XVII. A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES…

XVII. A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES

The traveler of to-day is seldom granted the pleasure of visiting really new territory. How much more rarely comes the joy of being one of the first of modern men to tread the streets of an entire city, unrivaled in location and unknown to history! Such, however, is the privilege of those who come up to Cuzco in these days with the time and disregard for roughing it necessary to visit Machu Picchu.

The mysterious, white-granite city of the Incas or their predecessors now called by that name was unknown to civilized man and the world until Professor Hiram Bingham of Yale visited the site in 1911, to come back a year later in charge of the expedition that cleared it of the rampant jungle growth and the oblivion of ages. Here was uncovered what are perhaps the most splendid pre-Columbian ruins in the Western Hemisphere, most splendid because, in addition to being the most important—except Cuzco itself—discovered since the Conquest, they have not been wrecked by treasure-hunters or confused with Spanish building. The account of the find had overtaken me in Lima, and all the four-hundred-mile tramp across Peru to the ancient City of the Sun had been gladdened by the anticipation of visiting a spot that not only promised extraordinary interest in itself, but had the added attraction of being difficult of access.

I had planned to travel to Machu Picchu alone and afoot. In Cuzco, however, it was my good fortune to run across Professor R—— of our Middle West, and to change in consequence my customary mode of transportation. We called on the prefect together. His mind wandered, as do those of all his class, to his cholita or whatever it is that sends the Andean official wool-gathering, even while he puzzled to account for the joint appearance of a famous sociologist recommended by the President of the Republic and a tramp who had arrived on foot. His secretary at length delivered an impressive document informing whomever it might concern that we were going to “Mansupisco.” When I protested, the prefect assured the professor it was often spelled that way. I insisted, whereupon he and the secretary sneaked off and found a geography, and this time got all right except the date. That was a week behind time, which was perhaps in keeping with the local color.

Martinelli of the cinema, who volunteered to accompany us, owned a coast horse and a wise gray macho, leaving the prefect to obey his telegraphic orders only to the extent of furnishing another animal capable of keeping the professor’s feet off the ground. This was not so easy as it may sound, for the professor had finally halted in his physical rise in the world about midway between the six and seven foot mark, and the horses of the Andes are rarely spoken of without tacking on the Spanish diminutive, ito.

Having already spent more than a year among the people of the Andes, I was by no means so surprised as the professor when, upon descending in full road regalia to the cobbled street at six, we found no sign of the horse the prefect had solemnly promised to have standing saddled at our hotel door at five. Some things come to him who waits—long enough—even in Peru, however, and by the time the third round of anecdotes was ended, there broke the street vista and drifted down upon us a Peruvian soldier in full accoutrements, bestriding a sorrowful little black mule and leading as gaunt and decrepit a chusco as even I had ever seen among those shaggy ponies that masquerade under the name of horse throughout the Andes. The soldier dismounted and saluted. The professor stood gazing abstractedly down upon the animal, no doubt drawing a mental picture of himself in the rôle of Don Quixote, with the added touch of dragging his toes on the ground over 150 miles of Andean trails. With a snort, and a speed that proved his four years in the United States had not been entirely misspent, Martinelli disappeared in the direction of the prefectura. Before another hour had drifted into the past he reappeared, followed by a second soldier leading a real horse from the corral of the officers of the garrison.

“How did you manage it?” I asked, in admiration.

“I raised hell,” said Martinelli, tightening the girth of his own animal.

“What Peru most needs,” mused the professor, who has the happy faculty of now and then giving his professional vocabulary a furlough, “is about ten thousand of you young fellows educated abroad to come home here and raise hell.”

Plainly the professor was already beginning to get a real mental grasp on South America.

We transferred the government saddle to the real horse and by eight were clattering away over the cobblestones of the City of the Incas, the soldier on his sorrowful black mule bringing up a funereal rear. This was doing very well indeed. To get off on the same day planned, at any hour whatever, is no slight feat in the Andes. Such of Cuzco as had already lifted its frowsy head from the pillow gazed hazy-eyed out upon us as we wound and clashed our stony way up out of the city by that breakneck stairway down which I had descended from my trans-Peruvian journey. The morning sunlight fell weirdly upon the City of the Sun below when we reached the notch in the hills where all Indians pause before the last view of the sacred capital of their ancestors to murmur, with bared heads, “O Cuzco, Great City, I bid thee adieu!”

As we jogged on in the sunny October morning across the bare, colorful, cool hills of Cuzco toward the lofty pampa beyond, I turned to ask the soldier behind:

“Cómo te llamas?”

“Tomás,” he replied, with a military salute, “Tomás Cobino, sargento de la Gendarmería Nacional.”

“Can you be that same Tomás who was with the Americans in Machu Picchu?”

“Sí, señor, I attended los yanquis three months in their treasure-hunts.”

The means has not yet been found of convincing the people of the Sierra that digging about old ruins can have any motive other than that of seeking the traditional treasures of the Incas.

A few miles out, the road was in the throes of “repair” by a large gang of Indians, under command of the alguaciles of the neighboring hamlets, who stood haughtily by, firmly grasping their silver-mounted staffs of office. They looked not at all like worldlings, but like men from Mars commanded by sixteenth-century pirates. At first we met many mule-trains, Cuzco-bound, the leaders wearing about their necks long jangling bells with wooden clappers. The Cuzco Indian, of the color of old brass, with his bare legs, scanty knee-breeches, and flat, black-and-red montera, sneaked noiselessly by with the air of a whipped cur, fawningly removing his pancake hat and murmuring an abject “Amripusma.” The greeting sounded like Quichua, but is merely what becomes of the Spanish “Ave María Purísima” in the mouth of the aboriginal. The professor showed great astonishment to find even the women raising their hats in salutation, but Martinelli and I had long since grown to expect it. In his democracy he touched his own hat and repeated “Buenos días, señor” to each Indian’s greeting, instead of acknowledging it with a surly grunt or haughty silence, in the Peruvian fashion. He would have been astonished to know how the startled native cudgeled his primitive brain all the way home, there to roll about his mud hut telling his fellows how he had met a “kara” so roaring drunk that he called him “señor,” as if he were a white man.

Within an hour the trail swung to the right. Away over our left shoulders lay that splendid Plain of Anta, rich with cattle and historical memories of the Conquistadores. The distant bleat of sheep now and then drew our eyes to a bedraggled little Indian shepherdess, armed with a sling, and spinning incessantly, automatically, the crude native yarn on her cruder spindle of a quinoa-stalk run through a potato as whirl-bob, as she edged cautiously away. These lonely guardians of the flocks are not infrequently pursued with impunity by native travelers, and are even known to resort to mechanical means to frustrate attack. In this treeless region the doors of the Indians’ dismal mud hovels were of stiff, sun-dried, hairy cowhides. As the bare world rose still higher, even these miserable dwellings died out, and only the bleak, brown uplands of the Andes spread about us on every hand.

In mid-morning we topped a great bare puna, from the chilly summit of which the white-crested Central Cordillera stretched like some mighty wall across the entire horizon, the snow-peaks and glaciers thrusting their hoary heads through the less-white banks of clouds. Then a vast Andean valley, like those that had long since grown so familiar to me, yet were always beautiful, opened out before us, in its lap the town of Maras, tinted the pale red of its aged tile roofs. The great rolling, red-brown basin was surrounded by age-wrinkled mountainsides speckled with little shadowed valleys and perpendicular chacras, or tiny Indian farms, hung on their flanks like small paintings on slightly inclined walls. We halted for dinner with the gobernador, and for chala, as the Incas called dried cornstalks with half-matured ears; and to admire the far-reaching view and the cut-stone doorways of mud houses sculptured with bastard Inca-Christian designs.

We went on again over the high, brown, barren world, the wind-swept summit of each succeeding land-wave bringing again above the horizon the great snow-crested wall that each time seemed near, yet all the jogging day appeared not a yard nearer. At three we came suddenly to a vast split in the earth, into which we began to go down and ever down by acute zigzags and stony cuestas that grew so steep we had to dismount and lead our animals. Before and below us spread the magnificent cañon of the Urubamba, that river of many names which, rising near Titicaca, at length adds its bit to the giant Amazon. Spring plowing was in progress on the valley floor, walled by mountains as far as the eye could reach in either direction. Over this rampart the sun still peered when we reached the level of the river at last and, picking up the road from up the valley, jogged down along it.

Stone-faced terraces of the Incas were frequent; here and there far up the sheer enclosing bluffs were the ruins of pre-Conquest watch-towers of rough stone. At times the road was itself one of these ancient terraces, the retaining wall of the one above rubbing our left elbows, a sheer drop of some eight feet to that below close on our right. In places the river itself was faced and narrowed by massive cut-stones. The exotic iron bridge, replacing to-day the former one of braided withes, by which we crossed to Ollantaytambo had a central pier of those enormous boulders which the bygone race seemed to toss about at will.

We rode to the bare, mud-hutted plaza past splendid wrought-stone walls of what had once been palaces little inferior to those of Cuzco. The local “authority” bowed low over our “passport” and turned the gobernación over to us for the night. This was an all but windowless second-story room opening on the unfurnished plaza, with a springy earth floor laid on poles. Into it shrinking alguaciles lugged our baggage and a rheumatic table and bench, without once releasing their staffs of office. Tomás, our soldier-servant, had found the bringing up of the rear a heavy task, and he and his worn and sorrowful black mule arrived with the last rays of the setting sun. Meanwhile, the egg supply of Ollantaytambo having been greatly reduced, we spread our saddle-blankets and lay down with heads to the walls; for the slope of the floor was such that to stretch along them would have been to fetch up before morning in a tangled confusion in the middle of the room.

Like Limatambo, near which Chusquito had ended our joint career, Ollantaytambo was one of the four fortresses and rest-houses, each about twelve leagues out on the Inca highways that sallied forth from Cuzco to the “Four Corners of the Earth.” Its ruins, among the most striking in South America, consist of fairly recent Inca structures alternating with remains of unknown antiquity. Unquestioned history, however, has little to say of the great wrought-stone fortress in the best “Inca style” on the hill overlooking the town; the several splendid defensive walls, on the general plan of Sacsahuaman, being topped off with any chips of stone at hand, as if at the sudden appearance of besiegers. This might suggest that a later race of less energy had taken advantage of the works of more hardy ancestors, but for the mystery of the “Tired Stones” of porphyry, the largest 25 by 10 by 5 feet in dimensions, which lie abandoned all the way from the town to the quarry far up near the top of the mountain wall across the river, down the face of which they were tobogganed.

Ollantaytambo unquestionably was once densely populated. On all sides it is surrounded by remarkable terraces, some still under half-hearted cultivation, long and flat, with barely a foot difference in each succeeding level, on the valley floor; narrow and high-walled on the swift mountainsides and for miles up a side gully to the east. The inhabitants of to-day, unemotional, bath-fearing, Quichua-speaking Indians, as in all this region, still occupy much of the old “Inca” town, with its shoulder-wide streets between massive stone walls that grow more and more careless in construction in direct ratio to their distance from the center. Whole blocks of these ancient houses are still intact, except for the roofs, a single doorway giving entrance to each block. Strangely enough, this was the same unbroken exterior wall around an interior court common to the Moor and Spaniard. Had it fallen to men of the Anglo-Saxon race to overthrow the empire of the Incas, they would have been vastly more struck by the aboriginal architecture than were the Conquistadores.

Enormous cut-stones are here and there incorporated with the buildings of to-day; as in Cuzco, many an adobe second-story has been superimposed on the walls of what must have been at least a king’s palace. Far up the sheer bluff behind the ancient town hangs the “school,” bright yellow in color, constructed, according to the alcalde, of some concrete-like substance that has not disintegrated under the rain and sunshine of centuries. From below it looks more like a five-story building than the five terraces piled one above the other on the inaccessible face of the mountain, which it really is. If, as is commonly accepted, it was a school for children of the nobles—for the Incas, like the priests who have inherited their power, did not believe in education for the common people—a daily climb to and descent from it eliminated any necessity for a course in physical training. Whether the “school” was built by another race, or whether those whose massive monuments cover the site below could not carry their blocks of stone so far aloft, is but another of those baffling mysteries that hover forever over the ruins of the Andes. About the town are several “baths” of carved stone, which may rather have been reservoirs for drinking water—I for one will not believe that a bath was ever a part of the equipment of the Andean Indian. As everywhere within a radius of many miles about Cuzco, every possible boulder, ground-stone, or rock-ledge is carved into seats, steps, dungeon-like grottoes, every fantastic shape a tyrannic mind could have conceived, a score of grotesque forms that can only be accounted for as the whims of some despot. The ancient Peruvian emperors seem to have believed, as firmly as the windjammer’s “bo’s’n” who sets his crew to picking oakum, in the relationship between idle hands and mischief, and to have assigned the otherwise unengaged the task of carving the nearest boulder.

With the remaining half of the seventy-five miles from Cuzco to Mandorpampa before us, we were away betimes in the soft, early-summer morning, tinged with coolness from off the half-hidden snow-clads above, as we rode northeastward into the sunrise down the right bank of the Urubamba. Gradually, as the morning warmed, the blue-white glaciers of Piri and its neighbors shook off their night wraps of clouds, until they stood forth above us in all their massive grandeur. The valley narrowed to a cañon, and that to a gorge, with repulsive, bare mountain walls standing precipitously more than a thousand feet into the sky on either hand. Here and there the rock-broiling river was hurried between retaining walls laboriously constructed by the bygone race. Often these alone held us up, as the precipice shouldered us to the sheer edge of the stream; sometimes, indeed, the road was hewn out of the perpendicular mountainside and carried tremulously across from one solid foothold to another on patched-up props of stone. Straight above us on virtually unassailable crags were the ruins of walls, and perhaps small forts, the holders of which might have showered down boulders squarely upon us—had they not centuries since been laid away in their bottle-shaped graves, hugging their osseous knees. On the inaccessible left bank were scores of ancient terraces. For miles every available inch of the mountainside had once been prepared for cultivation. Small, indeed, must have been the laborer’s wage, a daily handful of beans and corn, in this once densely populated cañon, where the struggle for existence forced the construction of an eight-foot wall of stone to uphold a four-foot shelf of cultivation.

Hourly it grew more perfect summer, and ever more delightful views and magnificent vistas broke unexpectedly upon us, contrasting strangely with the bleak, wind-swept puna of the day before. The old trail from Cuzco to the tropical montaña climbed sulkily away up a side quebrada toward the dreary uplands. This new road to Santa Ana had only recently made accessible for the first time in modern days this marvelous cañon of the Urubamba. It was nowhere steep. We went down by frequent little stony descents, with no corresponding rises, half-aware of now and then standing in our stirrups as our animals dropped from under us, the conscious self gazing at the enthralling scene below and above. Frequent pack-trains passed us, bound upward out of the hot-lands with cargoes of fiery native aguardiente, in leather skins inside cloth-wrapped wooden frames, or long cylindrical packages of coca-leaves such as the drivers were chewing. Often the meetings were at points where only extreme vigilance saved us from being pushed over the precipice; for, though our right of way gave us the mountainside, the pack-animals, shy of the roaring stream below, sought to crowd in between us and the wall, in spite of the threatening cries and whistling of their arrieros.

At eleven we stopped for “breakfast.” By the time we were in the saddle again the vegetation began to grow frankly tropical. The approach to the vast Amazonian lowlands was heralded by trees, then by whole forests climbing the lower flanks of the hills that cut in alternately from either side; then they began clothing the lower ridges and the flanks of the mountains themselves, in delightful contrast to the dreary treelessness of the upper heights. The first full-grown trees of the montaña, crowding in among the hardy shrubs of the lower highlands, began to stand forth against the irregular patches of sky ahead. Jungle brush and undergrowth sprang up about us. Moss and tropical herbage took to draping the moist rocks and boulders, until even the perpendicular face of the mountain clothed itself in lush-green vegetation. Ferns, the first I had seen in months, appeared, and quickly grew to their gigantic tropical forms. Orchids were plentiful, and other flowers of brilliant colors. The government telegraph wire that had followed us across the bleak, wind-swept puna the day before, on poles shriveled with the cold, began to jump gaily from parasite-laden tree to tree. Brooks of sparkling clear water came leaping down from the unseen glaciers and frozen heights above, to the joy of both man and beast. A condor, volplaning on motionless wings high above the mountain wall, looked like a sparrow mingled with the white clouds that flecked the summer sky. A soft wind caressed us, and upon us fell that lazy, contented mood that always follows a descent from the cold, nerve-straining páramo.

