel and whistle jammed themselves up against the bridge, while the short distance to the stern rail gave room for a squat cabin out of which rose the mainmast. A score of Chimbote lanchas were as big—bigger—and where this telescoped liner would find room for cargo or coal after providing for engines and a galley is a mystery. Yet it does carry cargo and ambles along from port to port a tragic marvel of compression.

The day before, off Huanchazo, where a storm far out had piled up a heavy, oily groundswell, that even put the racks on the tables, a wealthy old Peruvian lady had been hoisted abroad in a cask clinging to her son. She was a garrulous old soul, powdered like a marshmallow, with three chins and a little moustache, and her son was the very apple of her eye. Therefore, son was what one might expect. His adolescent and mature ambition was to be the amorous cut-up of the coast and so far he had succeeded generously in making a smug, self-satisfied nuisance of himself. He counted doting mother’s allowance publicly, drank warm champagne noisily when thrifty mother was not around, and dressed in the Huanchazo idea of French fashions for men. In the morning he did not appear. Mother explained fondly—but not the truth. She did not know it.

Passengers are warned not to go between decks after dark, the steerage hutches and the crew have the freedom of that deck. Son prowled down on some shifty little romantic project of his own. In the darkness he suddenly felt two sharp little pricks in the skin of his back and one sharp little prod in front; they felt very, very much like the points of knives. Up went son’s hands promptly and in the blackness he felt heavy hands pulling out his maternal allowance—the beautiful money with which he was to flaunt his fascinations in Lima. Hence no Limanean gay life—mother it seemed was a thrifty Spartan in money matters—and son was in his berth, weeping. A steward told us the latter, confidentially of course.

Samancho, Chimbote, Salivari, Suppe, and then at last, in the daybreak of the morning after the last named and in the midst of a soft, clouded day, Callao. There was the usual customs search of the baggage—a maddening process to an Englishman, mildly irritating to a Frenchman, and accepted meekly and placidly by Americans as a matter of course from a thorough training in our own home ports. I have never passed through any country that could give as close an imitation of our own thorough methods of dock robbery and tariff brigandage as Peru. A quarter of an hour by train through a rich soil that can be worked only by irrigation and Lima, the first halt on the continent, has been attained.

For two weeks there was nothing to do but to idle in Lima. A delightful city full of the old contrasts of highly civilized, sybaritic pleasures alongside of the squalid, aimless poverty of the survivors of a devastated empire. There is the Bois where fashionable equipages with cockaded, copper-colored lackeys—possibly in bare or sandaled feet—on the box, silver-mounted harness and heavy, Chilean bred coach horses jingle past in procession on Sunday afternoons while some gallant Peruano lopes alongside with huge silver stirrups and a saddle almost solid with bullion; the sodden side streets where the buzzard and the scavenger pig are man’s best friend; the cathedral where lies the dessicated body of Pizarro in a marble casket like an aquarium, the one open side covered with glass through which may be seen the remains of that treacherous old buccaneer, with his head re-fastened by a silver wire to guard against a repetition of the theft; the cathedral itself with its murky interior smoked by the votive candles of millions of conscript converts; its queer carvings where the ecclesiastical memories of architecture have been freely rendered by the Indian stone-cutters; the clubs, the cafés—and the ambrosial coffee—chapels with the bullion covered walls, the wretched tobacco at high tariff—extorted prices—all these and then the Hotel Maury.

Lima, a Delightful City of Contrasts

Peace be to Savarin, to Delmonico, and to Chamberlain. They did well in their way. But they never served a squid, or cuttlefish, floating like a small hot-water bottle, tender and delicious in an inky sauce of their own founding; nor a starfish sprawled in a five-pointed dream of savory, lobster-like succulence; nor “señoritas”—a delicate species of scallop—each with its tiny scarlet tongue draped across the pearl-white bivalve bosom and that, steamed or not, melted in one supreme ecstatic flavor; nor five inch langostin fresh from the cold waters of the Andean hills, nor compounded or invented a strawberry gin cocktail of surpassing allurement—cooled by a piece of ice kept in a flannel-lined drawer and returned thereto after stirring. None of these things had they and so by just that much they fell short.

In the Hotel Maury there was a written bill of fare for those who could merely read. But for the expert, the fastidious—or the adventurous—there was a redoubt in the main room whose flanking bastions and crest were a solid array of great joints and little joints, steaks, chops, unnamed fish in platoons and señoritas in brigades, fruits, vegetables and all of the foregoing—and more—laid out in tiers and terraces whose foundations were of cool, inviting seaweeds and mosses, and still further seductively embellished with a variety of paper ribbons and crests and cockades until one almost lost sight of the pagodas of gaudy, many-storied cakes and confections that rose like watch towers at judicious intervals along the battlements. It was a salon.

To the shuffling, woolen-capped, sandaled, or bare-footed Indian at one’s heels the directions were given, you chose what you would as they thus reposed in the altogether and then repaired to await in a sawdust-floored cavern at one side and in a state of serene and expectant bliss the certain pleasures of the very immediate future. You waited, it is true, at a warped table with a stained cloth on which a bent cruet supplied the only note of elegance. And, lest any of the precious viands be lost in transit or breakage, you knew that you would be served with a substantial, hard-shell crockery only slightly more vulnerable than reinforced concrete. Presently your Indian reappeared in a shuffling trot scattering sawdust from the prow of each sandal like a harbor pile-driver under full speed—the hard-shell crockery is white hot, but he has the hands of a salamander—and then with a flourish he drops an assorted collection of tableware somewhere within reach—you are served. And what a repast! Peace be to Savarin, Delmonico and—enough. Comparisons are invidious and the Maury can stand alone in the continent of his choosing.

Very shortly the sailing day came for, since it was not possible to land in Mollendo owing to that port being afflicted with a quarantine, it had been necessary to catch a steamer that would put us through the surf at Quilca, a hole in a cliff that has its only function in these times of quarantine. A farewell inspection of the redoubt and bastions, a recharging of the bottle of salicylic acid and alcohol, which while it had in no way abated the fleas of the Hotel Maury, yet had mitigated their consequences, and Lima and Callao drifted into the background with the closing day. From Quilca in some way we would connect by muleback and packtrain across the desert to the desert station of La Joya with the railroad to Arequipa and thence to Lake Titicaca and across to La Paz.

CHAPTER IV
A FORCED MARCH ACROSS THE DESERT OF ATACAMA

The stand-by bell of the Limari tinkled from her engine-room, our baggage and freight were safely stowed in the wallowing Peruvian lanchas alongside, and the Bolivian mail followed. The Captain of the Port and the Inspector of Customs balanced down the swaying gangway and dropped into the gig alongside. We followed.

Before us stretched the long, barren line of rocky coast, fading away in the soft mist of a Peruvian winter. For it is winter here, damp and chill, in September. Directly ahead is a narrow, ragged break in the cliffs. Inside is Quilca, the side door to La Paz in days of quarantine.

We cross the barrier of half-concealed rock before us, and soon we are in the smooth waters of the cañon beyond. On either side the red volcanic bluffs rise for perhaps two hundred feet, their faces scarred and seamed or beaten into grotesque forms by the Pacific of ages past. Up this defile we rowed for several hundred yards, then we rounded a ragged promontory, and the full glories of the metropolis of Quilca burst upon us. A broken flight of steps led from the water, and, back of it all, two thin straggling lines of woven-cane huts bounded the solitary street. Two houses, more dismally pretentious than the rest, with mud walls and corrugated-iron roofs, marked the local seat of government. In the distance rose the red volcanic hills, dull, flat, and shadowless under the clouded sky of the tropical winter. This was all of Quilca.

We had cabled from Lima for horses and a pack-train to meet us and bring us over the desert of San José, where we could get the train to the interior.

The morning after our arrival we were awakened by the clatter of the pack-mules as they passed our quarters, and the “Hola, hola! Huish, huish!” of their arrieros. It was our train.

In the middle of the lone street the arrieros were busy lashing our smaller packages in rawhide nets. Scattered about in the sand were the larger cases of freight—prospecting machinery and mining hardware—amounting to a little over a ton in weight; and still under the guard of Agamemnon in our quarters of the night was the personal equipment—trunks, instruments, rifles, shotguns, cartridges and powder and shot—making nineteen hundred pounds more. And blocking the only thoroughfare of Quilca were the twelve pack-mules—long-haired, disconsolate animals, with pepper-and-salt complexions, save where patches of bare hide showed the chafing of the pack-ropes. They looked as though our own regulation army load of two hundred pounds per mule would be far too great. And they were to divide four thousand pounds among them.

It was eleven o’clock in the forenoon when the last diamond-hitch was thrown and the last pack lashed in place. The arrieros swung their long, knotted rawhide thongs, the saddle-galled bell-mare clanged as she led the way, and we climbed into our saddles and fell in behind the straggling mules as they led the way up the dismal street and out into the desert.

