Charles Johnson Post

“ Worn through the rim by generations of plodding 115 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Eight hundred miles back, through cañon and mountain torrent, over the giant passes of the inner Andes, lay the Bolivian capital of La Paz, the last civilization from the Pacific shore. Two thousand miles to the eastward from this little frontier nucleus of Rurrenabaque lay the civilization that groped its way westward from the Atlantic, while between were long reaches of desolate rivers, and primitive jungle.
The few whites—refugee mostly; two, I knew, had a price on their heads on the other side of the Andes—popped out of their cane shacks to see me off. ”

“ Sometimes a Lecco’s shoulder would rise above the boiling smother, with the brown muscles playing in hard knots; sometimes we would slew side on to the current, and no power could hold us straight until a bursting wave would throw us back; sometimes for an instant the dripping snouts of the callapo would be flung high in the air and fall back with a crash that made itself heard above the roar, and the raft would quiver and strain with the impact. One saw nothing; we might have been standing still. There was nothing but the lashing sting of the whirling spray and the thunder of the cataract. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sallow gentlemen of wealth and haughtiness came aboard with their retinue of family who, in turn, had their retinue of half savage servants, to escort their rubber shipments and sling their hammocks from the stanchions of the cool forward deck along with mine.
All day we broiled sociably together and in the nights—when we anchored in the river—slept softly in the balmy night airs. Together we listened to the Madeira pilots swear as they ran us on a mud-bank and then clattered aft bossing the dumping of the anchor from the steamer’s dinghy in order to warp us off again. ”

“ We dropped through long distances of sunlight that glowed with a grateful and novel warmth, and once in a while a brilliant little bird flashed past, while gorgeous butterflies began to flutter about the mud-holes. The eastern side of the Andes drop in a succession of forest-clad cliffs; looking up and back, it seemed at times hardly possible that a trail could cling to the steep face. ”

“ ANDEAN MOUNTAINEER.
Whatever course the trail turned, the blizzard seemed to shift to meet us again square in the teeth. The shale and débris along the narrow ledge of trail was treacherous with an icy glare. The saddle buckles were knots of ice, and every now and then we beat our hats against 147 the mule to break the ice that encrusted them; on my poncho the sleet froze in a thin sheet that would crackle with any movement and rattle off. The particles of ice and snow did not fall as in a self-respecting gale, but were whipped along in the blast in streaks that never seemed to drop. ”

“ Here and there the feasting crews were gorging themselves on monkey and half-burned strips of tapir, while a tin can of alcohol and a gourd dipper were free to all. A short distance up the river the savages had appeared that morning, and one of their men lay dead back in the jungle, while another was in one of the huts 353 with an arrow-hole through his breast. In the main shack a few rods off was a woman, white, pure Brazilian, who spoke in the low, soft modulations of a far-off civilization, and who, by any of the standards of all the ages, was a beauty. ”

“ And yet these crossings were never made until the last moment when the poles could find no bottom and the steep bank came down like a cliff into from fifteen to fifty feet of water. The little rapids that were nothing more than riffles coming down—that is, in comparison with the real cañons and rapids—were slowly poled and dragged through with double crews, inch by inch around some jutting, strategic rocky point and into the upstream eddy beyond. Boils of water burst from under the balsas until you balanced with the Leccos on the straining raft like rope dancers on the same strand. ”

“ Rapidly the camp grew under the influx of the new men; the song of the whip-saw rose in the forest and long clean timbers began piling themselves along the trail; now and again the roar of some huge tree shook the air as it mowed a swath of jungle in its fall; a tiny store was opened and 308 now and again Leccos came to trade—out from the original jungle of the year before had come a tiny, fragmentary community hanging on to the frontier. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 Aymará huts that clung to the steep slopes with their little patches of corn were shrunk to miniature; the single bull plowing with a crooked tree-trunk was a diminutive bug, prodded along the furrow by a microscopic insect. All the air was filled with the low roar of cascades; every slope and valley was scarred with the slender, white threads of torrents from the melting snows above. Far ahead, where the buttress of a mountain projected like a hilly peninsula into the Sorata valley, a toy village of scarlet tile and thatched roofs was compactly lodged on the flattened crest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The little monkey, the frightened, hopeless agony of death stamped on its tiny, grotesque features, dabbles aimlessly with little twigs and leaves, stuffing them at the wound; sometimes it feebly tries to get back among the branches that make his world, and, as you approach, there is never any savage, snarling stand where he meets extinction with the cornered heroism that seems for the moment to balance the scene. Instead, he pleads with failing gestures of forlorn propitiation, and with hoarse, cooing little noises, for the respite that would be far less merciful than the coup de gráce. ”

“ The dusk of fiesta is filled with drunken, sullen Indians among whom wander here and there dishevelled creatures with clotted wounds. Occasionally the sullen buzz rises, a little restless movement begins from some section of the big plaza, and in a moment a knot of Bolivian police are plunging in to come back with bloody carbine butts. Always there is the dull hatred of the Bolivian by the Aymará which comes easily to the surface at these times. And there is not a Bolivian statute governing the sale of liquor to an Aymará; if he gets dangerous when drunk, beat him; if too dangerous, kill him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even though the mules were mountain-bred, the rare air of this high pass affected them and as we climbed higher, they began to halt every fifty yards for breath, with their icicled flanks heaving in distress. In a moment they would start on again of their own accord, yet sometimes in the fiercer blasts of the storm only the constant spur would keep them in the trail and headed for the pass above. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 130 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. ”

“ The jam of pack animals in the narrow street straightened out under the stimulus of the arrieros’ rawhide thongs and we clattered by the little plaza and on up a narrow, rain-washed gully flanked with the thatched mud huts of the Aymarás, on past the walled cemetery and into 141 the steep trail that led up the mountains. High above us the peaks were still hidden in soft masses of clouds that were already golden under the first rays of the morning sun. ”

“ 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 30 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. ”

“ 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 80 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At the mud walled tambo of Cocuta the first change of horses was made. Before we reached Machicomaca, the next tambo for new horses where we ate breakfast in a mud walled, windowless room, the brake broke or fell off and had been lost somewhere on the rough trail. The steady gallop of the tough, rough mountain horses kept time to the steady singing and punctuating 263 crack of the whip. And yet rarely was a horse struck. An Aymará will drive a crippled animal or leave it to die of starvation on a lonely trail without a thought, but it is rarely that he will abuse a beast with actual violence. ”

“ The night’s camp was at Ysipuri, a rubber barraca that was complaining bitterly at the time that it was overstocked with marmalade and snakes. If you have never lived on marmalade for six months hand-running when transportation is practically cut off—and a cheap, tin-can marmalade made mainly for the calloused tongues of a half-breed trade at that—you do not know what real desolation in a rubber jungle is. ”