As we descended still deeper into the fastnesses of the Andes, the solid granite precipices, rising sheer thousands of feet from the foaming rapids to the clouds, remained at the same height; but the valley of the river continued to descend, and gave us the curious effect of seeming to see the mountains that shut us in rise ever higher into the sky. The cañon of the Urubamba had shrunk to a resounding gorge of sharp V-shape, with virtually no room left for cultivation, so that even the hardy andenes of the ancients were crowded out of existence, and only the imperious river forced its way through the mountains, permitting the narrow road to follow on the precarious footholds blasted for it along one of the towering granite walls. We began to meet yellow, fever-eyed walking skeletons, straggling languidly up from the tropical valleys. These increased until all the few travelers were gaunt and hollow-eyed, and of a lifeless cast of countenance. Now a humid jungle hemmed us in; impenetrable tropical forest covered all the tumbled mountain world about us, the further ranges blue-black with distance, an unbroken wilderness in which might lie buried a score of forgotten cities. Trees assumed those fantastic shapes that startle or mock the tropical traveler. Lianas, those great climbing vines over which the northern school-boy dreams before his open geography while the snow swirls about the shivering window, swung languidly from these giants of the jungle. The rampant vegetation clutched playfully at us along the way; now and again a branch reached forth and whipped us in our sweated faces. The drowsy chorus of the jungles sounded about us; the tropical joy of life took possession even of the professor, rousing him to song, so that the cañon resounded with discordant, rumbling Middle-Western noises.

Toward four the beautiful jagged peak of Huayna Picchu came into sight down the winding gorge, puffs of white clouds hovering about it; and we knew we were approaching our goal. But things moved with ever more tropical languor. In places the road became a stony stairway down which we must pick our way step by step; in others it was pieced together with slivers of rock to keep it from falling sheer into the angry stream below. The impending crags squeezed the trail to the extreme edge, so that an unwary horseman, gazing at the riches of nature about him, was not infrequently rapped on the head by jagged points of rock left by the dynamite of the trail-builders. Tropical birds of startling plumage flitted in and out of the impenetrable undergrowth; the pungent, death-suggesting, yet enticing scent of the tropics filled our nostrils. The sun abandoned us early, and left us with a sense of being down in some great well dreamily wondering whether we should ever again reach the broad, open world above.

Dusk was falling when the road wandered out upon a bit of flat meadow, squeezed between the mountain wall and the now calmer river, facing the breakneck slopes of Huayna Picchu. This was Mandorpampa. A grass-thatched hut on poles served as tambo. As we hung our alforjas over the unhewn beams, an unattractive half-breed, past middle age and scented with fire-water, appeared from the adjoining hut he occupied with a flock of Quichua-speaking women and children. It was he who had first guided los yanquis to the then jungle-hidden Machu Picchu. He had long known of the ruins, as had other natives, but had never considered them extensive or important. Indeed, he seemed still to have a distinctly low opinion of them as “things of the Gentiles,” not to be compared with the Cathedral of Cuzco, with its tin saints and tinseled Virgins. He promised to climb to the site with us in the morning, however, for a consideration, and I fell to preparing supper over my miniature cooking-range.

After it, we sat for a time in the heavy, humming, tropical night, listening to the chirrido of jungle crickets and striving by anecdote and song to keep up the professor’s spirits, drooping under the dread of snakes and vipers and the thousand subtle dangers of the tropics. For the night we arranged that Martinelli should share with the family chickens the pole couch of the Indian’s “guest-room,” knowing that, as a Peruvian, he preferred to sleep in as airless a spot as possible, while the professor and I prepared to hoist ourselves up into the garret of small poles under the low thatched roof of the tambo. It was like stowing a piano on an upper bookshelf, but we got a bit of our “beds” bunched under us at last, and when the poles had ceased to sag and creak, I fell asleep.

The humid darkness was showing signs of fading when I woke the professor from a night during which, by his own testimony, he had not slept a wink. The cause of his insomnia was not lack of comfort, for the professor is an experienced man of the woods, but a great mental anguish. An insect had stung him on a knuckle. Now the professor had just come from investigating that dread disease of the Andes knows as uta, from the Quichua word for rot, which, beginning in just such an insect bite, eats away the victim’s flesh until he is hurried at breakneck speed into the grave. His was too fixed a place in the life of our Middle West to afford to be rotted away here in the Peruvian jungle by a mere insect. Naturally he wanted our earnest examination and experienced opinion whether we should, after all, climb to Machu Picchu or hurry back to Cuzco to call a conference of the medical wiseacres. I examined the bite solicitously. There was no doubt that it was merely the preliminary nibble of the myriad insects that would have fallen upon us in earnest, and tattooed us with the strange patterns I had already often worn, had we descended another five thousand feet into the real tropics. But one cannot put such things cruelly and baldly to a companion weighed down by the intangible dread of the subtle, pest-infested hot-lands, from which no man is free upon his first descent into them. Between us we convinced the professor that he would in all probability outlive the day, and by fog-bound six we were off.

The lover of ardent waters had concluded that he could not possibly get his various activities in shape to accompany us before eight, and we decided to hobble along without his historical assistance. We paid him two soles to keep the animals well fed and, lest the matter slip his mind, left Tomás with him as a perpetual reminder. This left us well burdened with our “beds” and the supplies necessary to pass the night, for I would not hear of paying the forgotten city only a flying visit. Being the only one in Andean training, I volunteered to carry the surplus and, bowed under a bulky sixty-five pounds held by a llama-hair rope across my chest, like any Indian cargador, I led the way back along the road, planning to boast myself forever after the equal of any aboriginal burden-bearer of the Andes. Barely had I reconciled myself to the perpendicular climb in store for us under such a load, however, when we came upon a gang of Indians chopping the boulder-imbedded roadway higher back under the edge of the cliff for flood-time. The foreman offered us carriers. None of them were large; beside the professor the impassive fellows approached dwarfishness, and I uttered a protest when Martinelli waved a thumb at by no means the largest. But my fancied equality to the human freight-trains of the Andes oozed away as suddenly as the rotundity of a pricked wine-skin. When, the Indian had swung upon his back the burden I had been staggering under on a level roadway, Martinelli nonchalantly tossed his twenty-five pounds on top of it. A bit further on that unfeeling savage paused at one of the pole-and-leaf shelters of the workmen under the edge of the impending cliff and added a pair of blankets, a coca-bag, and several other personal odds and ends, then waltzed away as lightly as a prairie chicken under its tail-feathers—faster than we cared to follow.

Perhaps two miles back, a hidden path plunged swiftly down through the wet, clinging jungle to the sapling bridge that hung precariously from rock to boulder across the river. Beyond the snarling stream, which snatched impotently at us as we passed, sagging, a perpendicular jungled mountainside, apparently impenetrable, stared impassively down upon us. But when we had clambered and tripped some distance over the rocks and jagged boulders at the edge of the raging torrent, a hole in the undergrowth, like the lair of some wild animal, proved to be the beginning of a trail, now overgrown almost to nothing.

The first mile up was through densest wet jungle. We climbed clutching at the vegetation as at the hair of some giant head we were striving to surmount. The average slope was perhaps sixty-five degrees, though there were places virtually perpendicular where to lose an Andean level-headedness would have been to pitch many yards down toward the now hoarse river below. According to local repute, this section was notorious for its venomous snakes, particularly a little ten-inch víbora whose bite is certain death unless the victim instantly adopts the heroic measures of the Indians and carves out a Shylockian chunk of flesh, cauterize the wound with a hot iron, and retire a half-year to recuperate. But as with all tales of robbers, dangers, and sudden death on the road ahead, that behind me trailed out harmless and unexciting.

Gradually the heavy jungle gave way to a lighter, stunted growth that had once been burned over and on which the sun blazed down mercilessly. Up the all but sheer face of this the trail sweated in sharp zigzags. Rumiñaui, as we had dubbed our stony-eyed carrier, kept steadily above us, and though he panted a bit, it was the least burdened of us who called now and then for a breathing-spell. Dry-tongued with thirst, we came at last to an almost level shelf of the mountain, with a patch of shade. In it grew a “Spanish tomato” shaped like a huge strawberry, of a double acidity that throttled our thirst for the moment. Somewhat higher we found ourselves mounting ancient agricultural terraces. These were walls of rough stone, head high, that sustained level spaces of like width. Far from being under cultivation, the rich, black soil of these artificial mountain shelves nourished an all but impassable tangle of new jungle growth; and the trunks of great trees that had been felled and charred over cut us off in many directions. By working our way laboriously back and forth, and gradually mounting several terraces, now by a canted tree-trunk, now by the four projecting stones set stair-like in the faces of the walls, by which the prehistoric husbandmen mounted and descended, we found a terrace along which we could tear our way, and came out at last, nearly two hours above the river, on the sheer edge of things. Machu Picchu lay before us.

My first impression was tinged with disappointment. Aside from the universal experience of finding a long-heralded scene striking in inverse ratio to the length of time the imagination has fed upon it, my mental picture of a city seemed to call for skyscrapers crowded together over a vast area that could be bound closely together only by a rapid-transit system. Measured by these subconscious standards, the town the Incas or their predecessors had left here in the beautiful fastnesses of the Urubamba was small. But at least it had been our good fortune to catch the first sight of it from a splendid point of vantage. Well below us, and across a gully so deep as to be almost a valley, the abandoned city lay spread out under the gorgeous Andean sunshine in all its white-granite brilliancy; and if all the town could not be included in a view from this point, or from any other, that view included all the finer buildings, and left out chiefly the extensive andenes and the third-class houses of those who lived on and worked them. Though roofless, it was otherwise a complete city, in so fine a state of preservation that the beholder felt like one of the old Spanish Conquistadores in those enviable years when there were still new worlds to discover.

On a gigantic scale, its site was that of an ancient feudal castle. A mountain ridge defended by nature in one of her most solitary moods, and including within its confines the steeple-pointed peak of Huayna Picchu, fell away on every side by tremendous precipices into the fearful void of the Urubamba, a sheer unbroken two thousand feet to the thread-like river that makes a three fourths circle around it; while beyond, pregnant with mystery of impassable jungle and the story of a bygone race, lay a wonderful wilderness of Andean ranges, shaggy with dense forest, pitched and tumbled and fading away in the blue-black of unfathomable distance. Yet how strange that an entire city, a mere two days’ ride from Cuzco, should thus have remained for centuries unknown! Only he who knows the Latin-American will comprehend how Machu Picchu could be so seldom visited even now, after los yanquis have uncovered it; though the cuzqueños who passively wait for foreigners to come and do what they themselves should long since have done blandly assume credit for the newly discovered city, as if they had some part in it because the blood of its builders runs in their veins. Yet to the world at large its existence was never suspected. Squier, noted for his accuracy, says self-confidently: “Ollantaytambo was the frontier town and fortress of the Incas in the valley of the Ucayali, as it is to-day of their conquerors. There were outlying works some leagues lower down at Havaspampa, but the bulwark of the Empire against the savage Antis in this direction was Ollantaytambo.” Small wonder he heard nothing of a place not a whisper of which has crept into all the writings of Peru since Pizarro’s secretary first took to setting down the prowess of his commander.

Machu Picchu was indeed a city of refuge. There is no need of Incaic lore and the furrowed brow of the archeologist to be certain of that. Only men scared beyond the functioning of goose-flesh would have scurried away into this most inaccessible nook of the Andes and scrambled up these appalling cliffs to escape their pursuers; only men to whom labor was nothing as compared with the fear of bodily violence would have toiled a century fitting together these gigantic boulders, rather than sally forth and take their chances against the slings or poisoned arrows of their enemies. The slinking, hare-hearted Cuzco Indian of to-day may easily be their lineal descendant.

Effectively defended by nature though they were, these champions of precaution left no loopholes. Across the gully between where we sat and the lost city they had thrown two massive stone walls from sheer precipice to sheerer. Outside this were most of the agricultural terraces, for within the city proper was scant space for cultivation, and in case of attack the peasants no doubt abandoned their fields and raced to town. Between these walls lay a dry moat, deep and wide, while at the city gate the fortress was constructed on the “salient” system of Sacsahuaman, so that while a besieger was gently knocking for admittance some member of the goose-flesh clan could stroll out on the wall above and drop a boulder on his astonished head. Nor was that all. In every least crevice or foothold across which the champion trapeze performer or tight-rope artist of the besieging tribes could by any stretch of the trembling imagination have squirmed his way, the defenders built little patches of rock-wall, in places he only will believe who has climbed to see; and on the tiptop of the neighboring heights, on Machu Picchu mountain, on the steeple-point of Huayna Picchu, in every crow’s-nest the most athletic Indian could hope to reach, were stone watch-towers, sometimes invisible, from which certainly the sentinels had some telegraphic means of passing word down to the cautious city. There were no adventurers among the builders of Machu Picchu. They took no chances.

When we had drunk in this comprehensive view of the forgotten city, we descended by projecting terrace stones and jungled zigzags and finally by a great stone stairway to the dry moat, then by a graded approach to the city gate, always tearing our way through thick undergrowth. For though “los chapetes” had cleared away the dense tropical forest that had hidden the city from civilized man since historical time began, the rampant vegetation was striving quickly to conceal it again, as if jealous of its beauty or guardian of its secret. Being far more determined in its efforts than the apathetic Peruvians, it bade fair to succeed. Already the caña brava waved impudently head-high everywhere, and what might grow to such trees as had been felled in hundreds were already sprouting forth again here and there from between the interstices of the splendid walls. A deserving-politician caretaker had been appointed by the government, but he was caring for both Machu Picchu and Ollantaytambo by living in Cuzco on his salary.

We sent Rumiñaui ahead to stack our junk under the weather-blackened thatch roof supported by four slender legs, down in a central space that might have been a parade-ground or a garden to fall back upon in time of siege. There we hastened to disentangle the canvas bucket and bade him “Unuta apamuy.” But it was more easily ordered than brought. The cut-stone basins to which small acequias had once carried water down off the shoulders of the range behind had gone stone-dry, and as we lay choking in the welcome shade, surviving only on the anticipation of the cooling draughts soon to come, the Indian came wandering back with that apathetic expressionlessness of his race—the bucket empty. Martinelli rose up, cursing in three tongues, to lead him, and soon returned to say that a well-filled bucket was following close behind. But Martinelli was a Peruvian, given like all his race to counting his chickens before the eggs are laid. After fighting his way through the jungle to the edge of the hollow “where the spring really is,” he had neglected to descend ten yards further through the bushes to find whether the spring really was. So that a few yards behind his resuscitating announcement came trailing Rumiñaui, more stony-eyed than ever, still carrying a collapsed bucket.

Audible expression of our inmost sentiments would have been the opposite of thirst-quenching, and as each day consists of a limited number of hours, even in the waterless tropics, I slung my kodak over a shoulder and set out to see as much as possible before preservation of life might force a hurried descent to the river. The fancied disappointment of the first view had worn completely away. As the mind adapted itself to pre-Columbian standards, the abandoned city assumed its true aspect, that of a delicate work of art of intensive construction. Here in this eagle’s nest of the Andes, virtually cut off from the rest of the world, had lived an artistic and adaptable people with a capacity for concentration of effort, for sustained endeavor, and a high grade of efficiency now lost among the Peruvians. Virtually all the stone work of the better part of the city was of the very best “Inca style” in plan, cut, and fit. Nothing I had seen in all the length of the Andes, from Cañar in the far north, could surpass these walls, rivaled only by those of Cuzco; and even those of the City of the Sun cannot match the charming uniform color of this white-gray granite, approaching in beauty to pure marble. Whereas Sacsahuaman and Ollantaytambo seemed massive, cyclopean, this new city of old gives the effect of a delicate gem in a peerless setting—though the man of to-day ordered to tote the smallest block in the average wall would not exactly refer to it as delicate.

Like the remains of Cuzco, the ruins are exclusively confined to walls. The Inca civilization seems to have been of that utilitarian turn of mind that gives its attention chiefly to the practical, with the result that to-day there is not a statue in the length and breadth of Peruvian ruins; and the grass-thatched roofs beyond which these unrivaled stone-cutters did not advance may have fallen in centuries before Pizarro first herded his pigs among the foothills of Estremadura. But as walls they are unsurpassed, fitted with so tireless a nicety that, even without mortar, they stand to-day, except where the roots of trees have crowded in between them, striking illustrations of that time-worn phrase of all Peruvian chroniclers from Garsilaso to Squier, “so that a knife-blade cannot be inserted between them.” Marble-white walls there were so splendidly symmetrical that time after time the enraptured eye stole along them as over a beloved form. As with all Inca architecture, everything,—walls, doors, niches—decreased in size toward the top, at about the slope of the surrounding precipices, carrying the mind back to Karnak and the ruins of the Nile. Every possible ground-boulder or rock-ledge and mountain-platform was made full use of, and the eye at times hardly detects where the building of nature leaves off and the planning of man begins.