The trail rose sharply as it left Quilca, and then wound around to the right, where it joined the old desert road used by the Spaniards after their conquest, and for centuries before that by the Incas in their barter with the coast. On each side rose white walls of rotten rock, higher than our heads as we rode by, the path between them worn down by plodding hoofs for untold ages. Upon this path the rock was ground to a fine white powder that rose in clouds and covered us until we looked ahead as through the mists of a fog. Vaguely, over the walls, the ragged volcanic hills silhouetted against the sky.

We kept on ascending between these winding walls, at length emerging on a narrow table-land—the top of the cliffs we had seen from the decks of the Limari. A short distance over the level ground, and then from the farther edge we looked down on the flat, stony bottom of the Vitor Valley—a ragged gorge that wound a tortuous course through the desert. A narrow trail with short, sharp angles zigzagged down a steep gully to the bottom. The mules carefully picked their way down among the loose stones, halting inquiringly at times to choose perhaps a shorter cut. If it seemed to their instinct feasible, they gathered their hind legs under them, their front hoofs sticking stiffly out in front, and slid down on their bellies, in a cloud of dust, carrying with them a small avalanche of loose shale as they landed in a section of the trail below.

You sit back in your saddle—all saddles in these parts have cruppers and breastplates to prevent your sliding over the animal’s ears as you go down or slipping off behind as you go up a mountain path—and as you watch the tossing line of packs below, the speculation forces itself as to the consequences of a mule’s misstep. That it is not all idle speculation is shown by the scattered skeletons below in the valley, bleached to varying degrees of dull white.

We do not descend to the pavement of river-washed stones on the bed of the valley. Twenty yards above, the trail leads abruptly off to the left into a narrow ditch worn in the face of the cliff, which in places has been scooped out to allow for the width of the packs, leaving an insecure overhang of rock above.

For miles we followed the contour of the valley, clinging to the steep slopes and the sides of the cliffs that hedged it in. Then down a clayey bank the trail started diagonally across the bottom of the valley to the farther side. Occasionally we would come suddenly on a little clearing where two or three Indians, grisly through the ashen grime, were burning charcoal—little twigs scarcely bigger than one’s finger. We came out at the farther side of the valley against the cliffs of the mesa beyond. On the little stony flat before them, three straggling huts of woven cane with thatched roofs of barley straw marked a lonely hacienda. A few dirty Indians and their slatternly wives lounged about. A short distance beyond, the trail led over the steep talus at the base of the cliffs; then on up through a narrow, wedge-shaped crevice that wound back and forth in short ascending turns, till it disappeared over the edge of the mesa a thousand feet above. For miles on either side it was the only break in the cliff; and as we looked at the stiff prospect ahead of us, the rocky descent of a few hours before seemed like gentle morning exercise in the park.

For a short distance the trail ran straight up over the loose shale; then the real ascent began. Ten yards to the right, then ten to the left, and steeper with each change. The mules humped their backs and scratched along on the toe of the hoof, choosing their foothold with the nice precision of a cat crossing a sprinkled street. Two turns to the right, then two to the left; then a rest of half a minute, when without urging they would recommence the ascent. Slowly and tediously we climbed, and finally rode out on a broad, level plateau that stretched away and merged with the desert hills of the distance. Below us toiled our pack-train, tediously weaving back and forth on the zigzag trail. As each section reached the level ground, the arriero dismounted and went among his animals, talking mule-talk and easing loads to a better balance or tightening the stretched cinches. All the unkempt, hairy sides were heaving with heavy breaths. A few lay down—a bad sign in a pack-animal. But in twenty minutes every mule was apparently as fresh as ever, wandering about and foraging on the stiff, wiry bunch-grass of the arid soil. And when we started they stepped off easily under their loads, with their long ears briskly flapping. The two small arrieros left us here and returned to Quilca, for the chief difficulties were passed, and the rest was but persistent plodding over the desert to San José.

The trail over the plateau had been worn in parallel furrows like the thin strip of a newly ploughed field. Each mule chose his furrow and insistently walked there, resenting the effort of any of the others to get in ahead of him. When a collision occurred you could hear the rattle of nail-kegs and the clatter of shovels, picks, and hardware a half-mile off as they butted and shoved for the right of way. Our two remaining arrieros rode in the rear, muffled in their gaudy woolen ponchos. Occasionally a lean arm would shoot out from under its folds and the knotted thong bite the flank of some lagging mule. These mule-drivers’ thongs are long, braided strips of rawhide spliced into the curb-rein—they use no snaffle—ending in a heavy knot. Its twelve or fourteen feet lie coiled in the bridle-hand until called into service. Then with a twist of the wrist, it feeds rapidly out through the right hand, humming like a sawmill as it circles round his head, and landing with a thwack that generally corrects the indisposition for which it is intended. Often the arrieros imitate its vicious hum, and it will frequently prove sufficient.

The trail was distinct enough—there was no fear of wandering away from it—a slender ditch worn in the bed of the arroyo. Here and there a ragged little hole dug in the soft walls of white rock marked the lonely home of some desert badger; and again we would ride past whole colonies of them. In these badger villages the holes fairly honeycombed the sides of the trail and the bluff walls of the arroyos, and the shuffling claw-marks of the badger trails scarred the dust in all directions. There were no other signs of life; not even the scaly windings of a lizard were to be seen, and the sparse patches of bunch-grass had long since disappeared.

Mile after mile we pushed up these narrow valleys. The badger-holes disappeared, and strange desert growths began to appear from time to time. As we had ascended, the clouds had seemed to lower, and now we could see on either hand the light mists floating about us.

One more steep loomed ahead. We pushed through the damp strata of mists clinging to its sides, and came out on the flat land above in the long level rays of the setting sun. Below us, over the clouds, it cast its cold, blue shadows and sparkling high lights, transforming those shifting, unstable vapors into rippling waves of golden foam. To the east the whole desert glowed with color. The long furrows of the trail wove themselves in patterns of orange and purple. Rolling shadows, rich in their changing violets, faded slowly and softly away to the left. Gorgeous reds and scarlets, madders, oranges, crimsons—every brilliant color of the palette—spread in glowing masses, changing with each minute of the dying day. The saddle-stiffness, cracked lips, and parched throat, dry with the alkaline dust, were forgotten—even the dismal clank of the bell-mare slowly toiling in the lead mellowed to a far-off chime—and in those few brief moments of the vanishing day we felt the subtle desert spell.

The shadows grew colder and merged one into another; the desert dimmed, a few stars glistened, and, as though a door had closed behind us, we passed into the night. Twilight is short in the tropics. Down by the horizon on our right the Southern Cross slowly lighted up—four straggling points of light that feebly struggled with the blazing stars about them. We closed in behind the swaying shadow of the mules, from which came the subdued rattle of packs and creaking cinches, that were the only sounds to disturb the dark stillness. It was but a little way now; in another hour we would be in camp.

Out of the shadow ahead came the clash of picks and shovels, the rattle of a load as it struck the sand, and the swaying shades of the mules divided around a black mass stretched on the trail. It was the first note of exhaustion. For twelve hours the mules had plodded at the same steady gait, rested only by the halt on the cliff, miles back, and the wonder of it was that, with their loads, none had dropped before. As we rode up we could see against the faint starlit ground the sprawling silhouette of the beast, lying as he fell, the long, expressive ears limp on the desert sand. The arrieros dismounted and pried him on his feet again, and patiently he hit the trail. In the next half-hour four more went down. At one time half our mules were down, and we strung out over the desert for two miles picking them up.

A few minutes later we swung off to the right, stumbling through a series of broken ditches—the remains of the old Inca irrigation systems that ran for miles back into the Andes. Then we dropped down steep winding paths, our shoulders scraping against walls of sand as we turned to the right or left around the corners. The mules apparently understood that a camp was not far ahead, and seemed fresher. Soon we rode out on a flat, sitting straight in our saddles once more, with the hard rattle of stones underfoot and the cool wet sound of running water just ahead. Then the noiseless, padded ground of a corral, and the mules lay down and we climbed out of our saddles. It was the camp at last.

A dried old Indian appeared from somewhere, and by the light of his tallow dip I made out the time—half past three in the morning. We had come seventy-six miles without water or rest.

At a little after six we were awake. The sun was rising above the cliffs that lined the valley, though the chill of the night air still lingered. Coffee awaited us in the openwork cane hut of the Indian proprietor of this hacienda, and as soon as we finished it we would start. In the daylight we could see that we were in a broad level valley. Through the center of the valley ran a brook—a portion of the same Vitor River of the day before, but now dwindled to a tiny thread. About us clustered a few buildings with low walls of broken stone from some Inca ruin. A short distance off was the mission church of the desert, announced by a cross of two twigs tied with a strip of rawhide and surmounting an excrescence of broken stones evidently intended as a steeple. We drank the thick, black coffee, for which the Indian refused both money and presents, and at seven o’clock we started.