Hidden away from the iconoclastic, gold-thirsting Spaniards, and so far distant from the dwellings of his effete descendants that transportation of its blocks for their own botching is impossible, Machu Picchu has escaped the common fate of the other pre-Columbian ruins of the Andes and remains a city intact, like Pompeii, as genuine as when its inhabitants abandoned it, carrying off perhaps their household gods and the revered remains of their ancestors. But for the missing roof, scores of buildings are as well preserved as on the day their dwellers departed. Rough-stone, windowed gables—though both Humboldt and Prescott deny the existence of gables or windows in ancient Peru—stand everywhere peaked above the general level, sometimes still bearing the stump of a great tree the roots of which had curled and twined in among the stones wherever a handful of soil was to be found to feed upon. The ruins seemed to sprout flowers and trees. Giants of the forest grew wherever there was a suggestion of foothold; with a Jewish persistency they had crowded in between apparently inseparable stone blocks; great trees had sprung up and grown to man’s estate in unbelievable places, on the very peaks of frail stone gables, even out from between the still tight-fitted granite boulders. The task of “los yanquis” had been no sinecure. They had felled an entire tropical forest, with giant trees a century old, the charred trunks of a few of which lay as they had fallen, like gluttonous bandits overtaken at their stolen feast, convenient stairways now from one terrace to another. But much care had been necessary. Many a stump must be left where it stood, for even to attempt its removal would frequently have brought down half the structure it grew in. Besides clearing it of the concealing vegetation, the Americans had dug away in places several feet of soil and had presented at last the entire city, with its alignment of streets, its “baths,” temples, palaces, and blocks of dwellings. The finest ruins of the Western Hemisphere, the mystery of this city of the unpeopled wilderness trebles its fascination. How could such a place have completely eluded the foraging Spaniards? How could long centuries have passed during which Ollantaytambo was accepted as the last monument of importance in the valley of the Urubamba? How—

But just then a cry of “Cancha unu!” from Martinelli, who affected Quichua since he found I had some knowledge of it, brought me tearing back through the undergrowth to the roof on legs. Back along one of the terraces a trickling supply of water had been found, and now we might take time to view the ruins more leisurely. We concocted a lunch and sent Stony-Eye to carry our possessions to a “sacred cave” among the palaces.

The town centers about the main plaza, with its splendid wrought-stone temple, backed by the priest’s dwelling with the sacred hill piled up behind it. Here, too, is the temple of the three windows, so unusual a feature of prehistoric Peruvian architecture that the chief of the excavators connects it with the tradition of the three brothers who came out of as many windows to found the Empire of the Incas. “Al principio del mundo,” as Garsilaso puts it,—“In the beginning of the world, say the Indians who live to the east and north of the city of Cuzco, three brothers sallied forth through some windows in some rocks, which they called royal windows.” Certainly, if this is the original Tampu Tocco from which came the founders of the Empire, they improved little in their building during the long years between Machu Picchu and the construction of Cuzco. Its sponsor considers the city a thousand years old. Yet though the virile simplicity of its construction is untouched by the beginning of that ornateness that marks decadence in all civilizations, there is something of delicacy and artistic splendor, even amid a curious mixture of the crude and primitive, that does not seem to bespeak an older and less-developed people than the builders of Cuzco.

The long, solid walls are broken, as in most Inca structures, by niches large and small, mere shallow closets without doors, with cylindrical projecting stones alternating between them. These have been fancied, among other things, to have wardrobes and hooks for clothing, but the habit of their descendants suggest that the builders were content to hang their garments on the floor. Though larger than the average Andean dwelling of to-day, houses of more than one room are rare. The ancient Peruvians were evidently as indifferent to lack of privacy as their modern successors. Along the walls are stone couches as comfortable as those of sun-baked mud which the weary traveler is fortunate to find in the better-class houses of the interior to this day. They probably had as little furniture as their descendants, and the host of long ago no doubt greeted his guest with that selfsame “Tome asiento” (Be seated) and a wave of the hand toward a six-inch block of wood or a sharp corner of stone. They lived apparently more thickly than in any modern tenement-house, and the problem of increase of population must have been acute. Was it this internal pressure that forced them finally to abandon their eagle’s-nest? Every square foot of ground was utilized, the rooms densely crowded together, with even subterranean dwellings, and long rows of rough-stone houses stand steeply one above the other on the swift precipices of the city.

For all its ups and downs—and it was next to impossible to go somewhere else in Machu Picchu without climbing or descending—intercommunication was amply provided. Scores of stairways of all lengths and sizes, often laboriously cut out of a single ground-boulder, lead everywhere. Mrs. Tocco had no difficulty in dropping in on Mrs. Huasi simply because she lived in another clan-group or up over her head. Tunnels, too, were common to this ingenious race of stone-cutters, and fat men must have been as rare as among the Indians of to-day, or distinctly limited in their movements. No nation under blockade ever made more intensive use of its agricultural possibilities. Within a radius of several miles not a possible foot of ground escaped cultivation. The soil, carried perhaps from a great distance, was richly fertile, and to these men of a bygone race the building of a massive stone wall to support half its size in arable ground was all in the day’s work. The terraces on the north side of the mountain, half agricultural, half defensive, drop swiftly away as long as there is a suggestion of foothold, and those on the west of the sacred plaza and below the intihuatana, or sun-dial, go down so vertiginously hand over hand that there could have been no dizzy heads among the husbandmen of long ago. It was easy for the peasant of those days to do away with an enemy; he had only to reach down from his own field and push his rival off his three-foot farm into bottomless oblivion.

I pushed on toward the outskirts. The social inequalities of to-day were as native to the civilization of this lost race. As one left the center, the houses grew less and less like the cut-stone palaces; on the edges of the town hung mere cobblestone hovels, little better than the miserable dens of the modern Indian. All about them now was rampant cane jungle. On the slopes, from the interstices between the rocks, even on the thatched roof of last year’s shelter of the workmen, grew big yellow calabashes, like gypsy pumpkins. Then there was wild corn and self-sown potatoes, bushes of ripe ají, the beloved peppers of the Incas, in deep reds and greens. These were no doubt the chief products of olden times, constantly threatened with suffocation by the belligerent tropical vegetation. Monarch of all he surveyed—and it was much—the ruler of this aery probably lived chiefly on corn and frozen potatoes, ground in such carved stone mortars as are still to be found here; and he could not have been overwhelmingly troubled with a longing for the fleshpots or for other excitement than that his enemies gave him. For he does not seem to have often visited other towns, and even “los yanquis” found no ruins of theater or billiard-hall.

The Incas, using the word broadly, showed an extraordinary liking for building where they had an unbroken outlook over all the surrounding world. Lovers of nature, perhaps, though the apparently complete indifference of their descendants to its charms and moods makes this debatable, they were, above all, practical fellows, moved less by esthetic reasons than by an overwhelming dislike of being awakened from an afternoon siesta by a well-aimed boulder. Yet had their only quest been unrivaled situations, that of Machu Picchu could scarcely have been improved upon. Mere words or pictures give faint idea of the unique charm of the place. Men not merely of iron will and endless patience, they must also have had a fixed and unchanging policy for generations, for with such tools as they possessed it is inconceivable that they could have built Machu Picchu in less than a century. Not even their ambitionless descendants of to-day have less of the wanderlust than they; and what a conviction of the perpetual endurance of the status quo was theirs, to take such infinite pains in their building that they need not even be repaired for centuries. Were they driven out by the fierce Aymarás from the south, or by the dreaded “huari-ni,” the “breechless” tribes from the hot-lands below, which the meek Indian of the highlands fears to this day; were they suddenly wiped out by an epidemic; or did they gather strength and courage after centuries of hiding in this lofty nest and sally forth with the avowed intention of conquering the world, perhaps to be destroyed, and the secret of their city with them? Every traveler knows how isolated groups of men gradually come to fancy themselves superior to all the rest of the universe. Whatever the cause of the migration, it must have taken stern renunciation to leave behind so much of the work of themselves and their ancestors.

I was aroused from my musings by a crashing in the jungle, and the professor hailed me with, “Wait! I want your advice!” It was that awful bite on the knuckle again. By this time it had grown to nearly the size of the second letter of this word, was a pale red in color, and about it was a swelling that could plainly be seen under a microscope, or without one by a man with good eyes and a badly worried imagination.

“Now of course this might not turn out to be uta,” said the victim, in an agitated voice, “but if it should, twenty-four hours delay might make all the difference in the world, and I wonder if it wouldn’t be prudent, at least, to go down now and get started back to Cuzco.”

I examined the alarming symptom with care. There was no doubt that it was the dreaded “rot”—bally rot, in fact. As to the swelling, had not I myself more than once been so swollen by tropical insects that my best friends would not have recognized me in a bar-room? Moreover, I was not to be cheated out of the night I had promised myself in the abandoned city, and from words of sympathy and reassurance, I led the conversation deftly and gently back through the mention of the professor’s large life-insurance policy, to the dangers of life here in the days of the Incas, who had not even those post-mortem sops to make existence bearable, until the terror of the tropics, inherent in all men of the temperate zone, was buried beneath the fascinating mystery of the fathomless past.

The earth offers few such views as that from the intihuatana, the “place where the sun was tied,” at the top of the town. There the great topping boulder has been carved into an upright shaft of stone, of symbolic sacredness no doubt in those bygone days when the people of Peru made the error of worshipping the sun instead of bowing down before wooden images, though it looks as much like a beheading-block as a sun-dial. The scene is best enjoyed alone. The intrusion of modern man seems to break the spell, and the imagination halts lamely in its striving to build up the past. Literally at my feet the world dropped away sheer to the Urubamba, like a copper thread all but encircling the entire city with what is virtually one precipice. The altitude of Machu Picchu is put at 8500 feet and that of the river at 2000 less, yet it is surprising how distinctly the roar of the stream comes up to the very top of the invulnerable city. Utterly unpeopled, the visible world is one tumbled mass of gigantic forest-clad mountains rolling away to inaccessible distance-blue ranges, rising afar off to snow-capped crests mingled with the sky. Here are not the haggard and sterile Andes of elsewhere, but softened, undulating forms, so densely wooded that nowhere is a spot of earth visible. Swing round the circle, and on the other side the gaze falls as precipitously into the Urubamba. There three great ranges rise one behind another, fading from blue to the purple of vast distances, until the icy wall of the Central Cordillera shuts off all the world beyond. In another direction the rolling purple ranges die enticingly away one beyond the other into the great montaña and the hot-lands of the Amazon, while masses of pure white clouds come floating majestically up out of Brazil beyond. One regrets having to return as he came, always a misfortune, and the gaze falls again to the hoarse thread of river below, watching it wind away into the mystery of the unknown, to break through the central range beyond where the eye loses it, and so on away, away. But the chief hardship of travel is renunciation.

Here, in what is to-day the home only of the condor, one may muse, but muse in vain, on the history of Machu Picchu. A thousand years old; and a thousand years hence it will still be here! Why is man of such perishable stuff that mere rocks and stones may laugh at the brevity of his existence? If only one could call back the ancient inhabitants to tell their story! Did they build so long before the Conquest that the city was already overgrown and forgotten when the bearded centaurs first appeared to startle and undo their descendants? Or was this some secret holy spot the Indians concealed by silence even from the garrulous descendant of Huayna Ccápac? Were its existence known to them, why did not Tupac Amaru and his followers set up a defence here against the Spaniards? For even in those days the place would have been invulnerable against anything but treachery from within.

However baffling its story, it is not difficult for one who has wandered along the Andes to build up a picture of the living city of the past as he sits here in the declining day, lulled yet excited by the ceaseless music of the Urubamba far below, mysterious, Indian-like in its impassiveness, as if it knew, but were sworn forever to guard, the secret it has girdled with its impregnable precipices for unknown centuries. Before the inner eye the many stone stairways take on life. Up and down them move unhurriedly, yet actively, thick-set men and women with broad, copper-tinted faces, noiseless in their bare feet, their garments a constant interweaving of many bright colors. The hundreds of peaked gables take on gothic-steep roofs of thatch, symmetrical, carefully made, perhaps with decorated ceilings within, at least in the temples and palaces. Llamas step silently through the narrow streets, gazing with haughty dreaminess about them. From all the crowded city rises the hum of busy, bucolic life, yet not noisily, for the general tone is peaceful industry and a phlegmatic preoccupation. Now and again the hollow boom of a wooden gong rises and dies away in one of the sacred temples. As the shadows lengthen, bare-legged workmen, a cheek swollen with a cud of coca, mount up the breakneck terraces below, waving with Indian corn or purple with potato-blossoms, pass silently along the brow of the intihuatana hill, and hurry unhurriedly on to their cobble-stone huts in the crowded outskirts. A greater hush than before falls on all the scene, except for the never-varying voice of the Urubamba, as the Inca, majestic of mien, the royal llauta about his forehead, attended a certain distance by respectful nobles bearing the symbolic burden on their shoulders, mounts to the sacred rock. There, alone, or attended at respectful aloofness only by the high-priests of the little temple behind, he watches the god of the Peruvians of old sink swiftly, as it was sinking now, behind the snow range that stands out cold and clear to the west, and sees the labyrinth of shaggy, wooded ranges beyond the bottomless void below melt and merge into one common, fading-purple whole. Off in a corner of the city, on the brow of the headlong precipice, comes faintly to the imperial ears the sound of stone striking stone, where the miscreant sentenced that day to carve a new seat in an over-carved boulder before the coming of the new moon plies his task. With full darkness even this ceases. The faint smoke-columns of the supper-fires die away, and before the night is an hour old the entire city is sunk in slumber, save only the watchmen in their towers and aeries behind and above, and along the city wall in the hollow beneath. From these come faint glows to punctuate the darkness of the Andean night, then nothing, and from a living city Machu Picchu returns to what it is, an utterly unpeopled mountain-peak cut off from all the known world, into which have intruded three hob-nailed beings of noisy modern days, and their stony-eyed serving-man briefly loaned from that world of long ago.

Martinelli was inclined to sleep in the sacred cave under the circular tower. To this the professor objected, as too “snaky,” and they compromised on the long stone bench above, near the finest wall in Machu Picchu. When they were settled, I piled my bedding on the back of Rumiñaui, and drove him away into the humid, viper-teeming darkness. Sailing under sealed orders, he tore his way fearfully through the undergrowth that clutched at him with a thousand unseen fingers, down through the jungle-grown heart of the town and knee-deep across the sacred plaza, its three great windows staring all but invisible at us in the night. On I pursued the trembling wretch into the three-sided high-temple, the most imposing structure of Machu Picchu, and three times bade him pile his load up on the stone altar before he would believe his ears. When I murmured “illimni” (“all right”), he turned tail and fled so suddenly that he forgot even the customary leave-taking.

Above, below, and all about me the night was chanting its mysterious pagan song. The distant roar of the Urubamba came up clear and sharp. In the sky above, myriad stars shone forth with that unusual brightness of upper heights. The rest was blackness. I cleared away a few plants and parasites from the altar and the niches above. It was an immense cut-stone fourteen feet long and five high, but a bare three feet wide, and a long drop for an uneasy sleeper. I rolled out saddle-blanket and ponchos to form the “bed” of many an Andean night; then unconsciously, in an instant, I solved the niche problem that has been harassing Peruvian antiquarians for centuries. Nothing could be simpler! The bygone race broke the long surfaces of their walls with these half-openings neither as settings for their idols nor as stations for their guards, but as convenient places in which to lay their leggings, hobnailed boots, and tin watches for the night. I am by no means the only one who will be glad to have the problem solved at last.

It would have been easy for the high priest to have dropped in on me during the night, or to have sent his henchmen to do likewise with a few rocks and boulders, even if he could not have arranged for me a dance of his private ñustas, especially as the temple is now roofless. But I slept the night through monotonously undisturbed, waking only once to congratulate myself on being so far removed from the disturbing living world, and falling asleep again without even feeling to find whether my revolver still hung within easy reach.

Long wilderness travel seems to develop in the nostrils a power to scent the dawn. I had finished dressing when the night began to pale along its eastern rim, and striding away through the dew-dripping jungle and down the great central stone stairway, I came upon the professor and Martinelli huddled together end to end on their roofless stone couch, snoring oblivious of the fact that the daylight in which no true traveler sleeps had already come. The opportunity for correction was too precious to lose. Close beside them I drew my revolver and fired a roaring 38-caliber shot into the rosy dawn overhead. Mere words are powerless to picture the slothful pair as they exploded forth from their coverings, with the rampant hair and fist-like eyes of Puritans suddenly fallen upon by a band of Indians in the good old days when Puritans were fair prey. In the sacred cave below I found Rumiñaui also sitting up in his “bed,” scratching the sleep out of his eyes, and having sent him for my possessions set to boiling coffee while listening to the sad story of my companions.