It was all white sand now, and everywhere the same hot, white glare hedged us in. There was not a breath of air, and as the sun rose higher it beat down with a constantly growing heat. Then once more out on the flat desert above. For endless miles it stretched, quivering in the heated air of the morning. Away down in the east the long line of the ragged, snow-covered Andes loomed up, their summits thrust through the low banks of clouds along the horizon. All signs of a trail had disappeared. The little furrows left by the passing pack-trains were filled in by the hot desert winds that blow always from the west. It is the unvarying steadiness of these winds that causes the curious crescent-shaped dunes of sand found on this desert. There were thousands of these shimmering in the long distances of the heated glare, from little ones just blown into existence and not six inches from tip to tip up to great banks forty feet high and with two hundred feet between the horns. Superheated puffs of air blew from them that struck like a breath from the first run of molten slag. The heat crept between your closed teeth and dried your tongue. When you spoke it was from the throat, and the words seemed to shrivel in your mouth.

For twenty miles we plodded over the scorching glare, and then, far ahead, a small dark patch appeared. Slowly it developed and became a dull, dusty green—scraggly palms and a few peach-trees; then a railroad station with a hot galvanized-iron roof. It was San José.

In the half-hour to train-time our saddles were off and stored, the baggage and freight separated and shipped, and we ourselves stretched comfortably in the shade of the agent’s thatched porch. The Arequipa train backed in, and the agent and conductor loaded the one box car, and we followed our outfit in.

CHAPTER V
AREQUIPA THE CITY OF CHURCHES

The baking heat of the desert boiled in through the open doors of the freight car, the blazing sun beat down upon the roof, and, inside, a thousand essences from its variegated life simmered and blended. Together with some half dozen of assorted native passengers we had jammed ourselves in among a jumble of food-stuffs and mining hardware in transit. The box car banged and groaned and occasionally halted on the desert at the hail of some wayfarer whom we helped cordially up and stirred into the odoriferous oven. Sociably we rode in this freight car up from the desert oasis of San José because this freight car constituted the whole of the train. Farther on at Vitor there was hope of a real train.

In the scant space left by the cargo I had wedged myself against a stack of dried fish while my feet reposed easily on the body of a newly dead pig on his way to the market in Arequipa joggling in time to the uncertain swaying of the car; Agamemnon fitted his saddle-stiff joints into a niche in the freight and went peacefully to sleep, indifferent to the broken barrel of lime that sifted its contents over him. And so it was that we pulled in to Vitor, a town that hung on the edge of the desert from which rose the foothills of the first Andean range to the eastward. Stiffly we climbed down and out into the heated, but untainted air and idled in the station shadow until the train should signify its readiness to receive us.

I was passing through the patio of the station when I was briefly conscious of a rush, a choked snarl, and in the same instant my whole right leg seemed to have stepped into a vise clamped to a jig-saw; the impact spun me half around and I found myself helpless in the grip of a huge, flea-bitten mongrel that just lacked, by what appeared to be a mere shadow of a margin, sufficient power to shake me rat fashion. I judged that it was about eight years afterward when an Indian leisurely appeared and clattered at the brute. Adroitly it let go and disappeared before I could get a sufficiently able-bodied rock out of the pavement for I was unarmed, having packed my gun when preparing to leave San José.

AN AREQUIPA CARRIER

But it turned out to have been purely illusion after all, as was apparent on the assurances of the lean buccaneer who had the restaurant privilege and acted as station master. There was not a dog about the place no, señor! I pointed to the dorsal facade of my battle-scarred person. Caramba—investigation, prontissimo! The lean buccaneer called and an Indian responded. It was the same Indian who had driven off the dog. He listened to the buccaneer. Then he replied at length and with gestures. I listened, but it was in Quechua they spoke, a dialect that sounds not unlike German interspersed with an occasional vocal imitation of a brass band. The buccaneer again turned to me:

“Señor, it is as I said. There is no dog,—there has been no dog,—I have no dog—it is a very great pity,—I sympathize!”

It revealed to me a power of imagination I had not suspected myself of possessing, though Agamemnon who was pinning up the rents and counting the punctures still regarded it as an actual occurrence.

The blistering hours on the trail across the desert had left us as parched as a dried sponge, crackly and dusty and with brittle, peeling skins ravenous for moisture. Outside the newly made-up train on either side straggled a collection of grimy, sand-blown Indians—mainly women—peddling queer, uncertain foods from earthen pots or battered tin cans that were in great demand among the sophisticated natives while, on a higher plane of dignity, a fat, placid Cholo sent the first native urchin on whom his eye fell into the station presently to deliver to you a bottle of unripe, bilious beer as warm as the hot shadow in which it had been kept. Its color, foam, and the characteristic shape of the bottles were means of identification, but, with the eyes closed, it did not differ materially from catnip tea or any of the old home remedy stand-bys. And never did an orange look more nobly luscious, for the round, unripe, green skin of the native product enfolds a heart of nectar.

From Vitor on we wound through twisting gorges or steep valleys, barren of all save cactus and the desert shale and boulders. Steadily the train climbed. Always on one side or the other were the traces of the old Inca empire and its industrious dominion; here a fragmentary stretch of road and a ruined gateway, now and again the almost obliterated ruins of some old town or village, but always, running along the sides of the steep hills or through the valleys, the dusty remains of a tremendous system of irrigation ditches. Where once has been a busy land, soft with the green of growing things, there are the cactus and the badger and the occasional baked-mud hut of an Indian wringing a dull living from the desert, Heaven knows how, where his ancestors once farmed and throve in multitudes.

In Arequipa the City of Churches

The contrast stirs the dullest fancy. And on the side of the spoilers for their gains? Only the dessicated remains of a treacherous old pirate that may be viewed—for a very moderate tip—through the side of a marble aquarium back in Lima as a cathedral curio and, in Europe, an asthmatic and toothless Spain drained to decrepitude by her own remorseless greed and predaceous piety.

In the long rays of the sunset the train rolled across the level stretches of the high valley in which lies the city of Arequipa. The low, flat houses—more or less earthquake proof—and the red tile roofs were radiant in the mellow glow. Beyond rose the dull, volcanic slopes of Misti in an immense cone, while best of all, in the one story hotel of rambling patios in that city of earthquakes we were once more able to collect sufficient water at one time to accomplish a bath. In Arequipa the first train stops exhausted; mañana, or at the worst only a few days later, a second train leaves to climb the first high pass and leave its passengers on the shores of Lake Titicaca.

Throughout the city there is scarcely a building that cannot show patched cracks or gaping cornices that are the scars of earthquakes; here and there a heap of rock and plaster or fragmentary walls abandoned to the Indian beggars mark the years of great temblors. Rarely does a private house attempt a second story and the marvel is how the churches or the cathedral, with their high walls and towers, have been able to survive at all! Though often cracked and battered, yet in some way they have weathered the subterranean gales.

And what a city for churches! On every street, on all but every turn, there rises an ecclesiastical edifice with its grim walls of faded, peeling kalsomine and its porticos, perhaps ornamented with odd stone carvings that preserve a strong Indian flavor in spite of the old monkish guidance. Whole blocks in the heart of the city are bounded by enormous walls enclosing the sacred precincts of a convent or monastery. I was informed that out of every twelve inhabitants, men, women, and children, one was in some of the many orders behind the high walls. Each day in some part of the city is a fiesta in honor of some particular saint who is heralded and honored by a vast popping of firecrackers, squibs, and rockets and a grand procession through the neighborhood. Often several saints’ fiestas fall on the same day and from all directions come the rattle of firecrackers and the plop of the daylight bombs or rockets and any casual stroll will bring one against a procession heavy with the smoke of incense or uncanny with the thin, wailing chanting of the celebrants.

HARDLY A DAY WITHOUT ITS SAINT’S FIESTA.

The whole city centers around an extraordinarily large central plaza on one side of which is the ancient cathedral with its tiers of bells in the bell tower still lashed to the massive beams by rawhide thongs. The remaining three sides are business arcades of small shops, the pastries, and cafés; the bullet chipped arches still confirming the earnestness with which many a civil election has been contested between the liberal and the clerical elements after the returns were counted—or, quite as often, during that process.

The chief industry is in a few machine shops and central supply houses for the mines of the interior. Outside of this there is nothing. A few small shops with the cheapest and shabbiest of stocks cluster around the plaza; on Sunday that same plaza is scantily filled with the select of Arequipa while the stocky police keep it cleared of the tattered urchins and Indians of the weekdays. There is the dull, oppressive sense of wretched poverty or genteel destitution. It is in the sharpest contrast with the general run of other and typical Latin cities; the whole city seems to have become encysted in a hopeless poverty in which any form of local energy is permitted to find expression only in ecclesiastical fireworks or mystical parades of wailing and incense.

The start from Arequipa up to Lake Titicaca is made in the early morning. The huge cone of Misti—looking for all the world like a vast slag dump—stands forth with telescopic detail in the high, rare air mellowed in the cool morning sun. Prickling and glistening on the even slopes or in the purple shadows, the frost still clings like a lichen to the barren rocks and there is a thin touch of briskness in the air like the taste of fall on a September morning back home.

AN ANDEAN TOURING CAR

Down at the station the departure of the train is in the nature of an event like the sailing of a steamer. Already the train—one first-class and two second-class coaches—is filled, aisles and seats, with a shuffling crowd already in the ecstacy of a noisy and mournful, but interminable leave taking. Their view of the hazards of a journey by rail may not be so far out of the way for on the steep grades of these Andean roads a train has been known to break in half and go scuttling back down hill until the hand-brakes take effect; also, and later, on the ancient engine I observed with interest the native engineer screw down his throttle and then, in starting, bang it open with a monkey wrench.