Barely had I left them to their own protection the evening before when Martinelli thought he felt a snake strike his boot, and shouted in alarm. (By morning light he found a cactus-spine had pricked him through the leather.) Then Rumiñaui had come with a long and dolorous Quichua tale of the tribes of “víboras” that had their nests in the interstices of the wall beside and above them, and only awaited the stillness of the night to sally forth on their deadly errands. This in turn recalled to the professor that the so-called circular “snake-windows” were in this very building, and caused him to scrunch down, head and all, into his sleeping-bag, hoping against hope that no deadly viper could bite through its several thicknesses. To make life even more miserable, another gnat had stung him on another knuckle,—a voracious creature, evidently, so bent on destruction that it had made a special trip up from the valley below for this nefarious purpose, since insects do not commonly inhabit Machu Picchu. Now, it might be that the first bite had not injected the dread uta, but surely no ordinary man could hope to survive a second. So that all the bitter night through the professor lay—or, more exactly, curved—rigid and motionless within his six-foot sleeping-bag on the extreme outer edge of the stone divan, as far as possible from the viperous wall, yet always in fear of taking the awful two-foot drop to the reptilian ground beneath, while before his sunken eyes passed in cinematographic succession the picture of the dread “rot” he could distinctly feel creeping and crawling through all his frame, devouring it limb by limb, feature by feature, the awful news seeping out into the Middle West that one of his most cherished citizens had been brought to grief by a mere insect of the Andes! But enough of the harrowing details! Yet the worst is still to be heard. All the endless night through things kept dropping down upon the sleepers from the wall above. To my unromantic mind these were bits of twigs and leaves, yet in the subtle silence of the tropical night small wonder each was a possible sudden-death to the sufferer within the sleeping-bag, assuring himself a thousand times that no viper could bite through it, yet lacking faith in his own assurance. The most anguishing moment of all was that when there dropped squarely upon him, with a soft, reptile-like thud, something that proved by daylight that he had hung carelessly in the Incaic niche above one of his woolen socks!

The descent was harder than the climb; also it was quicker. So slippery was the wet trail at that angle that whenever our heels failed to bite into the soil we sat down emphatically on the backs of our necks some feet further down the slope, fetching it a resounding wallop with the rest of the body. There is talk of some day building an electric line from Cuzco, and a funicular up to the ruins, with perhaps a tourist hotel among them. Fortunately talk does not easily breed action in Peru. One of the chief charms of Machu Picchu is inherent in the difficulty of reaching it; a scene once made accessible to fat, middle-aged ladies is ready to be marked off the traveler’s itinerary and to be turned over to the tender mercies of the tourist.

We ended the descent without broken bones, though not without shattered tempers, and finding the precarious connection with the outer world still sagging between the roaring boulders, climbed the wet jungled bank beyond. Here Rumiñaui, in addition to his regular government wage of twenty cents, was rewarded with a shilling and a handful of coca-leaves, only the latter seeming to be of any interest to him; and here, strangely enough, Tomás was waiting, as he had been ordered, with the four animals, their heads turned toward Cuzco.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XVIII. THE COLLASUYU, OR “UPPER” PERU

On November 11th I took train southward. Though my original plan of following the Inca highway from Quito to Cuzco had been accomplished, the thought of turning homeward with half the continent still unexplored had become an absurdity. But the scattered life of that dreary region to the south of the Imperial City promised too little of new interest to be worth covering on foot. If I did walk down to the station, behind my belongings on jogging Indian legs, it was because to have waited for the nine o’clock mule-car would probably have been to miss the nine-thirty train.

Cuzco, like its rival to the north, has been connected by rail with the outside world since 1908. The train leaves on Tuesdays and Saturdays, spending a night at Sicuani and another at Juliaca, whence a branch descends to Arequipa. Every Friday there is a vertiginous “express” that makes Puno in one day.

A fertile valley, the great bolson, or mountain pocket, that stretches from the pampa of Anta in the north to Urcos on the south, with many grazing cattle, frequent villages, and strings of laden Indians and asses, rolled slowly past. Before noon we caught the gorge of the muddy Vilcañota, the same stream that under the name of Urubamba encircles Machu Picchu, with little patch-farms far up the face of the enclosing ranges and here and there steep, narrow side valleys rich with cultivation. Yet cultivatable ground was scarce, so scarce that it was easy to understand why the ancient population spared as much of it as possible by walling up their dead in caves and planting all but perpendicular slopes.

Next day the valley rose gradually, until cultivation gave way completely to cattle and sheep, then to llama and alpaca herds grazing on the tough ichu of broad punas stretching to arid foothills that, in turn, rolled up into a great snow-clad range on our left. An aggressive, despairing aridity, rarely touched with a cheering note of green, spread in every direction. A dreary land indeed would this have been to journey through afoot. Small wonder the race accustomed always to this desolate landscape is of melancholy temperament, given to personifying nature as a host of evil spirits inimical to man.

The drear and barren land across which lay the branch line of the third day rolled ever higher to the Crucero Alto at 14,666 feet. Two large lakes, cold, steely-blue in tint, with a few barren islands, broke upon the scene and sank slowly as we panted upward; patches of snow lay above, around, and then below us; the glare of the arid, sun-flooded landscape grew painful to the eyes, recalling that many an Andean traveler holds colored glasses an indispensable part of his equipment. Towns there were none; and the stations consisted of one or two wind-threshed buildings of stone or sheet-iron, dismal beyond conception.

Then we descended gradually. Here and there in the edge of reedy lagoons stood parihuanas,—long-legged, rose-tinted birds the feathers of which in olden days formed the Inca’s head-dress, when capital punishment was meted out to anyone of lesser rank who dared decorate himself with them. Equally sacred were the vicuñas, the undomesticated species of the llama family that furnished the imperial ermine. Ordinarily the traveler is fortunate to catch sight from the train of one or two of those timid animals. To-day a group of fourteen appeared not five hundred yards away across the pampa; then within an hour we passed close by flocks of nine, twelve, seven, and eight respectively, a total of fifty, more than my Peruvian seat-companion, who crossed this line several times a year, had seen in all his life. Unlike the three domesticated species, llama, alpaca, and guanaco, the vicuñas are uniform in color, a reddish-brown with whitish belly, legs, and tail, not unlike a fawn in general appearance. A more delicate animal could scarcely be imagined; the neck seemed hardly larger than a man’s wrist, the legs fragile in their slender daintiness. They were graceful, as well as swift, even in their running, which resembled the gait of the jack-rabbit in the way they brought front and hind legs together. The flocks still belong to the government as in the days of the Incas, when they were protected by royal edict, under penalty of death. For some ten years past Peruvian law, too, has forbidden killing them, but the valuable wool and skins are still to be had in the larger cities, for game-wardens are conspicuous by their absence.

What seemed a hopeless desert thinly covered with dry, wiry bunch-grass, now spread in all directions. We were crossing the vast “Pampa de Arguelles,” so named from the family that has leased hundreds of square miles of it from the government. They in turn grant the Indians permission to graze their cattle,—at 25 cents a year for larger animals, twice that for each flock of small ones; yet “los Arguelles” derive income sufficient to permit the family to live on the fat of Paris. Mirages, as of rivers flowing landward, appeared now and then across the arid immensity. At stations lay piled great heaps of yarlta, a fuel resembling a cross between peat and giant mushrooms. Further down, a scraggly bush was cut for the same purpose and carried in bundles on donkeys’ backs. Soon that dreary Sahara of the West Coast lay on every hand, massive rocks piled up fantastically, monotonous to the last degree, yet not without a certain striking beauty under some moods. The landscape was what the Germans call eintönig, of a rich yellow-brown, dusted by the winds and bleached by the suns of centuries, and spreading away to infinity with a hint of the vastness of the earth which even the sea does not give.

Suddenly a deep-green patch of alfalfa burst out among the glaring rocks, trebling their barrenness by contrast. It was the little oasis of Yura, fed by a small stream, the water of which, reputed efficacious to disordered livers, is bottled and sold—less widely to-day than before the priests, whose rival establishment produces the “Water of Jesus,” threatened to blackball out of heaven anyone who drank the other. Then far away across the Egypt-tinted world the eye made out well below, at first dimly, a green oasis with a great, or at least a widespread, city covering about half of it. “Ari, quepay!” (“Yes, let us stay a while!”) the first settlers are said to have cried when they caught sight of this garden spot; and the train seemed like-minded, setting us down at last in Arequipa, second city of Peru. Three dawdling days had been required to cover 412 miles.

The only place of importance between the Pacific and Titicaca is strikingly oriental in atmosphere, with a suggestion of Cairo, thanks to its shuffling donkeys—a hole is slit in their nostrils that they may more easily breathe this highland air—and its encircling desert, yet exceeding the latter in beauty by reason of the snowclads hovering about it. To the north lies Chachani, fantastic with its peaks and pinnacles and jagged ice-fields; nearer at hand stands hoar-headed Misti, rivalled in symmetry of form only by Fujiyama and Cotapaxi. From any second-story roof the arid, yellow sand stretches away as from the summit of the pyramids to a horizon far more broken and tumbled than that of the Sahara. The hills are streaked with what looks like snow, but is really fine sand, the same sand that lies in waves monotonously multiplied in the form of wandering, crescent-shaped médanos nearer the coast, whence quantities of it are shipped to Europe to make a cheap glass. Down below and round about the city are fat cattle knee-deep in green pastures, in an oasis where irrigation produces alfalfa, as well as many fruits, in abundance. The desert air is clear beyond words, bringing the newcomer from the bleak highlands above the impression that summer, an unoppressive midsummer of the North, has suddenly come again. Every evening wonderful sunsets, ranging from lurid pink through purple and blue-gray to a velvety fading slate, play a veritable symphony of color across the surrounding desert world.

The city itself is flat, of one, or at most two stories, always with the bulking mass of Misti or its neighbors behind it. Earthquakes have been frequent in Arequipa. Because of these visitations, perhaps, the town has everywhere an unfinished appearance, most buildings ceasing abruptly just above the first story and looking as if the rest had been shaken off or suddenly abandoned. A few have ventured to crawl up again to two stories, and here and there a bold adventurer to three, these latter, commonly of sheet-iron, seeming constantly to tremble at their own temerity. As in Lima and the lands of the Arab, the roofs are flat, places of promenade and evening tertulias; for rain falls, if at all, only in brief afternoon showers. The town is built largely of a soft white stone, almost chalk in composition, and light in weight as terra-cotta, which is chopped or sawed out of a desert quarry not far away and which, though it hardens in the air, can still be carved with a knife. Two arched bridges with massive piers, mildly suggesting those by which one enters Toledo in Spain, span the little cliff-sided Chili. The eucalyptus seems less at home here than in the higher cities of the Sierra, but drooping willows abound. As everywhere on the West Coast of Peru, massive mud fences afford places of promenade in the outskirts.

I was treading close on the heels of civilization of a material sort. Electric street-cars had appeared in Arequipa a bare three months before; with motormen imported from Lima they afforded an efficient service to nearly every corner of the oasis. The innovation had not been without its difficulties. Strolling one morning, I met three cholos driving a dozen donkeys marketward. Suddenly they began to shout and dance about the animals as if some danger were imminent. A block away sounded the gong of a bright new tramcar, but as I had never known one, least of all in South America, deliberately to run down an animal, I wondered at the uproar. To my surprise the car came on without slackening speed. The shrieking cholos succeeded in hauling, pushing, or coaxing most of the stubborn brutes off the line, but one pair refused to vary their set course. At the last moment one of these lost courage and sidestepped, but his sturdy black companion kept serenely on, with stubborn down-hung ears and a “to-hell-with-you” flip of the tail—and just then a corner of the swiftly moving car caught him on the starboard beam. He turned a complete somersault on the cobbles, rolled on to his feet, and gazed after the still speeding car with a scowl not unmixed with a ludicrous expression of astonishment. Later I learned from the American manager of the line that a number of donkeys, burritos, and dogs had been killed during the first month of operation. Decrees and warnings had been utterly wasted, and Arequipa’s donkeys would have stagnated the lines and again taken possession of the gait of life without this resort to the teaching of experience.

Cuzco and Arequipa are reputed the Peruvian strongholds of conservatism. Of the two, the latter is probably more deeply under the spell of the ancient church. The din of bells was almost constant; during my week in the city I saw no fewer than five images of the Virgin paraded through the streets to the usual accompaniment of kneeling cholos, bareheaded whites, and scores of sanctimonious-faced old beatas following with funereal step. Several of Arequipa’s fiestas are noted for the dancing of wooden saints to barbaric music in the public squares. Others have fixed periods of calling on their fellows, sallying forth from their home churches to the plaza where, manipulated by the cholo bearers beneath, they bow to and finally “kiss” each other, to the fanatical applause of the multitude. The town boasts also several crucified figures operated by wires that cause the eyes to roll, the limbs to quiver, and the head finally to droop as in death, after which a gang of workmen, carrying towels over their arms to wipe away the “blood,” climb up to remove the nails and lay the “body of Jesus” away in a glass coffin until the next holy day.

From a score of stories typical of Arequipa with which I was favored by a fellow-countryman, who had spent many years as the alpaca expert of the chief local warehouse, I pass on two. For months he and his wife had been annoyed by the throngs of beggars who gathered for a bowl of soup each noon at the monastery just across the narrow street from his residence, and then slept out the day in the sandy hollows nearby, like the dogs of Constantinople. What particularly aroused his ire were the habits of an old fellow of ninety or so, whom he had known for years. A few weeks before, finding him in the all too scanty remnants of what had once been shirt and trousers, the American had smuggled him into his workshop and given him a complete new outfit from his own wardrobe. The mendicant returned to his customary hollow a hundred yards up the street, which he was accustomed to share with several curs and a donkey or two, and during the night his fellow-beggars robbed him of the new garments. What, then, was the donor’s surprise and American disgust when he set out on his early stroll next morning to find the old fellow parading up and down the street, begging of the women bound for mass in the monastery church “without a lickin’ stitch on him, as naked as the day he was born. If you’d tell it in the States, they’d say you was lyin’ and that he must have had a shirt an’ britches on anyway. But, no, sir, just as I’m telling you, without a lickin’ stitch, an’ parading his wrinkled old ninety-year carcass up an’ down amongst all them women goin’ to mass.”

But the ladies seemed merely to be mildly amused, and the native policeman saw nothing in the sight worthy of comment. Children now and then roam the streets of Arequipa in their birthday clothes, and the old fellow had long since been in his second childhood. My outraged fellow-countryman went across town to make complaint to his friend, the prefect. The latter did not see what he could do about it.

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

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

“Well, sir, I couldn’t stand it no longer having that ol’ feller paradin’ around before my house, with my wife inside an’ all of them women folks goin’ to mass, as naked as the day he was born. So next mornin’ I borrowed a stretcher an’ got four Indians, an’ I says, ‘Now you git that ol’ feller on that stretcher an’ tie him down an’ carry him over to the hospital an’ leave him inside, or dump him in the river or anything you like, only so’s you git him out of here. An’ I’ve got a phone an’ when I hear he’s inside the hospital I’ll give you each a sol.’ Well, sir, them Indians just dumped him in the hospital payteeo before the Sisters of Mercy could shut the gates, an’ they had to keep him.

“I’ve got a lot of friends amongst them priests across the road, even if I ain’t a Catholic,” he went on, “an’ they’re a pretty nice lot o’ fellers, take ’em all in all. They’s three kinds of ’em: the brown priests, the black priests, an’ the white priests” (Franciscans, Dominicans, and Mercedarias). One especial, by the name of Jayzoóse, has been over here in my house off an’ on for fifteen years to ask for a chicken or some eggs, or a few dollars to build a new altar, or to have a few drinks—Oh, they’re a pretty decent lot o’ fellers, an’ of course they’ve got to live somehow. Well, Jayzoóse—he’s livin’ with a woman over there behind the monastery wall an’ got four or five kids; but then of course they all do that in Peru, though I suppose the Catholics up in the States wouldn’t believe you if you told ’em, but of course you ’n me or anybody that’s been down here—well, Jayzoóse come over the other day an’ says he wants me to come an’ hear him preach. So I went out to a church over here on the edge of town an’ I tell you he preached a mighty strong sermon, too. Only it was All Saints’ Day an’ of course everybody was drunk. So I was layin’ here readin’ along in the afternoon, when I heard somebody knock at the street door—or if I happened to be asleep an’ didn’t, Theodore Roosevelt” (pointing to a cross between a Dachshund and a pug curled up at his feet) “here, or Woody Wilson” (an Irish terrier) “there did, for they always hear anybody that knocks, no matter if it’s midnight—an’ I went to the door an’ there was Jayzoóse, an’ he was pickled to the eyes. So I invited him in, an’ he says, ‘Why don’t you give me something to drink?’ An’ I says, ‘Well, Jayzoóse, I ain’t got anything in the house just now, but I’ll send out an’ get something. An’ I sent out an’ got two bottles of beer. But Jayzoóse was that drunk he couldn’t sit up, say nothin’ of stand up, an’ when the beer come he got to rollin’ around an’ out of his pocket drops a big loaded revolver. I picked it up an’ says, ‘Here, I’m goin’ to keep this gun fer you. What are you goin’ to do with a gun anyway?’ An’ Jayzoóse says, ‘I’m goin’ to kill that there Chilian blacksmith down the street, because he don’t go to mass an’ says he don’t believe in the Holy Church an’ its miracles; an’ if I’d a had a couple of drinks more, I’d a killed him las’ night.’ An’ I says, ‘No, you don’t want to kill that feller, Jayzoóse, an’ I’ll keep this gun fer you until to-morrow,’—an’ I got up to help him home, an’ when I opened the street door, in tumbles a woman that had been leanin’ up against it—being All Saints’ Day—an’ just fell down into the parlor here; an’ by the time I rolled her out again an’ got Jayzoóse home I was sweatin’ some, I can tell you.”