Presently, as the hour of departure drew near, the conductor appeared and began sorting out the passengers. Rebozo-muffled ladies and Peruvian gentlemen who failed to show tickets and who had been picnicking in the seats burst into one final explosion of embracings and goodbyes before descending to the tracks where they took up a position alongside the car windows. The second-class were not admitted to their hard benches except on proof of actually possessing a ticket, but the stubby trainmen had their hands full in keeping the car door clear for they were continually choked with Cholo or Indian groups committing last messages to memory. Their windows were jammed with heads and clawing arms exchanging or accepting dripping foods wrapped in platano leaves, bottles of checha, or earthen pots containing Heaven knows what.

At last the whistle screamed from the engine, a bell tinkled, and the train moved out in state to the demonstrations of the populace. The car was but moderately filled; a couple of padres from Ecuador—one a political refugee—a tonsured monk, a couple of black-robed nuns, and three engineers, together with an assortment of Peruvians—the women in the shrouding, tightly drawn rebozo of funeral black against which the heavy face-powdering showed in ghastly contrast—and a couple of small children who turned up at intervals from under the seats, grimed with train cinders and ecstatically sticky with chancaca, a raw sugar sort of candy. And in every vacant seat was baggage, native, hairy rawhide boxes shapeless from the many pack-mule lashings, paper bags, and pasteboard hat boxes and bandanna bundles and somewhere in the collection each Peruvian seemed to be able to draw on an inexhaustible supply of the Arequipa brewed, bilious, green beer.

CHAPTER VI
THROUGH THE INCA COUNTRY

Slowly at first we rose, skirting the great foothills or gently ascending valleys and always crossing some dismantled relic of the dead Inca empire. Then we plunged boldly into the mountain chain teetering over spidery bridges across gorges whose bottom was a ribbon of foam or where the rails followed a winding shelf cut in the face of the mountain, where an empty beer bottle flung from the car window broke on the tracks below over which the train had been crawling a quarter of an hour before. With the increasing altitude—the summit of the pass was still ahead and something over fifteen thousand feet above sea level—the soroche, mountain sickness, began to be manifest in the car in deathly, nauseating dizziness until it closely resembled the woebegone cabin of a sightseeing steamer at a yacht race. The engineers had been discussing the traces of the old Inca works with special reference to their irrigation systems, of which there was generally a ruin visible out of one window or the other. Special emphasis had been laid on the total lack of survival of any instruments or methods by which this hydraulic engineering had been calculated or performed. There is a trace of one irrigation ditch something like one hundred and twenty-five miles in length—a set of levels for such a project even to-day would be a matter for nice calculation. The Incas simply went ahead and did it, some way. Their engineering had been turned over and over and compared with the great engineering works of antiquity.

“Cut and try,” said one engineer in conclusion; “that was the way these old Inca people made their irrigation systems. Put a gang of Indians to digging a ditch from where the water supply was to come; then let in the water as they dug—in a little ditch—and dig deeper or dike it up to the water level as it showed in the trench. When they had that little ditch finished there was their level; all they had to do was to dig it as big and deep and wide as they wanted.”

It looked reasonable; there was no dissent. We swung around a curve and a vista opened out of a ragged valley, broken by gorges and cañons with sheer walls of soft rock.

One of the other engineers chuckled. “Look at that!” He pointed up the valley and his finger followed one of the cañons. “How did they cut and try on that proposition?”

There, for as far as the eye could follow the turnings of the cañon way was the line of a ditch, an aqueduct, that hung some twenty to fifty feet below the edge of the cliff. It had been cut into the wall of rock, leaving a lip along the outer edge to hold in the current. Here and there, where the ragged trace of the cañon made projecting, buttressing angles, the aqueduct had been driven as a short-cut tunnel straight through. Here and there great sections of the cañon walls had fallen, while occasionally it appeared as though the outer lip had been destroyed by man-made efforts—one of the old Spanish methods of hurrying up a little ready tribute—but never had there been a possibility of using any “cut and try” method of its construction.

“Well,” remarked the first, “there goes that theory—and it isn’t original with me either—for I reckon they had to run that level first and chalk it up on the rock to cut by in some kind of a way.”

It is a trifle staggering, when you think of it, that a nation that was able to solve engineering difficulties like these, to turn an arid desert into a teeming farm and to organize and administer a vast empire, should have been wantonly destroyed all for the lack of a little knowledge of the combination of saltpetre, sulphur, and charcoal. And the wretched waste! Think of that church-benisoned riffraff of the medieval slums, recognizing only the greed for raw gold, wasting a whole people in torture to satisfy the rapacious gluttony of a Spanish court.

Sometimes the train crawled along no faster than a bare walk, so steep were the grades and sharp the turns. There was nothing of the scenic splendor such as one may get in the railroads among the Alps of Switzerland and where, as one climbs, one may look down and back into the green landscape of a panorama. The scale was too great, the sense of proportion and distance was subdued; a stretch great enough for a Swiss panorama was one vast gorge twisting its way among the vaster masses of the Andes. The crest of the pass itself was higher than Mount Rainier.

Sometimes the train passed over high plateaus where occasionally in the distance could be seen the low house of some hacienda or the grouped huts of Indians while beyond in the great distance the plain was rimmed with a jagged line of snow-capped peaks. The winds swept across the level stretches, raising an assortment of sand-spouts and dusty cyclones. They were of all sizes, from tiny remolinos that died in a few puffs to towering whirlwinds that spiraled fifteen hundred feet in the air with a base of fifty feet that juggled boulders in its vortex like so many cork chips. They would move leisurely for a short space and then dart like a flash in an erratic path. Sometimes fifteen or twenty of these would be in sight at the same time. Herds of llamas grazed over the plain, sometimes a flock of sheep or an occasional horse, each with a wary eye on the whirlwinds; if one approached too near they galloped off. Not infrequently a herd of guanacos would gallop off at the approach of the train or could be seen grazing in the distance.

From beyond the high plain the grades lessened and the train rolled along at a fine speed—for South America. At rare intervals there was a station and a short stop, usually the lonely outpost of some mining company. Then the grades began to slope our way and in place of the dry bunch grass there were rolling hills and gentle valleys of soft green grass. Little lakes nestled in the hills, their cold waters black with wildfowl that scarcely fluttered up as the train shot by. We were making the slight drop down to that vast inter-Andean plateau that stretches from Bolivia on up into Ecuador.

A cold winter sunset sank beyond the cold purple of the western peaks; a couple of feeble, smoking and smelling oil lamps irritated the darkness and added their fragrance to the close atmosphere—for in the bitter winds and biting cold of the high altitude the windows had long since been closed.

Juliaca was reached, a junction by which one may connect for Cuzco, the old Inca capital. It showed in the blackness as a few dingy lights. Here the car emptied itself of all but half a dozen bound for Bolivia across the lake. Once again we wheezed under way and presently with a grand celebration from the engine’s whistle the train pulled slowly into the train yards of the terminal at Puno and as we climbed out there came the light, musical splash of freshwater surf and the unmistakable smell of water. Dimly under the starlight there loomed the form of a boat and the dim reflecting surface of the water was picked out by the dark patches of the native Indian craft. It was the great Lake Titicaca.

Down at the end of the stone dock lay the Yavari a slim, patched boat, twice lengthened, whose hull and engines had been packed piecemeal on the backs of burros, llamas, and mules over the Andes to the Titicaca shores over fifty years ago. It had taken a year to do it. It was the first steamer on the lake and wonderful was the amazement of the native population as they beheld this veritable monster of the seas—some sixty feet in length—shoot mysteriously through the water at the prodigious speed of some seven miles an hour.

Forward, on either side, was an array of tiny staterooms, each about the size of a wardrobe into which penetrated a most grateful warmth from the boilers. A scrap of tallow candle threw the suspicious looking bunks into shadow and it was not long before I was in one under my own blankets. From the little cabin aft came the clatter of the native travelers over a late lunch served by a bare-legged Quechua sailor; it was in the main some kind of a hash preparation loaded with aji, a venomous pepper that will penetrate the stoutest stomach. I had tried it and having been both warned and punished in the same mouthful, I was glad to seek the wardrobe bunk to weep it out of my system in cramped solitude.

In the first streaks of dawn the Yavari backed out from the long dock and swung out upon the crystal-clear, blue waters of Lake Titicaca. On the other side of the dock at a disabled angle and under repairs lay the more pretentious steamer Coya—literally the Inca Queen—with diminutive bridge and chart-house and all the trappings of a deep sea liner shrunk and crowded into small compass. Varieties of water fowl dotted the water’s edge in large flocks busily at breakfast and almost indifferent to the occasional straw or rather reed canoe of the Indians.