I strolled out one afternoon in a leisurely hour from the central plaza by a street growing ever rougher and less cobbled to the Harvard Observatory on the flank of Misti, with a splendid view of the snow-capped cone towering into the sky close beside it and a marvelous outlook over all the oasis of Arequipa. Here, in a household where it was easy to fancy myself suddenly set back in the heart of my own land, American scientists photograph the heavens on large dry-plates, with exposures of from one to eight hours, through telescopes automatically regulated to the speed of the earth, but requiring also constant hand adjustment. Arequipa, however, is growing less ideal for the purpose, since the number of its cloudy days has more than doubled. The blood-red sun was sinking behind the Sahara hills when I turned homeward through the caressing air of evening, the desert flanks of Misti and Chachani and Pichapichu glowing a velvety red from the reflection of the opposite horizon, the white oriental city growing dimmer and dimmer, then suddenly bursting out in a spray of electric lights above which the two white spires of the cathedral more than ever resembled minarets.

Next day I returned to the highlands in the private car of the railway superintendent, a fellow-countryman. The day was brilliant, the leprous desert flashing in the sun even after it had given way to the ichu-brown tablelands of the great plateau, Misti bulking as large a hundred kilometers away as out at the observatory on her flanks, and snow-caps springing up into the luminous sky about us to all points of the compass. All the afternoon we loafed in cushioned armchairs facing the back platform, on which sat our host shooting with automatic gun-pistol at vicuñas, a pastime strictly against the law, but Peruvian statutes scarcely reach the altitude of a railway superintendent. Fortunately the animals were scarce and far away, and the nearest he came to breaking the law was to raise the desert dust about them and send them scampering across the rolling pampa at a lope between that of jack-rabbit and a deer, sparing us the necessity of halting the train and sending out the crew to bring in the game. From Juliaca we turned south along a flat once-lake-bottom. Arms and branches of Titicaca, full of shivering reeds, broke in upon the dusk that thickened into night just as we pulled into Puno, cold, dreary, and monotonously like all other towns of the high Sierra.

I had timed my arrival to take, instead of the regular steamer directly across the lake, the semi-monthly “Yapura” that makes the round of its shore, with many stops. We were off at ten and out upon the “open sea” by midnight, a huge distorted moon rising off the starboard bow, into the prismatic wake of which we wheezed slowly but steadily, until it crawled up under the black skirts of the clouds that covered the edges of an otherwise starlit sky. A wind as penetrating as that off Cape Race caused our diminutive craft to roll and plunge merrily, to the distress of the priest, lawyer, and home-made Ph.D., with whom I shared the six-by-eight dining-room-cabin. Titicaca by daylight has the identical color of the sea itself, and we awoke to find ourselves wheezing along in mid-ocean, so to speak, at eighteen knots—every two or three hours. We cast anchor first before the red town of Juli, in a lap of bare hills sloping up from the steel-blue lake. I dropped on top of the first boatload of cargo and went ashore, the captain, having orders not to start without me, promising to blow a special signal. The Jesuits claim to have set up in Juli the first printing-press in America, and here Quichua was first reduced to writing. To-day it is a mere dawdling village, distinguished by the voluminous Dutchman breeches of its Indians. At noon Pomata held us long enough to unload the priest and a few boxes and bales at the usual cobblestone wharf. This same good padre had assured me that it was a well-known fact that Saint Thomas had visited America before the Conquest and had brought the Indians their civilization, being known to them as “Tomi”—a bit familiar, to say the least. How persistently mankind seeks to rob poor old Columbus of his glory!

In the afternoon we churned into a wide, semicircular bay as far as shallow water and rustling reeds permitted, and I was soon climbing the easy slope to Yunguyo. Here and there was much freight to discharge. When I expressed my surprise at the consumptive powers of so small a town, the captain winked an Irish-Peruvian eye and breathed, rather than murmured, “contrabando.” I had come at last to the end of endless Peru, with the unexpected privilege of walking out of it, as I had entered it eight months before. Yunguyo lies on the neck of a little peninsula, part of which, by the arbitrariness of international frontiers, is Bolivian. The steamer had orders to pick me up in the morning, and slipping on kodak and revolver, I struck out for the sacred city of Copacabana. A league from the landing the road mounted a stony ridge, passed through the two arches of an uninhabited rural chapel, and left the historical, if sometimes profanity-provoking, land of Peru forever behind.

To that day I had never, to my knowledge, met a Bolivian. Those born beyond the boundary evidently kept the fact a profound secret, and in Peru the silence about the adjoining land was as if it were on the opposite side of the earth. Once in Bolivia it was as rare to hear anything of Peru. It was a stony country, in fact there were more stones than country. Everywhere they lay piled up in high massive fences with half-tillable patches between them. The wide road was well-peopled with Indians afoot, Indians darker and of more independent mien than those of Cuzco. This was the route by which, according to tradition, Manco Ccápac set out from the island of Titicaca to found the Inca Empire. The countrymen were engaged in a sort of planting and plowing bee, a half-drunken festival, their hatbands decorated with newly picked flowers. The instant I passed the boundary the head-dress of the women changed to an ugly, round, narrow-brimmed felt hat hitherto unknown. On the Peruvian side the shores of the lake had been reedy and shallow, lisping with water-birds and a melancholy wind from off Titicaca, as if the sea were thinking sadly of its lost glory. But as I topped the ridge of the peninsula, there opened suddenly before me the vast steely-blue lake, as clear-cut against the base of the reddish-brown hills as if dug with some gigantic spade, rolling away in one direction over the horizon like an Atlantic, the velvet-brown island of Titicaca standing forth in the middle distance sharp as an etching. Rocks, which the superstitious Indians fancy are impious men turned to stone, stood forth on every hand. Children along the way addressed me as “tata,” the Aymará version of the Quichua “tayta” (father).

At the end of a five-mile stroll the stony highway broke forth into a little lake-side town. The church and monastery sacred to Our Lady of Copacabana, roofed with glistening green and yellow tiles, in a square surrounded by heavy walls brilliant with the crimson flor del Inca, nestles in a lap of rocky hills a bit back from the lake and bulks high above the haunts of mere men at its feet. In the days of the Incas this was a holy city, with a certain “idol of vast renown among the Gentiles,” a place of purification whence pilgrims embarked for the ultra-sacred island of Titicaca. The church militant would not have been itself had it lost this opportunity of grafting its own superstitions on those of the aboriginals, and some three centuries ago the present “Virgen de Copacabana” was set up, with the usual marvelous tale of her miraculous appearance in this spot. Her servants have been realizing richly on their foresight ever since. A steady stream of pilgrims pours into the holy city from Peru, as well as Bolivia, and even from further off, the year round, though August 5 and February 2 are the days of chief festival and mightiest crowds. Near the monastery is a large hospicio, a two-story lodging-house for pilgrims, with a great rectangular patio opening through an archway. In the town roundabout is that curious atmosphere of a mixture of piety and commercial advantage common to Rome, Jerusalem, Benares, and Puree, an air of something hard to believe, yet highly advantageous to accept, at least outwardly. The costumes of the populace had grown frankly Bolivian. In several of the shops stocked with sacred baubles, facing the immense grass-grown plaza, women were rolling cigarettes, new proof that I was in Bolivia, for to roll a cigarette in Peru is the exclusive privilege of the government.

The priest of Pomata had given me a note to the superior of the monastery. A doorkeeper led me into pillared cloisters opening on a flower-grown patio and softly into the sanctum of Father Basoberri, deep in conversation with a parish priest who had brought a flock of pilgrims from a neighboring town. Being a European, he created a better impression than the average native churchman. To celebrate my arrival he ordered a servant to uncork a bottle of imported beer and, after the first formalities, had him set me down in the monastery dining-room, where an excellent meal stopped abruptly short of dessert and coffee. The superior conducted me in person to the large brick-and-tile room reserved for distinguished guests, opening on the now bitter-cold expanse of Titicaca, and advised me to fasten the padlock and put the key in my pocket, “for though we are here in a monastery, there are people passing back and forth, and it is safer. Now,” he went on, “if you wish to see the customs of the pilgrims, you have only to mount that stairway.”

I climbed two stone flights in semi-darkness and found myself in a narrow wooden gallery at the back of a large, high chamber suffused with a “dim religious light.” It was painted blue, with a sprinkling of golden stars, as nearly the painter’s visualization of heaven, no doubt, as the crudity of his workmanship permitted him to express. Confession and a contribution to the attendant priests are requirements for admittance to the floor of the church below. At the further end stood the gaudy altar, in its center a glass-faced alcove containing the far-famed Virgin of Copacabana. The figure, scarcely three feet high, was cumbered with several rich silk gowns, laden with gold and jewels, and with a blazing golden crown many sizes too large. Round-about her were expanses of golden-starred heavens, and half a hundred of what looked to a layman like large daggers threatened her from all sides. The original blue-stone idol had been destroyed by the Spaniards, the present incumbent having been fashioned in 1582 by Tito-Yupanqui, lineal descendant of the Incas. He was no artist, but was said to have been inspired by the Virgin herself.

The place was unusually immaculate for the Andes, as becomes a famous shrine where money pours in the year around, and was in striking contrast to the squalor of the surrounding region. The entire floor below was crowded with kneeling pilgrims, weirdly half-lighted by candles, except around the altar, where there was light enough to make priests, acolytes, and the Virgin stand out brilliantly. A week is the customary length of stay for pilgrims, with a ceremony of welcome and one of dismissal, separated by a long series of masses, confessions and purifications—not to mention the ubiquitous fees. It is perfectly well-known throughout the length and breadth of the Andes, as the priest from the neighboring town, having taken me in hand as soon as I appeared in the gallery, whispered above the rumble of the services, that Nuestra Señora de Copacabana is an all-round champion in the miracle line. For instance: Hardly a year back she had picked up a ship about to be wrecked on the coast of Chile and set it out a thousand miles or so into the mill-pond Pacific, merely because one of the sailors had had the presence of mind to call upon her at the height of the storm. The newspapers of the time seem to have covered the service poorly. Or there was the case of the Indian in my cicerone’s own parish who, working in his field far up the side of a mountain sloping swiftly toward Titicaca, suddenly fell headlong down the precipice. He would infallibly have been dashed to pieces on the rocks below, had he not suddenly, halfway down, uttered the name of the Virgin—personally I never knew the mind of an Andean Indian to work with such rapidity—and instantly found himself comfortably seated back in his own field again. The fact should not be lost sight of, however, in rating this marvel that the Aymará husbandman cheers on his labors with an even stronger chicha than that of his Quichua cousins to the north.

The ceremony we were now witnessing was that of dismissing the departing pilgrims. At about two-minute intervals there knelt on the steps of the altar one person, a man and wife, or sometimes a man, wife, and child, always of the same family. An Indian acolyte in red thrust a lighted candle into a hand of each, the chief priest bowed down before the image, while back beside us in the gallery an Indian in a poncho pumped a wheezing melodeon and the choir, consisting of several boys, four old half-Indian women wrapped to the ends of their noses in black mantos, and three merry little girls who managed to keep up a constant gossip and game through it all, knelt on the floor about the instrument and moaned weird hymns. If the pilgrim was of the “gente decente” class, the hymn was in Spanish; if an Indian, it was in Aymará. During the singing, and the chanting of the priest, another acolyte in a still more striking robe stepped forth and covered the kneeling person or persons at the altar with what looked like a richly embroidered blanket. This the priest beside me asserted was the Virgin’s cloak, capable of protecting from all evil, for a certain length of time—varying, perhaps, with the fee.

Then suddenly the cloak was snatched away, the candles were jerked out of the hands of the worshippers, the latter were all but bodily pushed aside, and a priest on the side-lines called out the next name from the list in his hands. This field-manager was startlingly unBolivian in efficiency, keeping things moving with a rush, and calling the next group almost before the acolyte reached for the blue blanket. The attitude of all those professionally connected with the ceremony, was scornful, careless, and hurried—like a New York barber who is convinced there is no “tip” coming. The fifth group to appear, however, was less cavalierly treated. A tall, well-dressed man stepped forward, and an acolyte quickly slipped in front of him a prie-dieu, or prayer-stool with high back, of the style used in church by well-to-do South American women. Then, to my surprise, two young men in riding breeches and leggings, who had been standing near us in the gallery, stumbled over each other in their haste to get down to the floor below and kneel on either side of the older man. “Ese caballero,” whispered the priest beside me, with a distinct tone of pride in his voice, “is a famous lawyer and ex-senator from La Paz, and those are his two sons. They are great devotees of the Blessed Virgin of Copacabana.”

When the cloak had been laid away for the night, the chief priest mounted a pulpit projecting from the side-wall, and in the same drawl in which he had chanted at the altar, compared with which the notorious American nasal twang is soft and songful, either preached a sermon, or recited a bit from the Bible, or imparted some stern orders from the Pope—which, neither I nor, I am certain, any other hearer not previously informed ever guessed. For the monotonous drone in which he hurried through the thing, like a man with an appointed tryst, was such that during the full twenty minutes it lasted I had not the faintest notion whether it was in Latin, Spanish, or Aymará. The only intelligible word I caught was an often-repeated, slovenly “Copavan.” Then the acolytes hastily snuffed the candles, and we filed out. At the foot of the stairway my companion was fallen upon by an old Indian and his son who, imprinting a rapid-fire of kisses on his by no means lily-white hands, begged him to hear them confess. He waved them aside as one might an importunate cur, until the Indian, redoubling his osculations, assured him he had real coin to pay for the service, whereupon the good padre took courteous leave of me and led the pair to his room in the monastery.

I was hurrying into my clothes in the bitter cold Titicaca dawn, when the faint long-drawn whistle of the “Yapura” was borne to my ears. To my astonishment it was barely five, so great is the difference in the hour of sunrise in the few degrees I had moved southward since leaving Cuzco. Copacabana in its lap of terraced hills shrunk into the past as we slipped away around the peninsula of the same name. Before us rose the Island of the Sun, traditional cradle of the Inca race, yellow-brown and mountainous, with terraces far up some of its rugged valleys, one red-roofed village housing the workmen of General Pando, chief owner of the island. It produces potatoes, maize, and quinoa. On the mainland, too, all the shores were terraced and cultivated from the water’s edge to the tops of the ridges and hills, in long, square, rectangular, or such fantastic shapes of fields as the lay of the land required. To the east the great glacier mass of Sorata, by some reputed the highest peak in America, lay piled into the sky, half-hidden and cut off from the solid earth by vast banks of white clouds. Before long we passed, a bit further off, Coati, the Island of the Moon, a low ridge terraced from end to end, constituting a single hacienda noted for its fertility. Mere words give but a faint notion of the beauty of Titicaca on a brilliant morning, with its striking combinations of soft colors,—the dense blue-green of the lake, curtained by tumbled banks of snow-white clouds, the velvety yellow-brown islands and mainland, with the faint-purple cloud-shadows playing across them. The mighty glacier bulk of Sorata piercing the sky seemed to move forward also, as the steamer slipped lazily on, frequently bringing into view new and more delicately beautiful combinations of the same elements.

The Bolivian mainland we drew near in the early afternoon was of a reddish soil, with many patches of bright green and pretty little tilted fields checkering the ridges clear down to the water’s edge. At Guaqui, the landing-place, no train was to leave for twenty-four hours, and I set out afoot across the exhilarating plains of Bolivia for Tiahuanaco, twelve miles away. It was a fertile, well-plowed land, where the remaining stubble suggested wheat as the chief product. The sun dropped behind a dense, blue-black bank of clouds hanging like a pall over Titicaca behind, and there was no sunset when the time for it came, but only a gradual, steady fading of light to a faint gleam in which the eyes could barely make out the ground underfoot. The evening stillness was broken only by the rare lowing of a cow afar off; a shower that was half hail and all cold beat stingingly into my face. But for the storm and wind, an absolute silence lay like a solid wall on every hand, with nowhere the suggestion of a light, the many clusters of Indian huts that had speckled the plain by day seeming to keep disconfidently out of reach of highway and railroad.

At eight I stumbled into the station building of Tiahuanaco. The telegraph operator was sufficiently impressed by my familiarity with the name of the gringo superintendent to induce the woman across the track to serve me stale bread and native cheese, and tea made of the water of Titicaca, brought here in locomotive tanks. On the table were several of the dailies of La Paz—it was difficult to think of that city as “the capital” after eight months of considering Lima the center of the universe—in which the world’s news all at once jumped up to date. But it was like reading a serial story of which one has lost several chapters and finds it impossible to pick up all the threads again.

Tiahuanaco, 12,900 feet above the sea, in a broad, open, unprotected plain, frigid by night, and not over warm by day under the chill blue of its highland sky, is the chief archeological enigma of “Alto-Peru.” The most important ruins lie a few hundred yards north of the station, and an equal distance from the modern adobe town with its bulking stone church. From a slight rise of ground the flat plain, sprinkled with many clusters of mud huts, stretches away to a gouged and broken ridge, here reddish, there green with vegetation, that fences it in. Huge blocks of stone lie tumbled and scattered over a vaster extent than at Luxor and Karnak, in a disarray at once suggesting earthquake; for they seem too immense to have been overthrown by a merely human destroying vengeance. In the region roughly known as Peru there were several detached and separate civilizations, some of which clearly antedated the Incas; and Tiahuanaco has little in common with the ruins further north. There the relics consist almost exclusively of stone walls; here there are virtually none, though excavations might uncover a few remnants. What is left looks, in contrast to the stem practicability of “Inca” ruins, like the caprice of some childish sovereign. But it is not certain how justly we may judge of the whole original plan, since not only the neighboring hamlet, as well as La Paz, has helped itself freely to the materials for its own chief buildings, but the railroad has carried off vast quantities of it for the construction of bridges and culverts. The still existing monuments are chiefly immense stone blocks too great to be moved by puny modern man, some still upright, some fallen. Bas-reliefs, of which Machu Picchu offers none, are numerous; sculptured figures are unknown among the ruins of Peru, while here there are several. Some resemble totem poles of stone. The most striking is a sturdy rock god, his features defaced by the revolver shots of the enlightened youths of La Paz on their Sunday excursions, which, like the twin figures of Thebes, sits abandoned out on the plain. The monolithic gateway, a single block of dark gray stone on which the intricate carving and bas-reliefs still stand forth clear yet inscrutable, has been set together again since Squier’s day.

As I sat gazing across the disordered mystery of long ago, an Indian woman, the ubiquitous bundle and second generation on her back, a crude sling in one hand, drove her pigs out into what seems once to have been the main square of the ruined city. As the animals fell to rooting about among the ruins, the woman walked across to the inscrutable stone god and bowed down before it with a strange, heathenish courtesy. I attempted to work my way around to leeward in the hope of catching a photograph of the aboriginal rite. But while I was still some distance off, she either spied or scented me, and raced away toward the town at a greater speed than I had ever before witnessed in one of her race.

In the modern town dwells an indolent, not to say insolent, population of cholos and Indians, ignorant as the Arabs of the Nile of the motive that brings strange beings from far off to view the disdained remnants of long ago, yet ready to take all possible advantage of that absurd custom. The place bids fair to become as overrun with the pests of tourist centers as the show-places of Europe. Already the stranger is greeted by a rabble of unsoaped urchins, offering for sale as “antigüedades” all manner of worthless pebbles. Aware that visitors, for some strange reason, are interested only in things of great age, these children vociferously proclaim everything in sight “muy antigua,” even to the loaves and meat displayed in the shops, a statement for which there is some basis. The bulking church of the town, as well as portions of the rudest edifices, is constructed of splendid cut-stone. On either side of the entrance are the weather-worn torsos of a man and a woman, crudely carved from reddish sandstone, sadly defaced, and having an even greater air of antiquity than the chief monuments out on the plain. They would be more properly in their setting out among the other ruins; here they are startling as one bursts unexpectedly upon them facing the empty grass-grown plaza of the dawdling village.

The train snorted in soon after noon. Across the bleak Collao spring plowing was at its height, amid much ceremony. Many of the sleek oxen were half-hidden by the red and yellow flags of Bolivia, set upright on the yoke across their horns. Gay streamers and banners decorated animals and plow, while the Indian family that in each case had come in full force to see the propitiation of the spirits that rule over the fields, was garbed in its gayest. For not only must the moon be in a particular phase, but all gods must be won over, all demons exorcised, and all signs promising, before it is worth while to begin the year’s sowing. What a fertile plateau it was, compared to stony Peru, the plowing unchecked over hill and dale of the slightly rolling plain as far as the eye could see!

An official passing through the train to examine the bundles for contraband was the only formality that had marked the passing of the frontier. In the second-class car I began to gather the impression that the Aymará Indian, if morose and even less given to smiling, was on the whole a more promising type of humanity than the Quichuas. For though he was more inclined to insolence, he was far less obsequious, more manly than the slinking race to the north, less passive and obedient, more bellicose and jealous of his rights; and as long as there is any fight left in a man, there is still hope for him.

The day waned. A plowman driving his oxen homeward and carrying the plow on his own shoulder is a touch Gray did not catch. The plain grew less fertile, and was dotted now with countless stone-heaps; Illimani and a long, half-clouded snow-range grew up before us; we climbed somewhat, though the world roundabout seemed level as before. The railroad swung to the left. The scores of mule, donkey, and llama pack-trains, however, kept straight on across the bleak, stone-heaped plain, till suddenly at a white pillar a few miles away they seemed to drop all at once into the unknown over the edge of the near horizon.

Where the train halted I scorned the electric trolley and, walking a few yards, saw suddenly burst upon me a scene for once superior to the anticipation,—La Paz, America’s most lofty capital, in its hole in the ground. Up there at the “Alto,” 13,600 feet above the sea, all was brown, cold, barren, unenticing; all about, behind, and around me the bleak, uninhabited Andean plateau, stony and drear, cherishing nothing but bunches of tough ichu, stretched away like a faded brown sea to the hazy distance. Then at my very feet this gave way, and all the nearby world pitched headlong down into a gashed and broken chasm 1200 feet down, measuring perhaps two miles across from where I stood to an equal height on the tumbled and ramified foothills opposite. These, breaking and splitting and falling away into unseen valleys, and climbing out again to become more rugged and higher ridges, finally culminated in a vast and jagged mass of snow and ice, cut off from the solid earth by banks of clouds, above which the reflection of the descending sun streamed in brilliant rose color upon the glaciered pinnacle of giant Illimani, 24,500 feet above the sea. Across the broad puna a cold, fitful wind whistled lugubriously; down below, though barely a sound of life except the blood-stirring snort of a regimental band came up this sheer quarter-mile from the city, all seemed pleasantly cozy and warm.

The lower flanks of the great cuenca were checkered with little Indian farms, now mostly light-brown from being newly plowed, some still the brownish-green of old crops, and all hanging at a decided angle. Further down, on the floor of the valley itself, were similar irregular patches, chiefly of the brilliant green of alfalfa, of every conceivable shape,—round, triangular, horseshoe, veritable “Gerrymanders” in the strange forms given them by the configurations of the ground; for, once down below it, this proves by no means so floor-flat as it seems from above. In the very bottom of the valley, rather on the further side and stretching a bit up the opposite slope, lay La Paz itself. It was a compact city, so compact that it seemed one conglomerate mass into which the eye broke only once,—at the tree-roofed central plaza, tiny from here as a green paster on a vast wall-painting. From this height one saw little but the roofs, the dull-red of the tiles greatly predominating—almost too much red, as in the garments of an Indian gathering; next came the white and colored house-walls, then the sober gray of old churches, and finally here and there the edge of a blue, green, or even an orange wall peering above the mass.

All about the city proper, imperceptibly joining it and stretching away on nearly all sides over vastly more space than the town itself, were perhaps half as many buildings, scattered singly or in small clusters, forming an almost unbroken row down the valley to the southeastward. Here and there one of these ostentated itself in brilliant red; most of them were cream-color or the gray of sheet-iron; and everywhere between them were the irregular green of plowed patches, with now and then a grove of blue-green eucalyptus, or a patch of willows, enticing from this treeless height where, once the eye rose a bit from the floor of the valley, there was not the suggestion of a shrub. Not the least striking feature of the scene was the glassy clearness of the atmosphere, with nowhere a puff of smoke, and absolutely nothing to dim the view; if the clock in the all-too-slender tower of the congress building had been larger, it would have been easy to tell the time by it.

Brown ribbons of roads, all starting at a pillar on the plateau above, strung like drippings of syrup down all sides of the cuenca, except on the rugged, uninhabited flank opposite; and along all of them on this Saturday afternoon crawled at what seemed a snail’s pace files of Indians with their laden donkeys and llamas, the cargoes generally covered with straw, the drivers chiefly in red ponchos, though so like tiny crawling ants were they from this height that the colors were barely noted. Seldom broken, these strings of pack-trains stretched from the edge of the plateau to where the head of each procession to the morrow’s market was swallowed up in the compact, silent city.

I walked on around the yawning chasm, the wind that howled across the puna reaching the very marrow of my bones, a raging hail-storm beating upon me for a brief moment and making the city below seem doubly snug and serene by contrast. The little “Great River” of La Paz one did not see at all, so tiny is it and worn so far down into the clay soil of the valley in a half-seen gorge descending through tumbled ranges of gnarled hills toward the yungas, as the Bolivian calls the tropical montaña, below. Mere words give but a faint notion of this lower end of the cuenca of La Paz. For so broken and pitched and tumbled, so fantastically gashed by the rains is it, that it would be an indescribably beautiful thing, even if there were not added the wonderful colors and half-tones, a rich dark-red predominating, over the countless split and torn and every-shape hollows and needles and pinnacles of earth across which the cloud-shadows play incessantly. The mournful notes of a quena, or rude Indian flute, floated sadly by on the wind. Then sunset crept relentlessly across the valley to the town that seemed to crouch motionless with fear of the darkness descending upon it, paused a moment to do its work well, swallowing up all before it in the purple twilight of tropical altitudes, then climbed slowly again out of the hollow on the further side and spread at last across all the world. The city’s bright colors had faded to an indistinct sameness, the brown hills and deeply eroded clay cliffs were blotched red by the departing sun, though the snow peaks above were still ablaze with light; the purple bases of the range receded into black, then into nothing, leaving Illimani standing forth white and cold, stone-dead as a once ardent hope, utterly alone in the luminous sky of the Andean night.

I descended afoot behind the last pack-train, a stony, thigh-aching half-hour from the pillar to the central plaza. The first information to reach me was that La Paz outdid in cost of living even Lima, which is criminal. The boliviano having but four fifths the value of the sol, I had fancied prices would be correspondingly lower; but here two units were often required where one had sufficed before, and the great majority scorned to do business in smaller coins. The hotels which my sadly mutilated letter of credit permitted me to enter were not only unsavory and atrociously managed, but had the barbarous custom of several beds in a room. Each in turn attempted to thrust me into a rumpled nest, with four or five others of unknown nationality or antecedents close beside it, within a battered door to which there was neither lock nor bolt. Whatever else I may be, I am distinctly not a gregarious being in that sense; whereupon they offered me a room with only one companion, as if there were any particular virtue in numbers! I brought up at last in the “Tambo Quirquincha,” facing the Plaza Alonzo de Mendoza, an inn favored almost entirely by natives arriving on horseback.

The constitution of Bolivia asserts that Sucre is the real capital, but permits congress to choose its place of meeting, and “because of the constant danger from our two chief enemies” (Peru and Chile) “at the northern end of the Republic, the Government really resides in La Paz.” How much the choice is governed by the fact that there is no railroad, but only a mule trail, to the “real capital,” is a matter of conjecture. At any rate, the president has not been in Sucre in more than a dozen years, congress has its seat in La Paz, and the head of the army resides there—conditions which will no doubt continue, at least until the railroad reaches Sucre. On the other hand the former “Chuquisaca” is honored with the presence of the supreme court and the archbishop of Bolivia, who do not have to move often enough to make mule trails burdensome. But Sucre will not be comforted. Her chief newspaper is named “La Capital,” each of its editorials ends with the argument “La Capital!” and it always refers to La Paz as “the present seat of Government.”

This “seat of Government,” perhaps the most Indian capital of all South America, has the most purely Spanish name. It should still be called Chuquiyapu, as the aboriginals refer to it to-day, rather than by the trite Castilian designation that is duplicated a score of times throughout Spanish-America. The census of 1909 discovered 76,559 persons in the entire hole in the ground. Of these, 20,007 were rated “white,” but as usual in Latin-America the enumerators got the color sadly mixed with the social position of the enumerated. Indeed, the chief of the census goes on to explain “white” as “descendants, more or less pure, of Spaniards, Europeans, or North Americans”—in other words, anyone with a distinct trace of European blood. There may be a third that many of strictly Caucasian race. Of the 3458 foreign residents, 86 were Americans; of 696 non-Catholics, 562 were foreign men, 40, foreign women, 193, Bolivian men (“chiefly atheists”), and one Bolivian woman. Bold woman, indeed, to admit it! The census rated 30% of the population as Indians; but here again the social status must have played its part, or else there are many non-resident country Indians often in the city. African blood is extremely rare, though slavery was not abolished until 1851. It is no climate for negroes. “The unmarried American women are nearly all teachers,” the report continues, then takes a rap at the country’s chief enemy for stealing her seaport and bottling her up within South America by remarking, “Las chilenas living in La Paz are almost without exception prostitutes.” Most striking of all the data, perhaps, is the fact that of the 60,445 inhabitants over nineteen years of age, only 13,047 are married. But this does not mean that race suicide is imminent; rather that the priests have made the cost of marriage all but prohibitive to the lower classes, and that many others are thereby influenced to consider the ceremony of minor importance. In the entire republic 16% are “alfabéticos,” that is, “know their letters,” a much more handy expression in Latin-American statistics than “read and write.” Only Honduras, in all America, is so low in this respect.

Roughly speaking, the population is divided into three classes, as everywhere in the Andes, each shading into the other until the lines of demarkation are at best hazy. Of the whites, the census report itself asserts, “Sequestered, they knew more of theological subtleties than of religion, were more devout than moral, and had more preoccupations than ideas. There is even to-day no stimulus for their best faculties, and they have lost almost completely that virile character bequeathed them by their Spanish ancestors. They will work only at commerce or government employments that demand no corporeal fatigue.” Effeminate is the description that most quickly occurs to the foreigner; but they are no more so than all men of the “gente decente” class throughout South America. Even the whites take on something of that sulky dis-confidence, that unobliging insolence of the Aymará character, and one quickly catches the feeling that the foreigner is disliked in Bolivia, at least far more so than in Peru. Another native, with the point of view of wide travel, assures us, “The whites are really Indians and cholos in their mode of thought. Thanks to the Aymará blood in his veins, or to the effect of that environment on his character, the paceño lacks docility, is uncommunicative, and is bored at all times at everything; hence his desire for excitement, for noise, and the resultant life in the canteens. In the three cold cities of Bolivia more liquor is consumed than in all the rest of the country; alcoholism is the national vice par excellence, and the surest way to win a fortune is to run a bar.”

But in any strict census the cholo is the most numerous class of La Paz. A native writer succinctly explains the rise of this mixed race: “As in the beginning the Spaniards had not within reach many women of their own race, they satisfied the physical and moral necessities of the sex with women of the vanquished tribes.... A few of these succeeded in inspiring real passion in the breasts of the hardy Conquistadores, sometimes even to the extent of causing the latter to marry themselves legally and Catholicly with our Indian women.” All hail to the inspiring Indian women! One must not, however, overlook the fact that “real passion” among the old Spanish Conquistadores was not so closely allied to soap and tooth-powder as in our own days. Short and sturdy—especially the women, who do not wear themselves out with dissipation—with quick little eyes, the cholos have much of the independence of the Aymará character; they are quite the opposite of servile, and somewhat despise both the whites and the aboriginals.

No country of South America has so large a percentage of pure Indian population as Bolivia. The Aymará is by nature silent and aloof, more sullen and cruel than the Quichua, and by no means so obsequious as the aboriginals of Cuzco. He never touches his hat to a passing gringo; unlike the Indian of Quito he crosses the main plaza in any dress he chooses, even carrying bundles and sitting on the benches; in the region roundabout, the race has inner organizations under their own chiefs which are virtually independent of the Government; yet in town he does as he is ordered, though sullenly, and shopkeepers drag him in to perform any low task at whatever reward they choose to give him. As pongo, or house-servant, he is farmed out as a child and becomes virtually a slave,—though that condition worries him little. A frequent “want-ad.” in the papers of La Paz runs: “Se alquila pongo con taquia,” that is, there is for rent an Indian servant with necessity of gathering for his master llama droppings as fuel. Festivals and fire-water are his chief amusements. Sunday he reserves as a day to get drunk, and couples are reputed to take turns at this recreation, so that one may be in condition to lead the other home when it is over. His music is melancholy beyond words. As a Bolivian puts it, “He lives without inquietude and without remorse, being dangerous only when he is full of liquor or religion. He is a beast of burden, uncomplaining, desires nothing, is apparently content with his fate, and looks with supreme indifference on all the rest of the world and its people.”