All day the Yavari skirted a coast that rolled back in long hills or at times came down to the lake in a steep bluff. Very slowly the lake is receding. Old Inca towns once evidently on the shore line are back from the water; since Pizarro’s time the distance is a matter of miles. In the little party on the boat the old tales of the Inca gold and Atahualpa’s tribute became naturally a leading topic. The country from the highlands of Colombia down to Chile are filled with legends of secreted treasure and lost mines or caches, for Pizarro did not wait for Atahualpa to pay his ransom—he burned him at the stake when he realized that the Inca emperor could actually get together a council chamber packed to the ceiling with raw gold.

There were scores of llama trains coming down the Andes from the uttermost parts of the empire, a veritable flood of gold was on its way to secure the release of the sacred Inca chief. It never arrived and somewhere up and down some three thousand miles of Andes there are legends galore of Inca tribute treasure concealed by the Indians on the burning of their king. There are legends of monkish parchment maps left by early missionaries that locate rediscoveries with apparent exactness up to certain points, of mines relocated by accident; in one case, a drunken Scotch donkey-engine driver took up and finally married a wretched Aymará mine-woman, a half-human creature; she finally revealed to him the location of one of the old concealed mines and the two worked it together. As the story runs, they acquired fabulous wealth, he longed for Scotland and went back taking her with him and importing for her use the chuno and chalona that was her only food. He played fair. Finally he died there and his widow managed to get back to her own mountains where she was finally poisoned for her money or her secret.

Legend also has it that around the city of Cuzco—the seat of the Incas—there was a great golden chain and that this, upon the approach of Pizarro, was dropped into Titicaca. It is always a steamer discussion as to how soon the lake will have receded enough to make its discovery a matter of possibility. At the possible place where it was dropped in the engineer of the Coya holds that the lake has receded some six miles since the conquest.

There is also the legend of the immense treasure train coming down in sections from what is now Colombia and Ecuador which was on the mountain trails at the time of Atahualpa’s death; evidence is said to exist of the despatch of this gold which would have more than completed the ransom. It never arrived, it was never heard of again after the burning at the stake, but it is a common belief to-day that there are many Indians to whom these matters are tribal secrets. There are common tales of odd Indians, neither Quechua nor Aymará, those being the two great Indian divisions, suddenly appearing from time to time and taking part in some Indian fiesta of peculiar importance, although evidently all the fiestas now have been given an ecclesiastical significance—and then as completely disappearing. There are rumors of tribes and even cities buried in the eastern slopes of the Andes from which these irregular excursions come.

Skirting the shore until the late afternoon, the Yavari struck out into the ocean horizon that stretched away in the blue distance, until we raised the Island of the Sun and the Island of the Moon. The former is reputed to have been the summer residence of the Incas and there still remain the ruins of palaces together with a great basin or reservoir hewn from the solid rock and traditionally known as the Inca’s bath tub. To the other island is ascribed the home of the wives and concubines of the Incas, or perhaps a training school where they were domiciled until, like an army reserve, they were called to the colors.

From each of them the Yavari took on a little freight, a few sacks of cebada, barley, and chuño, the little, dried up, original, native American potato, not much larger than a nutmeg. The cargo was on board a heavy, sluggish reed boat, a big affair in which burros and even bullocks are carried to or from these lake islands—of which there are many scattered here and there—and the mainland.

All the western slopes of the Andes are treeless, the high plains are treeless, and the few poles that are used in the thatched roofs of the Indian huts are dragged out from the montaña, as the interior over the final Andean passes is called. These skinny little poles are regular articles of trade. Therefore, the Lake Titicaca Indian has evolved his reed canoe and boat.

The reed, which grows along the shores of the lake, is bound in round bundles tapering at both ends; these bundles in turn are lashed together to form the canoes, from the little bundles to the larger boats that can carry freight. Sometimes a mat sail, also from these same reeds, is hoisted on a couple of poles lashed together at the apex and at the base braced against the inside of the clumsy craft. The steering is done with an oar made from a pole and a board, while similar oars are used by the crew who drive a wooden pin for an oarlock at any convenient spot along the reed-bundle gunwale. In this kind of an outfit they put out on the lake fishing for the little fish that alone seem to have survived in the cold waters, or shuffling across the waves from the coast to one little sugar-loaf island after another in their native trade. In Pizarro’s day it was probably the same—costume, craft, and barter.

In Pizarro’s Day It Was Probably the Same—Costume, Craft, and Barter

One more night in the cramped wardrobe of the Yavari—during which my solution of alcohol and salicylic acid procured in flea-bitten Lima—against other similar emergencies—did valiant service, and in the morning we awoke to the clatter of the Indian mate and his Quechua crew as they made the little steamer fast to the dock at Guaqui. From here a railroad runs over a continuation of the level high plain and past the ruins of Tiajuanaca to the edge of the plateau above La Paz. The valley of La Paz is a vast crack torn in the level plain as by some primeval cataclysmic blast; on the farther side there is the tremendous peak of Illomani with a cape of perpetual snow far down its grim flanks; far off in the ragged valley and some two thousand feet below the railroad terminal is the capital of Bolivia, La Paz. Once no trolley wound its way down the steep sides, and in those days there still gathered at the station every Deadwood and express coach that had ever existed at the north. A crew of runners would meet the train, pile all the freight and passengers that were possible inside, lash the rest on the roof, and then with their four or six horse teams—never an animal free from a collar gall—on a dead run race for a place at the edge of the mesa in order to be the first on the winding trail that led downward to the city. Whips cracking, horses on the jump, coaches swinging and banging, here a hairy rawhide trunk goes off, and there an Indian hotel mozo is snapped straight out in the rush as he tries to crawl up on the baggage rack behind; and then the dropping trail in a whirl of dust over a road scarcely better than a dry creek bottom until, at last, over the rough cobbles of La Paz itself, to pull up at the door of the hotel with the rough horses in a lather and with white eyes and heaving sides. That was the way it was once. Now it is different; you can ride down sedately in a trolley car and walk into the hotel with never a hair turned.

CHAPTER VII
OUT OF LA PAZ BY PACK TRAIN

Here in La Paz were completed the final arrangements for reaching the interior; this was the last of the easy traveling, from now on it would be by pack train and saddle, raft and canoe, and to gather them we advanced from one interior town to another as best we might. It was the third and last of the Andean series that was to be crossed, and it was also the highest and hardest. Daily we haggled with arrieros over pack mules or rode to their corrals in the precipitous suburbs of the city and between times there were the odds and ends of a big outfit to be filled in and the commissary to be stocked. It was the last place where the little things of civilization could be procured, for there was but one more real settlement, Sorata over the first pass, that could be counted upon for anything that had been overlooked. And then one day it appeared as though we were complete.

HAGGLED WITH ARRIEROS OVER PACK MULES.

The arriero came around and weighed the cargo and divided it in rawhide nets, equally balanced, according to each individual mule’s capacity and then even before daybreak on the following morning we were off.

It seemed like midnight. The dead, still blackness of the night, with the lighter crevice of gloom that marked the dividing-line between the curtains at the window gave no indication of dawn, and only the echo of the little tin alarm-clock, with its hands irritatingly pointing to the hour of necessity, indicated that at last the time was at hand for the actual entry into the vague interior of South America. A thin tallow candle glimmered in the high-ceilinged room and illumed flickering patches between the areas of cold, uncertain darkness, and by its light I scrambled into breeches, puttees, and spurs, and buckled my gun under my heavy, wool-lined jacket. Down in the patio I could hear an Aymará scuffling about in his rawhide sandals, and as I stepped out on the balcony above the patio, a thin drift of acrid smoke floated up from where he was cooking our tin of coffee over a clay fire-pot with llama dung for fuel.

Below my window, up from the narrow street there came the shuffling noises of the pack-train—the creak of rawhide cinches, the thud and strain of the packs as they came in restless collision and now and again the “Hola! hola!” or “Huish!” of an arriero or more often the long-drawn hiss of a rawhide thong. Then the pack-train lengthened in file, and the noise died away up the crooked, narrow street. The few final necessities of the trail I jammed in my saddle-bag as the last mule was packed; then had a cup of coffee, steaming hot, although only comfortably warm to the taste from the low-boiling point of the high altitude, and we climbed into the saddle and were off.

The city of La Paz was still in darkness, but above the rim of the great crack in the depths of which it rests there was a suggestion of a silver haze that dimmed the stars. The streets were deserted except for an occasional scavenger pig grunting restlessly on its way. Sometimes a little Bolivian policeman, in heavy coat and cape, and muffled to the eyes in a woolen tippet, would peer sleepily from the shelter of a great Spanish doorway, and then, observing our solemn respectability, sink back into the comfortable shadow. By the time we had rejoined the main body of the pack-train we were in the shabbier outskirts of La Paz, where the Aymarás and the Cholos—the latter the half-breed relatives of the former—live in their squalid mud-brick hovels.

Prisoners Along the Trail up from La Paz

The streets were wider now, in fact they were nothing but a series of ragged gullies, along whose dry banks straggled the grimy dwellings. Always, in some of them, there is a fiesta of some kind, a birth, a wedding, a death, a special church celebration, or perhaps some pantheistic festival that still lingers in their dulled history and has prudently merged itself with the piously ordained occasions. The orgy of the night is past, yet from here and there come the feeble tootings of a drunken flute, an instrument that every Aymará seems to be able to play as a birthright, whose mournful and monotonous strains drift through the thin air from some less stupefied celebrant.