The contrasts of life in La Paz are striking. Here an ancient scribe sits before a typewriter agency; there a group of Indian women squat before the crude products of the country, in front of the electric-lighted emporium of a foreign merchant; electric tramways thrust aside trains of llamas even in the principal streets. Speaking of these street-cars, they crawl back and forth across town, sometimes zigzagging whole blocks for every street; and the dishevelled carriages for hire are generally drawn by four horses. For La Paz is broken and steep, often held up in layers by retaining walls, while the sidewalks are often toboggan-steep and always slippery. Houses which from the “Alto” seem on the level are found to be a hundred feet or more one above the other. It is one of the easiest cities to get lost in without being really lost; for one always comes out finally on some corner where a familiar landmark or half the city stands forth to orientate one at once. Many a street is crowded with Indians from the country, and especially with chola vendors who, there being no regular market-place, spread their wares where they will, squatting in unbroken rows on the sidewalks and driving the uncomplaining pedestrian into the slippery cobbled streets. One does not hurry in La Paz; the air is too scanty. A bogotano complained that he could not sleep there on account of the altitude! The temperature ranges from 6 degrees Centigrade in June to 18 in this mid-summer month of December. Yet even then it was somewhat wretched after sunset, and no one would choose to sit in pajamas in the central plaza at night. From eleven to three it grew almost uncomfortably warm for climbing about so up-and-down a place, and the brilliant unclouded sky was hard both on eyes and nerves at noonday.

It is difficult for the stranger to get accustomed to seeing droves of llamas, with drivers dressed in the style of Inca days, soft-footing across the main plaza or patiently awaiting their masters, with the modern congress building as a background. Congress, by the way, was in session during my days in La Paz. The visitors’ gallery is high up above the perfectly circular chamber, giving the half-hundred representatives the appearance of being down at the bottom of a deep well. They smoked frequently, spoke sitting, were largely white, though the cholo class was by no means unrepresented, and among them were two priests in full vestments, their tonsures shining up at us like rays from the Middle Ages. There were also several who strangely resembled Tammany politicians of the popular cartoons, and nowhere was there any outward sign of genius, legislative or otherwise. While the man who had the “floor” kept his seat and droned endlessly through something or other, the presiding officer sat motionless and openly bored, and members slept, smoked, read newspapers, wrote letters, and otherwise busied themselves with the vital problems of the nation, after the fashion of legislative bodies the world over.

There is a distinct gradation in the costumes of La Paz, especially among the women. The men of the “gente decente” class, the whites and the consider-themselves-whites, ape Paris to the best of their ability, as in all Andean capitals. The higher-class cholo, ranging from shoe-makers to clerks—in both the American and English sense—wears more or less countrified and ill-fitting “European” garb, even to gloves and a cane on Sunday, if he can get them; for social standing depends chiefly on dress. The less ambitious half-caste wears the same leather sandal as the Indian, a coat showing a bit above or below his more or less crude-colored poncho, a coarse shirt without collar, and a heavy felt hat. A peculiarity of the paceño costume, as universal among the Indians and poorer cholos as the cord around the knee of British workmen, is a slit in the back of the trouser-leg, showing a white, pajama-like undergarment above the bare brown ankle. The Indians, conservative as all their race, are slow to adopt the slightest change, and still dress much as in the time of the Incas. The men wear peaked knitted-wool “skating-caps” of gay colors, with earlaps, like clowns in a circus, often with a felt hat of varying tones of gray on top of it. Their ponchos of alpaca-wool are of solid colors,—orange, scarlet, purple, magenta—with some tone of red always the ruling favorite. Much of this cloth has for years come from Germany, though there is still considerable native weaving. Some go barefoot; more often they wear the heavy, well-made leather sandals that are displayed in large quantities in the market-stalls.

But the men of La Paz lend it little color compared to the women. These may be roughly divided, following the local phraseology, into “señoritas,” “cholas,” and “indias”; though these in turn subdivide, until there are six rather distinct costume classes, all shading somewhat into one another. First: The foreign women and a small number of native white ones copy the styles of Paris with more or less success. Second: The moderately well-to-do woman—and all those of the “gente decente” class during the morning hours of mass; it being against the rules to wear a hat in church—wrap themselves from head to foot in the jet black manto that gives them the appearance of stalking crows. These commonly powder their faces with what seems to be cheap flour, and are rarely startling in their beauty, though many are physically attractive between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three.

Third (to be marked Baedeker-fashion with two stars) comes the most picturesque figure in Bolivia, if not in South America,—la chola de La Paz. Her mate may blossom out in all the atrocities or “European” attire, but la chola clings tenaciously and wisely to the costume of her ancestors. Moreover, in this case the picturesque is not attended by its usual handmaid, uncleanliness. La Paz is not immaculate by modern standards, but at least la chola does her share toward making it seem so. She wears the usual multiplicity of skirts, but of a finer material and better fit than elsewhere, so that while she is still somewhat bulky about the hips, she is not disagreeably so. Her outer skirt is always of a solid color, distinctly gay, but never of the crudeness this garment attains among the Indian women. Of well-woven cloth, it stops just halfway from foot to knee, never high enough to suggest immodesty and never low enough to drag on the ground, as is the distressing custom among many of the middle-class women up and down the Andes. Above this she wears two shawls—at least that is the nearest English equivalent in a male vocabulary—of some excellent material closely resembling silk, with perpendicular stripes of varying width and color, the whole gay in the extreme, yet never clashing with the rest of the costume so far as the mere male eye can detect. These being large, they are folded in the middle and thrown about the shoulders, a glimpse of the inner one adding to the gaiety of the ensemble, the fringe of both sweeping her ankles. Her hair, jet black, and coarse as a horse’s mane, she parts in the middle and combs flat on either side, the ends of the braids, without the suggestion of a decoration of ribbon or flower, hanging sometimes inside, sometimes outside the shawls. From her ears swing heavy earrings of fantastic design some two inches long. Most striking of all is her unique hat. This is of straw, of “Panama” texture, with the general form of our derby or the Englishman’s “bowler,” lacquered or glazed over with something that causes it to reflect the brilliant sunlight of these heights like a mirror, and seeming at first sight as absurd and out of place as our own “’ard ’at” might to a visitor from Mars.

But one soon gets used to it, and even to like it, especially as la chola wears it at just the suggestion of a rakish angle, ever so slightly inclined over the right eye, though the near-certainty that she is wholly unconscious of that fact only adds to the attractiveness. When she grows excited, as in arguing the price of a nickel’s-worth of beans in the market-place, she has a way of giving the front rim a flip of the finger that knocks the hat back from her brow, under which circumstances she so vividly recalls a Western “drummer” in a heated but friendly argument in a bar-room, that one sighs with regret that she has not a half-burned cigar protruding at an aggressive angle from the corner of her mouth to complete the picture.

There remains but to speak of her footwear. This consists of a high shoe, native-made, on a very Parisian last, with high, slender “French heels,” of every color a shoe could be by any stretch of propriety, but with cream or canary-color the favorite, a bow of the same material—it seems to be kid—down near the toe and a bundle of tassels at the top. Occasionally the shoes are high enough to join company with the halfway-to-the-knee skirt, below which peers the white lace of an inner petticoat, but even then when she stoops over in arguing a purchase, one notes a “clocked” stocking, that adds still more to the debauch of colors, going on up—at least to where it is fitting for a stranger to cease investigation.

Astonishment grows that la chola can afford such garments. The shoes alone cost as high as $10, and every stitch in sight is of a grade and workmanship that come high in Bolivia, that would not, indeed, be cheap in a far more productive country. Yet the chief wonder is the specklessness of her entire garb—doubly wonderful to one of long Andean experience. The glazed hat shines like the polished dome of a mosque, the skirts and shawls always look as if they had just that moment come out of a Parisian shop, and the cream-colored shoes have not a fly-speck upon them; yet la chola wears this costume at any hour and under all circumstances—in the street, at least—and carries on her often soiling business in all parts of town. Some assert that she starves herself to dress; but her appearance does not uphold the contention. However she affords it, it is to be hoped that the means will continue, and that she will not some day abandon in favor of the atrocities of foreign fashions the most picturesque costume in South America, and the chief decoration of every outdoor scene and public gathering in La Paz.

The chola is not exactly chic; the thick-setness bequeathed her by Indian forebears makes that word fail. But she is as nearly so as the Andean Indian type can become; and as she trips along at a “snappy,” energetic stride up and down the break-neck cobbled streets of La Paz, in her slender-waisted “French heels,” and not only does not break her neck but does not even jar from its angle her “stiff ’at,” the eye is as certain to note her passing as it would that of a meteor in the sky above. She is always full-cheeked and plump, often good to look at in spite of her rather bulky Indian features, and aggressively independent, going anywhere at any time she chooses in complete indifference to the oriental seclusion that still clings about the upper class women. She treats the rest of the world with a manner midway between sauciness and impudence, scorning anything on the plane of reading and writing with the disdain of her Indian forebears. She holds most of the places in the market and the pulperías, or little liquor and food shops, and ranges all the way from small shopkeeper to unservile serving-maid to well-to-do women. One gets the impression from a brief acquaintance that she is as superior to her mate, the shifty-eyed cholo, as are the women of Tehuantepec to their men. She speaks Aymará by choice, but will use Spanish when necessary; and she is always at least comparatively young. One sees cholas up to thirty or thirty-five, but as they do not look as if they died off at that age, the natural conclusion is that they fall into a more somber and less agreeable costume. La chola is seldom married “legally and Catholicly,” but if she has a baby, a mishap that not infrequently befalls her, she wears it as all Andean women wear their babies,—on her back. Instead of being carelessly slung in a blanket tied across mother’s chest, however, this fortunate mite sits in a whole nest of clean, gay garments, the spotless white lining hanging down a foot or more on all sides of it, ending in a lace fringe. Indeed, this better care of baby is notable in La Paz, and has its influence even among the Indian women.

But I set out to give a half-dozen female classes. The fourth is the same chola, just a shade lower in the scale. She also wears a little round hat, but of brown or black felt. Her skirts and shawls are less gay and of coarser texture, her stockings are dark, and her footwear a shining-black, low slipper without heel. The fifth is usually a common servant, almost touching on the Indian woman, her garments sometimes descending to the plebeian, crude-colored, made-in-Germany-and-in-a-hurry bayeta in which the higher grade chola would scorn to be seen, though it is almost universal to her class elsewhere in the Andes. She wears also a shiny black slipper, but no stockings, though her brown plump leg looks almost like finely woven silk. There is no suggestion of immodesty in this absence of nether covering, yet when one of this class, for some sojourning-gringo reason, suddenly appears in the bare white legs of what at first glance seems a lady of our own race, the sight brings something of a shock. Of the three types of chola, the third and fourth may blend a bit, sometimes to the extent of coiffing the latter in a glazed hat; but only the first ever falls into the foolishness of the “upper” class in flouring her face a bit, and at worst it is confined to a few sporadic cases.

At the bottom of the scale, as everywhere in the Andes, comes the Indian woman, varying a bit in garb, according to the degree of her poverty. She wears the round felt hat and endures the chill highland winds by wrapping several thick bayeta skirts of clashing colors around her waist in bunches, until she looks like—I am at a loss for a comparison that is ugly, awkward, and bulky enough;—may I say, like a very badly packed sack of assorted hardware with the looser and lighter things above the compressed middle? She likes red best, and as the day warms, every second or third of the skirts she removes one by one is of some shade of that color. Below them are bronzed legs and either bare feet with hoof-like soles, or, as La Paz and vicinity are distinctly stony, as well as cold, with a flat sandal of a single piece of leather, with thongs over the heel and between the large toe and the others. Solidly built as she is, one wonders how the Indian woman’s waist can support the weight of six or eight heavy bayeta skirts. Yet always, in addition to these, night or day, young or old, drunk or sober, filthy or only dirty, she carries a bundle on her back in the colored blanket tied across her chest, with, whenever possible—and her possibilities in this line are infinite—the head of a baby protruding somewhere from the load, now gazing earnestly at the road ahead, now dancing a crowing hornpipe on the broad back of the utterly unresponsive mother.

Now, mix all these types; put at least half the male population in gay ponchos, with every known shade of saffron, red, orange, purple, and the like; sprinkle among them youths with long hair tied in queues, wearing gay-striped ponchos that conceal all but their sturdy brown legs, who straggle up out of the tropical coca-country to the east to mingle with the city life; add a distinctive costume for each surrounding village, the noiseless llama-driver in his absurd cap, a number of Germans in Bolivian army uniforms, monks in black, brown, and white, nuns in gray, soldiers in light-gray uniforms, policemen in brown ones, hundreds of personal idiosyncracies in color and style, and it will be more easily understood why La Paz is justly entitled to that overworked word “picturesque,” and why the aboriginal name of Chuquiyapu would still be more fitting than the trite Spanish one by which Bolivia’s unofficial capital is known to the world. Moreover, children dress exactly like father or mother as soon as they can walk. La chola’s little girl is her mother’s exact miniature, glazed hat, gay shawl, fancy little high-heeled shoes and all, as likely as not with a doll in fancy garments on her back; the cholo’s son paddles behind his father in long breeches slit up the back, gay poncho and felt hat; the little Indian girl trots after her mother in the selfsame red, green, or magenta skirts of bayeta, the round felt hat on her head, and always a bundle on her back, though she be barely three years old and the burden only a bundle of yarn—as if to accustom her early to the life she must lead to the day of her funeral.

There are many fine walks in and about La Paz. On a sunny afternoon, brilliant-clear as an afternoon can be only at this height, it is a joy to follow a muddy little creek, known as the Chuquiyapu, down through the broken and tumbled gorge below the town, where the clay soil, now sandy white, now soft red, is rain-gashed into a hundred fantastic shapes. The slender, always-at-home eucalyptus and a species of weeping-willow line the way. Illimani raises its hoar head higher and higher into the sky above, seeming to calm the spirits with its majestic serenity and promise of perpetual coolness. So imperceptibly does the valley descend that one could drift clear down into the languid tropical yungas that draws one on like a lodestone, like the “spicy garlic smells” of the Far East, until suddenly realizing how far the city has been left behind, one takes oneself figuratively by the neck and turns back to the town.

Or there is the climb out of the cuenca itself, a stiff hour to the pillar above. Once on the bleak puna, I wandered along the edge of the chasm to get a view of the city below from all angles. Near the station my eye was caught by the private car of a railroad superintendent. Fancying it might be that of my host on the journey up from Arequipa, I strolled toward it. A dishevelled fellow, his ragged coat close up around his neck, his long hair protruding like straw from a scarecrow, a two weeks’ black beard bristling, sat on the back platform, peeling potatoes.

“Está aqui el Señor ——?” I asked casually.

A cloud of incomprehension seemed to pass over the scarecrow face. I repeated the question, thinking he might be one of those weak-minded natives so often found at large in South America.

“English! English is all I talks,” came the startling reply out of the depths of the unshaven one, not only the accent but the presence of a few blackened stumps in lieu of teeth betraying both the nationality and the caste of the speaker. As I had never since leaving Panama seen a white man, much less an English-speaking person, doing manual labor my mistake was natural.

Thanks to the pleasure of having a hearer who could understand him, the exile’s sad, not to say jumbled, story was soon forthcoming.

“I ’ad a good iducation, d’ ye see,” he began, “sent to collidge an’ all that; but I tykes it into my ’ead t’ go t’ sea. An’ I was first-cabin steward on the ‘Dinkskiver’—I’ve my papers an’ discharge, an’ ready t’ show ’em t’ any man—an’ we runs int’ Australy, an’ I goes t’ the —— Club there, an’ a gentleman he introdjuces me t’ the club, which is where all the best gentlemen belongs, d’ ye see. An’ ’e says, ‘Look ’ere, if you’d like t’ stop ashore we’ll get the captain t’ sign y’ off an’ we’ll put y’ up as steward t’ the club,’ d’ ye see—I bein’ a first-class cook an’ can bake an’ do any kind o’ cookin’—an’ I got me papers an’ discharges right ’ere with me t’ prove it. An’ it was a right-o job, one o’ the best jobs I ever ’ad, s’ elp me. So I was steward t’ the —— Club, d’ ye see—an’ I’ll show the papers provin’ it t’ any man interested—but fin’ly one day I blew that job, d’ ye see; an’ I was three years out in Australy. But finally one day I says t’ myself, ‘I might as well see America, too.’ An’ I ’ad my passage pyde clean ’ome t’ Liverpool, d’ ye see, on the Roossian steamer ——, an’ we come across t’ _Ay_quique first, she bein’ bound round the ’Orn ’ome t’ Liverpool. But three of us gets ashore in _Ay_quique, d’ ye see, an’ we was messin’ about there an’—an’—lookin’ about, d’ y’ understand, an’ fin’ly we was left ashore there in _Ay_quique, d’ ye see, not ’avin’ got on board again before the packet sailed. An’ the British Consul ’e says, ‘Well, I’ll do anything I can fer ye, boys.’ An’ I ’ad money too, d’ ye see, an’ my passage was pyde clean ’ome t’ Liverpool on the Roossian, only she slipped ’er ’ook while we was ashore an’ there we was stranded in _Ay_quique.