The Aymará love of their primitive music is very strong; it is universal among them and, while their primitive flute, pandean pipe and crude drum interpret the joy ordinarily, yet they take cheerfully to any new form of musical instrument, and in some miraculous way learn, in time, to produce the same series of ragged, droning sounds. The accordion, concertina and mouth organ are much beloved and once I even heard a self-taught Aymará band of brass horns, cornet, tenor horn, bass, and a slide and key trombone, playing the Aymará airs with their own home-made orchestration. The government bandmaster had drilled a large military band that used to give concerts twice a week in the plaza and there was not an approach to a white man in the outfit, it was composed wholly of Cholos and Aymarás from the little boy drummers to the great horns that curled like a blanket-roll over the shoulder.

Rapidly the first silver of the morning deepened to richer tints and glowed above the purple silhouette of the rim of the great gorge, while Illimani, the perpetually snow-capped mountain that overshadowed La Paz, burst into splendid prismatic bloom as the first direct rays of the sun shimmered over its slopes and ice peaks; below, the gorge and the city slowly lightened and glimmered in detail through the frosty, early morning mists. The thin bitter air of the night was gone; it was cold still, but the thin high air held in some indefinable way the promise of a seductive warmth.

The long line of pack mules climbed steadily upward; the rambling, hovel-lined streets were gone and only now and then we passed a little mud hut with its one door as the sole aperture, the headquarters of the tiny Aymará truck farm. The acrid smoke from their cooking-fire leaked through the blackened roof and rose in little spirals straight up through the still air, while the members of the household squatted in the chill sun, muffled to the eyes in ponchos and with woolen cap and superimposed hat drawn down to meet the mufflings, squatted in the chilly sunlight. They muffle themselves in this way at the slightest suggestion of chill in the air; but from the thighs down they are indifferent to cold or storm. It makes no difference if they are in a blizzard blowing over one of the high Andean passes, they will trudge along with legs bare to above the knees, but with heads and throats muffled deep in woolens. I have seen them make a camp in a driving snow-storm and go peacefully to sleep with their heads carefully enshrouded, and awake at daybreak none the worse for the experience, though their bare legs were drifted over with snow and their sandals stiffened with ice.

Along the road that climbed up the side of the great crack in the high plateau that formed the valley of La Paz, little groups of Aymarás who had camped there during the night were packing their trains of llamas and burros for the last short distance in to the La Paz markets. Often, without taking the trouble to cook, they would gnaw on a piece of raw chalona—the split carcass of a sheep dried in the sun and cold of the high plateaus—which has about as much flavor as an old buggy whip. Sometimes they ate parched corn or chuño—the latter the native potato, shrunken and small after the drying in the high air in the same treatment as the chalona receives—and tasting very much like a cork bottle stopper. But always they chewed coca, the leaf that furnishes cocaine. Leaf by leaf they would stow it away, and add a little ashes and oil scraped out of a pouch with a needle of bone. Among the older Aymarás, the cheek frequently has developed a sagging pouch from the years of distention with coca. Aside from that, it seems to have no effect upon them.

The Aymará pack-trains of burros would pass us with indifference, half hidden in great sheaves of cebada—barley—or with chickens slung in ponchos on either side and with only their heads visible and swaying in time to the gait of the burro. But the llamas would go mincing past, crowding as far as possible against the other side of the road with an obvious assumption of fright. Their slitted nostrils would twitch and their slender ears wiggle in an agony of nervousness, while their eyes, the most beautiful, pleading, liquid eyes in the animal world would be humid with hysterical fear. Yet from their infancy they have seen men and horses, pack-trains, and all the travel of the mountains and plateaus. But the apparent gentleness of the llama is purely superficial; for it can spit with unpleasant accuracy to repel a frontal approach, while its rear and flanks are guarded by padded feet that are vicious in their power and uncertainty. To the Aymará the llama is transportation, food, wool, and fuel. An Aymará child can do anything with a llama, and with nothing more than her shrill little voice; but in the presence of a white man it is a creature of hysterical and timid peevishness.

AYMARÁ DRIVER OF PACK LLAMAS.

MEMBERS OF A GANG OF PRISONERS.

As we filed by these pack-trains, the Aymará driver would remove his native hat of coarse felt, leaving the head still covered by his gay, woolen nightcap with its flapping ear-tabs, and murmur a respectful “Tata!” to which we would politely return a “Buenos dias, tata,” unless the driver happened to be a woman, in which case we would substitute the corresponding “Mama” for the “Tata.” The women would plod along barefooted while they spun yarn from a bundle of dirty, raw wool held under one arm. As the yarn was spun, it was gathered on a top-like distaff dangling at the end of the woolen thread. In some miraculous way it was never permitted to lose its spinning twirl, and at the right moment always absorbed the additional thread, so that it never was permitted to drag along the trail. At her little home somewhere on the inter-Andean plateau, she will afterwards dye the wool and knit one of those night-caps or weave a poncho, according to some rough tribal pattern, so tight that it will shed water as well as a London raincoat. Her loom will be two logs laid on the ground, on which the warp is stretched; the shuttle will be carved from the bone of a sheep, and the threads will be beaten into place with the sharpened shin-bone of a sheep. Weeks may be spent in the patient weaving. Whether she is on the trail or is weaving, she has usually a pudgy, expressionless baby of a tarnished copper color held in the fold of the poncho that is knotted across her shoulders. Sometimes a prosperous Aymará gentleman, with his pack animals, passed us and then he was apt to be accompanied by several Aymará women and their assortment of tarnished copper babies, the women being his wives, who assist in the heavier work of driving and packing with complaisant domestic affection.

This road up from the great, raw gulch of La Paz was full of life; pack-train after pack-train passed, loaded with the daily supplies for that city. All of the trails of the high plateau above converge to feed it and it broadens out into a real road, no longer a trail, under the needs of the heavier traffic. A group of sandaled soldiers was apparently detailed to act as road-masters; and they would stop the Aymarás and enforce a bit of labor in aid of the gang of prisoners under their guard. The instant dull and sullen submission of the Indians at once indicated their position in the Bolivian scale.

THE GUARD FOR THE ROAD MENDERS.

Steadily during the early morning hours we climbed, until the rim of the high plateau itself was only a short distance ahead. Worn through the rim by generations of plodding hoofs was a crooked trail, so narrow that the mules bumped and scrabbled along, and we emerged, as through a trap-door, out on the endless distances of the vast inter-Andean plateau. Below, losing itself in the distant haze, stretched the ragged crack that made the valley of La Paz and miles away, quivering in the slowly warming air, was the city itself, a tiny clutter of gaudy houses and red-tiled roofs, with the brilliant green of the little park making a sharp contrast in color. Elsewhere the slopes of the valley were as destitute of verdure as when they were blown into existence by the terrific forces of primeval nature. Yet in this desert barrenness there was no lack of color; in the cool of the morning the shadows were soft in every delicate variation of purple and amethyst; the bare soil and the jagged slopes blended and shifted in ochers and vermilions, in golden tints and copper hues and, scattered here and there, were little patches of greens where some little, irrigated Aymará truck-farm was breaking into the world against the moist chocolate-colored soil. Beyond—and in their immensity there was no suggestion of their great distance—rose the jagged fangs of the last and most interior range of the Andes, with their black cliffs and scarred flanks disappearing under the everlasting mantles of snow; over all, was the clear, shimmering turquoise heaven of the high altitudes.

WHILE RODRIGUEZ AND HIS CHOLO HELPERS TIGHTENED THE RAWHIDE CINCHES AND REPLACED THE PACKS.

Down in that valley were the little cafés, the little shops with imported trinkets, the plaza Sunday afternoons with the band and the parading élite and all the little functions of civilization, yet this city is fairly balanced on the edge of the frontier, while beyond were the high passes and the vague interior of South America, the last of the great primitive domains, where men still exist by means of bow and arrow or stone club, and where the ethical right and the physical ability to survive are yet indistinguishable.

From this edge of the plateau the narrow trails run in all directions like the sticks of a fan. Trained from many previous trips, the pack-animals halted or wandered aside, nibbling at the tufts of dry bunch-grass, while Rodriguez and his two Cholo helpers tightened the rawhide cinches and replaced the packs that had shifted in the long climb and scramble through the narrow gully. Then, with the bell on the leading pack-animal tinkling monotonously, began the steady plodding in single file along one of the furrowed trails.

CHAPTER VIII
THE BACK TRAIL AMONG THE AYMARAS

At first the plateau was dotted with the lines of converging burro- and llama-trains, but, as the morning passed, there was nothing but the lonely distance of the plateau, with here and there a tiny speck of a solitary pack-train. The air had warmed rapidly under the sun; the light breeze had the touch of a northern spring, and I yielded to the seductive suggestion and strapped my heavy woolen coat to the saddle. Five minutes later I halted and gladly put it on once more, for the thin air was treacherous in its allurements.

Somewhere about the middle of the day we halted for breakfast at Cocuta, a native tambo or wayside inn, though the pack-train pushed on slowly, nibbling the bunch-grass as it went. The tambo was surrounded by a high, thick mud-brick wall that inclosed something over an acre of ground, and inside this fortress were the little mud buildings, granaries, and corrals. An old Aymará woman cooked our breakfast over a llama-dung fire in one corner of the room, and it was served on a rough table over by a dried mud bench that was built against two of the walls. The filthy room was lighted only by the small, low doors, the high, mud sills of which still further shut out light and ventilation, and the fetid atmosphere was rich in its ethnological and entomological suggestion. A chicken soup, reeking with the mutton tallow of chalona and with the head and feet of the fowl floating in the grease, made the first course; then came lomita (the tenderloin of a steak), and eggs fried in mutton tallow. We produced some coffee from the saddle-bags and the old woman fluttered about and brewed a pretty fair article. It was at this same Cocuta, on another occasion, that, in riding to La Paz, I ran into a band of drunken ladrones and, as some of the band took the trail after me, it gave a most unwelcome and interesting zest to the rest of that night ride.

That night we slept in a second tambo, smaller, but also with a thick mud wall inclosing the collection of mud huts. The mules were turned loose on the plateau to graze till morning, their hobbled feet a guarantee of their not straying. At sunset came the piercing cold, when even the barricaded door of the mud room and the steaming human warmth inside proved grateful. A wide platform of mud-bricks was the bed—it was the sole furniture—and on it we piled the sheepskins from the pack-saddles, and over an alcohol lamp we made a thin tea and warmed up some tinned things. An old Aymará woman was apparently the sole caretaker of this tambo, but she viewed us with unlovely eyes and would furnish nothing. Sullen and surly that night, she was all ingratiating smiles the next morning when she saw my camera. She scuttled inside her hut and then reappeared in some hasty finery, in which she trotted anxiously about with conciliatory grimaces and pleadings in guttural Aymará that her picture be taken. How she knew what a camera was for and, further, why she was not afraid of it were mysteries, for invariably I found all other Aymarás hostile against the evil witchcraft of the little black box. As it was yet only early dawn, there was not sufficient light, but I satisfied her by clicking the shutter.

After the heated air in the dark hut, the first moment outside in the pure, still cold was like breathing needles; the long stretch of plateau was soft with white frost, every grimy straw in the thatched roofs glistened like silver with its coating of ice, and the morning ablutions were performed through a hole broken in the crust of ice in a near-by brook. A cup of tea boiled over the alcohol lamp was the only breakfast, and then we started. As we climbed into the saddles the old Aymará woman hovered in the gateway clucking pleased Aymará benedictions for her photograph.

For some reason of his own Rodriguez elected to leave the main trail beyond this tambo and take one of the little-used back trails to Sorata. It was very much shorter but, as we afterward learned, is little used on account of the surly, hostile attitude of the Aymarás of that district and, except for a large outfit, is not considered safe. Here the Aymarás are more secluded and view intrusion with aggressive suspicion; three months before they had attacked an outfit and killed the trader. Those who passed no longer greeted us with the “Tata!” Instead, they would turn sullenly out of the trail to avoid us as we passed, or stop and view us with unmistakable hostility. When we halted for a hasty bite by the side of a cold brook, Rodriguez held the whole pack-train and the arrieros close by, and did not allow them to go ahead, as on the day before.

Just before branching off into this unused trail we came upon a large party of Aymarás carrying, in relays, a stretcher on their shoulders that was inclosed with cloth, so that it resembled a sort of palanquin; six of them were carrying it at a time in a ground-eating dog-trot and about each half-mile they would be relieved by six others, the transfer of the stretcher being effected without jolt or jar. It proved to be a wealthy Bolivian haciendado who was ill, and was being carried in this simple ambulance to the doctors in La Paz by his own Indians. The trot and the burden were nothing to them; I have seen an Aymará boy carry forty pounds on his back and trot hour after hour without apparent difficulty and come into camp at night but little behind the mounted man he was accompanying. Yet at this altitude, unless one has become gradually accustomed, even walking is a heavy effort.

AYMARA HERDERS PLAYED THEIR WEIRD FLUTES.

On the new trail the dead level of the plateau gave way to more rolling country, the ragged, snow-capped line of mountains at the horizon came closer; Huayna-Potosi loomed on our right, and, growing more impressive every hour, was the great, white mass of Mount Sorata, dead ahead. Then the rolling country closed in, and narrower valleys succeeded, with the rugged foot-hills on each side. In this part was an enormous breeding-ground for llamas; for miles the hills were dotted with them. Baby llamas, very new, and still blinking at the strange world, huddled timidly in behind a tuft of bunch-grass or behind some small boulder, while the queer, goose-necked mother stood near with apparent indifference; little llamas in all stages of adolescence and awkwardness gamboled on the hillsides, and herds dotting the slopes looked for all the world like big, stiff-necked, grotesque sheep. Among them were the Aymará herders who, like traditional shepherds, played their weird and mournful flutes or pipes. Over and over again came the same strain, which carried for miles in the thin, still air.

One of its little phrases curiously reminded me of that chanted taunt of my boyhood, “Over the fence is ou-oot!”

Rarely does the Aymará make his own flute or pipe, simple though it is; their manufacture is a native industry by itself. Like a true musician, the Aymará must have his instrument just so, and up in the higher altitudes the flutes are made and brought down to be sold in the market on the days of fiesta. His single weapon, a sling of the pattern made famous by David and Goliath, is of twisted llama-wool, and will throw a stone the size of a lemon. They develop a wonderful skill in its use.

On this lonely trail we came upon a castle, a veritable castle of the story books! Alone, grim and battlemented, it stood boldly outlined against the landscape. It was not large, but it was, or had been, perfect in every medieval detail, and was constructed of mud bricks from outer walls to keep. There was a moat, dry and unkept and now fallen upon evil days; the high surrounding wall was loopholed, and the fringe of battlements had been eaten away in places by the driving storms. The keep was visible rising above the wall, while galleries and overhanging balconies showed the purposes and possibilities of protection, even should the outer wall be successfully stormed by some ancient foe; the single, heavy outer gate in the wall was barred, and not a sign of life or of a retainer was to be seen. For miles around the country was deserted and bare, and in the desolate mountains remained this substance of the past like a grim, dramatic ghost of ancient days. Back on this unused trail it is but little known; Rodriguez knew of it, but that was all, except that he had a very positive idea that its owner or occupant did not care for visitors—but it was occupied.

Monotonously through the afternoon the pack-train wound through the narrow valleys, and closer came the mountains and more chill the air sweeping downward from their fields of snow. The melting snows flooded the slopes and valleys in innumerable brooks; often the trail itself was lost in wide expanses of icy water. The sun set, and with growing darkness came the increased bitterness of the piercing cold. Along this trail there was no shelter except here and there the little mud huts of the Aymará.

The clouds rolling low overhead left the night pitch-black; a gale of wind sprang up and hurled itself in our teeth, varying its monotony now and again with a squall of snow that stung like a blizzard. Without a stumble the sure-footed mules kept the trail in the darkness up and down through abrupt gullies or fording some icy stream that left their bellies a fringe of icicles, while, during some lull in the blast, the tinkle of the bell on the leading pack-animal would drift back to us.

At last the old, deserted tambo for which we had been aiming was reached. By the aid of a few matches—for the lantern was carefully packed on some mule indistinguishable in the blackness—half a dozen Aymarás were found sleeping in the litter on the floor of the mud room, for here there was not even a mud bench. There was no barricade to close the door, and a score of eddies whirled in from the broken thatch overhead. The arrieros drove the Aymarás out—they were part of a pack-train, and not natives of that district—and threw the sheepskin pads over the muddy ground. The alcohol-lamp, screened from drafts by saddles, sheepskins, and hats, finally furnished a lukewarm tin of soup, some thin, warm tea, and some eggs, which though warm, could hardly be considered cooked. The bitter wind swept through the openings, and no candle could survive, so purely by a sense of touch the frozen spurs and puttees were unbuckled for the instant sleep that came, clothes and all.

At the break of day we were again in the saddle. The trail the previous day had been hard and rough, but following a general level; but from now on it began steadily to rise. Early in the morning we had gained upon Mount Sorata; in the deceptive distance it loomed apparently only a few miles ahead, yet its nearest snow-field was thirty miles away. Lake Titicaca is only a few miles distant, and one of its long arms reaches back into the country in a vast, shallow lagoon covered with a water growth through which swim myriads of fearless water-fowls. In some ancient time a causeway was built over this long arm, solid and substantial, and on each side, as we passed over, ducks and snipe and waders eyed us impudently, the length of a fishing rod away, and one, a snipe, flickered along almost under the heels of the pack-mules. Off in the distance was the old Aymará city of Achicachi, still surrounded by the remains of an old mud wall that dates from before Pizarro, where the frosted thatch and tile roofs glittered in the sunlight against the distant cold blue horizon of Lake Titicaca.

Beyond the causeway the trail rose steadily to the mountain pass. The cold mists from Sorata swept down and the line of mules disappeared in its chill fog. It thins, slender wraiths of eddying vapor drift past, and we ride through the ruins of an ancient Aymará town where there was nothing left but the rectangular lines of stone débris; the few streets were still plainly marked, though the village has been dead these many centuries. Its name is lost; it is not even a tradition. From under some ruined rubbish an Aymará head was thrust out, framed in the acrid, thin smoke from the wretched, make-shift hut; a few sheep were herded within the ruined inclosures, and other small flocks were grazing near. The head proved to belong to their shepherd, tending them until the time of their transmutation into chalona.

The Few Streets Were Still Plainly Marked, Though the Village Has Been Dead These Many Centuries

Now and again an Aymará shrine loomed through the mist beside the trail, in its niche an offering of wilted flowers and some cigarette pictures, and above, in a crevice of the stones and dried mud, a crooked twig cross. Sometimes we met an Aymará, with a bundle of reeds, sitting in the shelter of a rough stone wind-break making and testing his reed flutes. He whittled the reed and tested each finger-hole as he scraped it larger. He looked up, and again we were saluted with the respectful “Tata!” for in order to reach the last stage of the mountain pass we had swung back on the main trail, where the Indians were more sociable. More stone and mud shrines appeared, each with its offering of propitiation to the gods of these higher places and each with its twig cross above.

Higher, rougher, and steeper grew the trail, often in a zigzag up some precipitous gorge. A tiny, scattering Indian village came in sight, Huaylata, perched on a high, rolling part of this Andean pass. Its mud huts were smaller, grimier, and drearier, if possible, than those that we had passed on the great plateau. A few Aymarás appeared and tried to sell us cebada, or barley, for the mules; an old woman, squatting on the ground, weaving a poncho on her log loom, stopped long enough to look over our cavalcade curiously out of her bleared eyes red with smoke. Through the little door of her hut the interior was visible, stacked with chalona half prepared and waiting for the sun to shine before it was moved out into the open ground for further drying.

Indifferently she watched me extract the camera from my saddle-bag, but when the brass lens pointed in her direction, she clattered vigorously in her dialect and scuttled into the house to hide. The other Aymarás were instantly hostile, and I worked a scheme that had often succeeded. I turned my back to them and reversed the camera, with the lens pointing backward under my arm. This would almost invariably get the picture. If it did not, I would stand behind the broad shoulders of one of the party while I adjusted the camera, and then have him step suddenly to one side as I pressed the button. Otherwise they would scatter like a flock of Chinamen under similar conditions, and with angry mutterings.

CHAPTER IX
OVER THE FIRST GREAT PASS

The intermittent fog and mist turned to a cold rain that drove in stinging gusts square in our faces. Slowly we climbed, and went a few miles beyond the divide. A huge pile of loose stones marked the spot, a tribute to the particular god of this high place that had slowly accumulated with the offerings of Aymarás that had passed the spot. The pile was larger than an Aymará hut, and on the summit was a little cross of twigs from which a few strips of calico fluttered in the gale. At the base were curious little altars made by two flat stones laid edge up, and with a third long, flat stone across them. They symbolized a house and were erected by some prospective Aymará bridegroom or house-builder in propitiation for his enterprise. The cross that surmounted all of these shrines and piles of stone has been readily adopted by the pantheistic Aymará, who is only too fearful lest some unknown god may have escaped his efforts at placation. Around the base of the cairn were the withered and frost-bitten remains of floral offerings and also the scraps of cigarette pictures, the latter, from their invariableness, apparently one of the chief delights of the gods.

BLIZZARDS BLOWING OVER THE ANDEAN PASSES.

At rare intervals some eddying rift would be blown in the mists, and for a brief moment Mount Sorata would stand clear and sharp against the blue patch of sky, with its great white shoulder scarcely more than five miles away across a precipitous gorge. High above our world it seemed to rise, a titanic, bulking, cataclysmic mass, magnificent in its immensity. Enormous cliffs of snow towered above the scarred, black gorges of its flanks, glittering in the flash of momentary sunlight and iridescent in the purple shadows. High against its face clouds were born and were shredded in the blast of an unseen gale; now and again an avalanche of snow broke from some slope and was whirled in a feathery spray into the shadows of a gorge thousands of feet below. It could blanket a dozen villages, yet it was diminished on the tremendous slopes until it seemed no more than the tiny avalanche on a tin roof at home; before it can fall to the depths of the gorge a gale has caught it and it is blown in a stinging blizzard half way across the mountain’s face. Vertically, nearly two miles above the trail across the divide, rose the white fang of the summit, that has still defied all efforts at scaling; there, according to the Aymará belief, is the chief treasure of the god of the mountain, a great golden bull. The generous pantheism of the Aymará has given a similar golden treasure to the summit of Illomani back near La Paz, but in that case, in order that the balance of conflicting religions might be kept, it is a huge cross of gold.

The difficulties and inaccessibility of these mountains conveys, to the Aymará mind, the idea that they are inhabited by the most powerful and exclusive of the gods. That hint of exclusiveness is enough for them and only with the greatest difficulty have they been prevailed upon to accompany the few climbing expeditions, while weird stories still circulate among them as to the howling and malignant devils that ride the storms in the great gorges high up. The Aymará is already supplied with enough lesser deities that require continuous and troublesome propitiation so that he does not care to go out of his way up into Sorata and incur another, and possibly hostile and irritated theistic burden.

After the cairn that marks the divide is passed, the trail leads abruptly downward. At first it is a relief to lean back in the saddle and feel the strain come on the crupper while the breast-strap flaps loosely once more, but hour after hour of constant descent and the constant straining back in the saddle become more irksome and monotonous than was the leaning forward on the upward climb. The mists and cold rains blow in lighter patches and with a softer touch; even occasionally the deep valleys below can be seen marked out in irregular surfaces of soft green where the Aymará farms are budding. The descent is rapid; the pack-train coils about among the buttresses of the mountains along a broad shelf that is often cut into the steep slopes, and always plunging downward. We were almost below the line of clouds, and a few moments later they were drifting past just overhead, and there, far below us, stretched the deep, crooked valley of Sorata.

It was the very heart of the Andes. In the wedge-shaped channel of the tortuous valley a slender thread of white torrent narrowed and disappeared in the haze of depth and distance; the huge mountains swept upward like the sides of a great bowl, while delicately floating strata of fleecy clouds seemed to mark off and measure and then accent their enormous altitudes. Beyond and above them rose other peaks and the jagged fangs of interlocking mountain-ranges that formed this colossal Andean maze; there was no sense of distance; even the feeling of space seemed to be for the instant gone, and under the long, mellow rays of the afternoon sun, with this vast, shattered universe spread before us, it was as though we had been suddenly translated and left dizzy and bewildered in an opalescent infinity.

Across the Andes

ACROSS THE
ANDES

THE TROPICS

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACROSS THE ANDES

CHAPTER I
OLD PANAMA, AGAMEMNON, AND THE GENIAL PICAROON

CHAPTER II
THE FIGHTING WHALE AND CHINAMEN IN THE CHICKEN COOP

CHAPTER III
THROUGH A TROPICAL QUARANTINE

CHAPTER IV
A FORCED MARCH ACROSS THE DESERT OF ATACAMA

CHAPTER V
AREQUIPA THE CITY OF CHURCHES

CHAPTER VI
THROUGH THE INCA COUNTRY

CHAPTER VII
OUT OF LA PAZ BY PACK TRAIN

CHAPTER VIII
THE BACK TRAIL AMONG THE AYMARAS

CHAPTER IX
OVER THE FIRST GREAT PASS

Across the Andes

ACROSS THEANDES

THE TROPICS

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACROSS THE ANDES

CHAPTER IOLD PANAMA, AGAMEMNON, AND THE GENIAL PICAROON

CHAPTER IITHE FIGHTING WHALE AND CHINAMEN IN THE CHICKEN COOP

CHAPTER IIITHROUGH A TROPICAL QUARANTINE

CHAPTER IVA FORCED MARCH ACROSS THE DESERT OF ATACAMA

CHAPTER VAREQUIPA THE CITY OF CHURCHES

CHAPTER VITHROUGH THE INCA COUNTRY

CHAPTER VIIOUT OF LA PAZ BY PACK TRAIN

CHAPTER VIIITHE BACK TRAIL AMONG THE AYMARAS

CHAPTER IXOVER THE FIRST GREAT PASS

ACROSS THE
ANDES

CHAPTER I
OLD PANAMA, AGAMEMNON, AND THE GENIAL PICAROON

CHAPTER II
THE FIGHTING WHALE AND CHINAMEN IN THE CHICKEN COOP

CHAPTER III
THROUGH A TROPICAL QUARANTINE

CHAPTER IV
A FORCED MARCH ACROSS THE DESERT OF ATACAMA

CHAPTER V
AREQUIPA THE CITY OF CHURCHES

CHAPTER VI
THROUGH THE INCA COUNTRY

CHAPTER VII
OUT OF LA PAZ BY PACK TRAIN

CHAPTER VIII
THE BACK TRAIL AMONG THE AYMARAS

CHAPTER IX
OVER THE FIRST GREAT PASS