“So then I gets up t’ this ’ere Arequeepy” (It turned out later that he meant Arica) “an’ I ’ad money on me, d’ y’ understand, but I was lookin’ about an’ seein’ if I couldn’t get work, d’ ye see, an’ messin’ about ’ere an’ there, an’ fin’ly I ’adn’t no money left an’ was on the beach there in Arequeepy. An’ so I tykes on with the boss ’ere as cook—I bein’ a first-class cook an’ steward—an’ the boss ’e likes me all right, too, d’ ye see. Only d’ ye know what ’e’s pying me? Sixty bally paysoze a month! That is, I sye ’e’s pying me that, but not a blightin’ tanner ’as ’e give me yet, an’ s’ elp me, I ayn’t so much as ’ad a shave since I took up with ’im. So finally I says, ‘Well, ’ere, sir, I wants me money.’ An’ the boss says, All right, ’e’d pye me all right, only ’e ’adn’t nothin’ with ’im t’ pye me then, the banks bein’ all closed on a Sunday; an’ ’e says, ‘Well, I’ll tell ye what I’ll do. If you’ll go up t’ Bolivy on this ’ere trip I’ve got t’ make, I’ll pye ye soon as ever we get down again,’ d’ ye see. So I says, ‘That’ll do me,’ an’ we come up ’ere. An’ I ayn’t ’ad my clothes off on th’ ole bolly trip, an’ cookin’ all the time. The boss ’e likes me all right, d’ ye see, but I don’t know ’ow about this ’ere Peruvan in the ki’chen with me, seein’ as ’ow I can’t understand ’is bloomin’ lingo. An’ I only jus’ left a good cookin’ job account o’ a black feller. ’E was always pickin’ up with me, an’ fin’ly one day ’e calls me a —— —— ——, an’ I says, ‘You’re another, ye —— —— black ——,’ an’ so I quit an’ got this ’ere job with the boss—anythink at all t’ keep y’ afloat when y’re stove in, d’ ye see. An’ yesterday mornin’ we stops at a place, d’ ye see, an’ the boss says, ‘Well, now, Joe, rustle out an’ buy some pervisions’—an’ me not knowin’ a word o’ the bally lingo! An’ then las’ night when I’d served ’em coffee at ’arf past midnight, the boss says, ‘Well, ye might as well turn in an’ do a wink o’ sleep, Joe.’ So I turns in under the dinin’-room tyble; only I couldn’t sleep any all night fer the cold. Nobody ’ad took the trouble t’ tell me it was cold up ’ere, d’ ye understand, an’ bein’ in the tropicks I didn’t see ’ow it could be—an’ me been livin’ in North Australy where it’s a ’underd an’ twenty in the shyde. But I says t’ myself, d ’ye see, I’ll tyke one blanket along in cyse I ’ave a chance t’ turn in on the trip. Only one blanket don’t stop the cold at all ’ere, d’ ye see, an’ when the boss comes int’ the dinin’-room this mornin’ an’ says, Well, Joe, let’s ’ave some coffee,’ I ’adn’t slept none whatever. An’ I ’ave that funny feelin’s, my legs all ’eavy an’ achin’ an’ feelin’ that bad in the back o’ the neck I don’t know but I’m took with somethink. I’ll tell ye this ayn’t no white man’s country, tyke it from me. When I gets down again, if the boss’ll give me my money, I’m goin’ t’ make fer ’ome full speed a’ead, I’m tellin’ ye an’ not ashymed of it. It’s all right-o fer you that talks the lingo an’ as got ’ardened t’ the cold. But fer me that couldn’t sleep a wink all night fer bein’ that cold—’ere in the tropicks, too—an’ that busy cookin’ day an’ night I ayn’t ’ad my clothes off On the trip, an’ this ’ere achin’ in my legs, d’ ye see, as if I’d been took with somethink.... No, I ayn’t been down t’ the city, though o’ course I see it from up ’ere, an’ I was wonderin’ what place it would be, bein’ a moderate fine lookin’ town fer these ’ere foreign countries. But we’ll be goin’ back t’night; the boss’ll likely be ’ere any minute. An’ I comes of a good family, d’ ye see, an’ they’ll be ’appy t’ see me ’ome again, they will. They give me a good iducation an’ sent me t’ collidge an’ all that, d’ ye see; only I took it int’ me ’ead t’ go t’ sea an’ come out t’ Australy, an’ I’ll show any man me papers—”

But the bitter night air that was beginning to sweep across the plateau was not the only reason I decided to be on my way.

As the sun sets gradually down through the cuenca of La Paz, so it rises, gilding first the western precipice far up near the edge of the plateau, plainly seen from my pillow in the “Tambo Quirquincha,” then slowly crawling down into the valley until, long after its first appearance, it finally floods in upon the city itself and lights up its streets and eastern house-walls. On such a cool, sun-flooded morning, known to the calendar as December fourth, a cholo boy of eleven presented himself to carry my baggage to the station, and did so easily, though I should have groaned at the load myself. The second-class coaches, here tramcars, left first, and slowly corkscrewed up out of the valley, the motorman, once we were started, coming inside where it was a bit less frigid, closing the door behind him, and giving all his attention to two comely cholas whose little black eyes jumped about like those of guinea-pigs.

On the “Alto” a brilliant sun somewhat tempered the biting cold of the puna at this early hour. At Viacha a better train awaited us, her engine turned south,—big vestibuled cars, marked “Ferrocarril á Bolivia” and plying to Antofagasta, a smooth, well-built roadbed that spoke of Chile and more modern countries, a diner ready for those who did not choose to buy boiled goat and frozen potatoes of the skirt-heaped Indian women squatting at the stations. Once off across the sandy, bunch-grass wilderness, flat as a sea, with herds of llamas grazing here and there, and little farms of all shapes hanging on the slopes of far-off and gradually receding hillsides, the train sped on as if it never intended to stop again. In truth there was little reason to do so, for it was as dreary a region as the imagination could picture. The few stations at which we halted briefly, single, wind-swept huts on the edge of salt marshes, bore names fitting to the landscape,—Silencio, Soledad, Eucalyptus—here a lone tree afforded the only feature to which a name could be attached. Now and then mirages across the dismal desert gave the lomitas the appearance of islands, the heat waves seeming to be water lapping their shores.

In mid-afternoon Oruro arose across the brown pampa, as Port Saïd rises from her muddy sea, and we rumbled into a flat, miserable, if from the miner’s point of view important town, gloomy, bleak, perhaps the most desolate city my eyes had ever fallen upon. The squat adobe buildings, chiefly one-story, were in many cases thatched over tile roofs, giving them the appearance of wearing a weather-worn hat over colored caps, like the Indians of La Paz. Reddish-brown, utterly barren desert hills, with mine openings, formed the background. The wind drove the sand like needles into our faces and seemed bent on cutting our eyes out. Cholas ostentated themselves in somewhat the same costume as those of the seat of government, but dulled and soiled by the all-pervading dust. Siberian, dreary, comfortless, the place seemed, yet its stores were well-stocked, and there were more gringos per capita than I had seen in many a day. Seeming to hate themselves and life in general, even the Americans had a haughty, unapproachable air, as in so many mining towns of the Andes, the unconscious result no doubt of caste treatment of Indian workmen.

I was only too glad when the train on a newly-constructed branch-line carried us off northeastward late next morning. A long string of mud monuments still marks the centuries’-old route across the trackless desert. Beehive-shaped huts of mud huddled in the sunshine here and there. We climbed in long zigzags over the crest of the Cuesta Colorada, drear hills of broken rock where only a scant brown bunch-grass finds foothold. Below the divide hearty gringo faces, more cheerful in this lower altitude, broke in now and then on the monotony of Latin-American features. Many tents marked with large letters “F. C. A. B.” lined the way, interspersed with the stone kennels of workmen and their women, and the swarming natural consequences. There is something about a railroad construction-gang more suggestive of the world’s progress than almost any other labor of man.

The new line petered out in the stony village of Changolla, some sixty-five miles from Oruro and halfway to Cochabamba, which it is in time due to reach. A stage-coach offered accommodations for the rest of the trip; but the joy of jolting all day in the thing was not commensurate with the pleasure of a new experience, even had the fare for both passengers and baggage not been prohibitive to a scantily supplied wanderer. “See Sinclair there,” suggested the gringo chief, pointing to a sandy, unshaven Scot of more than six energetic feet, who was superintending the loading of all manner of railroad material into ponderous two-wheeled carts; and the hint was sufficient.

Changolla would have been excited that night were it possible for railroad constructors of long experience in many wild regions to become so. A fellow-countryman and predecessor of the New Zealander in charge of the camp had gone on a rampage with an American youth and turned bandits, in dime-novel style. Filled with distilled bravery, they had “held up” a nearby camp under the impression that the paymaster had arrived, and disappointed in this, they had shot a harmless Chilian employee. It took some time and all my papers to calm the suspicions of Changolla before I was offered lodging with the New Zealander. The “bandits” had sworn to shoot him and his assistants on sight, and a cardboard had been fastened over the window to prevent them from carrying out the threat by lamp-light as we ate, though none of the group showed any nervousness at the prospect.

But the highwaying of the pair was amateurish at best. They had made no plans whatever for getting out of town, had even to ask the way, and had as provisions—two bottles of whiskey. Thus it was not strange that they were rounded up before morning, and my hosts showed no surprise when dawn disclosed the prisoners shackled in one of the box-cars. They had been taken, asleep, some ten miles from the scene of the crime, with a bottle in one hand and a gun in the other. The chief looked his fellow-countryman over, expressed his sentiments with a “You’re a hell of a bandit, you are,” lit a cigarette, and went on about his day’s work. Mounted on asses, with a stick through their elbows behind them, the pair set out for Cochabamba guarded by a score of soldiers. The punishment for murder in Bolivia is to be taken back to the scene of the crime and shot, though there is many a slip between the law and its execution, and judges, according to my hosts, must be properly “greased” before they will even indict a criminal, particularly when the complainant is a rich foreign company.

Meanwhile nine enormous carts, each drawn by six sleek and mighty mules, laden with all the bulky material required for railroad construction, to say nothing of my baggage, and covered in Forty-niner fashion, got under way. I set off ahead. The trail followed a broad, stony and sandy river-bed across which serpentined a yellow brook of brackish, luke-warm water which it was impossible by just two steps to cross dry-shod. The unfinished railroad flanked the barren, stony hills on the left, the embankment carved out of them being broken by unbuilt bridges and incomplete cuts and tunnels that cost me many a steep scramble. In the river-bed below passed a broken stream of Indians and cholos driving donkeys and mules, heavy-laden, as were most of the drivers themselves, their ponchos, chiefly of red with narrow perpendicular stripes, standing out against the barren brown landscape. Every little green patch on its edge was well-populated; many a hacienda or small village having become a railway construction camp where haughty young Englishmen gazed coldly and suspiciously at one of their race sinking his caste to travel on foot. The Briton who has “knocked about” the world until the corners have been blunted is an agreeable fellow; but in his youthful, fresh-from-London days he is best avoided.

The embankment gave out, and we struck a gorge where the carts were saved only by the vigilance of “Sandy,” astride his splendid macho, and the mules, as by a miracle. In the blazing, dusty, river-bed, sweat poured profusely as I plodded, clinging to the tail of a cart to be snatched across the ever-recurring stream. The towns were miserable, yet misery seems far less pitiful in perpetual summer. Worst of all, there was no water a man dared drink. The banks of the river were lined for broken spaces with large quantities of cobbles inside wire nets—an Argentine idea, according to the Scot—to keep the river from undermining and washing away the coming railroad. It seemed absurd to have to take such precautions against a tiny meandering brook, but in the rainy season this increases to a rushing torrent filling all the valley.

It was starving mid-afternoon before “Sandy” called a halt for “breakfast,” and the peons prepared a chupe,—a stew of potatoes, charqui, rice, and anything else that it occurred to them to toss into the pot. At sunset we camped like gypsies in the stony, wind-blown, waterless river-bed; the mules were turned loose among several heaps of straw carried in one of the carts, and we rolled up in blankets on the sand. The drivers were a motley gang of Bolivian, Argentine, and Chilian cholos, each with the accent peculiar to his nationality. All had long knives in their belts and were inclined to use them on slight provocation. Several carried their wives, or at least their women, with them in the carts, sometimes with a child or two in addition.

Next day as I plodded beside his long-legged mule, “Sandy” whiled away the long, hot hours with reminiscences.

“Did they tell you in Juliaca how I cleaned out their damned hotel,” he asked.

They had, but I wanted “Sandy’s” own version of the affair.

“Well, we were playing billiards, when some greaser said something about gringos, and I told him to shut up. The crowd was too drunk to know better, so I had to take a bunch of billiard-cues and clean out the thirty-two of them. It cost me just a hundred and twelve pounds—twelve for the greasers’ doctor-bills and a hundred to get my friend the subprefect to lie low until I could get over the line.

“Before the railway came I used to transport across the desert from Arica,” he went on, steering his mule around a hollow of broken rock, “and I had a little dog named Bobbie Burns. He was a wise little dog, and as the desert sand burned his feet he got still wiser, and used to run way ahead of me, a mile or so, so far he could just see me, and then dig a hole in the sand and lie in it until I was a mile ahead and almost out of sight again; and then he would race by me with a ‘how-d’-do’ yelp and dig another hole. A chileno greaser killed that little dog,” said “Sandy,” gazing dreamily across the mirage-flowing landscape, “and I never got a chance to do as much for him.”

The Capinota river we had been following, or rather criss-crossing, for two days came to an alfalfa-green village, exceedingly restful to eyes that had been gazing unbrokenly on the sun-flooded desert, and the trail struck off at right angles up a branch of a stream milky with dust. That night we camped again in the sand at the end of the haul, in celebration of which “Sandy” shaved and put on a purple neckcloth to scream at his red hair. There I took leave of him, with seventeen miles still separating me from Cochabamba. It was not the problem of transporting myself, but rather my baggage, that forced me to trot several times into blazing-hot Parotani in quest of a donkey—all in vain. At length—strange chances one takes in South America—I caught a total stranger bound for the city, and he was soon lost in the dust ahead, with all my possessions on the crupper of his mule. The sweating trail with its plaguing brook grew in time into a road on the left bank; huts, then entire villages sprang up beside me; troops of pack-animals increased to an almost steady stream, and at four I overtook my baggage in Vinto, recovered it by payment of a boliviano, and was soon screaming in a little toy train on a 75-centimeter-gage track, at the terrifying speed of an hour and forty minutes for the twelve miles, into the second city of Bolivia.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XIX. ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA

There are three such “railroads” running out of Cochabamba, though none of them venture more than a few miles. All were brought up piecemeal on muleback or on massive two-wheel carts, like the first steamers on Titicaca, for it is what the natives call a “mediterranean” town. One is a steam line with a single toy locomotive, which starts every hour from the central plaza, for the suburb Calacala, “noted” for its baths, splitting the ears with its infantile shriek and spitting hot cinders upon all the bench-holders in the vicinity. A cochabambino assured me that I could not believe it possible this “enormous” locomotive had been brought “from Germany” on muleback; but as he had never been further out of town than its three little lines could carry him, his conception of locomotives was somewhat atrophied. This one was so childlike that once, when it suddenly started up as I was crossing the street, I unconsciously put out a hand to thrust it back until I had passed.

Cochabamba, 60,000 inhabitants by its own count, the majority of whom have never left its suburbs, is conceded to be the second city of Bolivia, and considers itself the first, after the South American fashion. It is constantly quarrelling with La Paz as to which shall furnish the country its president, a truce being usually patched up by alternating the honor. The population of Bolivia is made up of just such heterogeneous groups, among which there exists a profound aversion. The rivalry is particularly tenacious between the Collas, those, chiefly of the Aymará race, inhabiting the Collao, or northern portion of the country bordering on Titicaca, and the south of the republic, containing a large proportion of Quichua blood and partaking of many of the characteristics of that timid, dreamy race. Like the Quichua in general, the cochabambino is wedded to his native soil, with an ineradicable affection for it, partly because isolation keeps its customs largely unchanged. The tongue of the Incas is still the chief one of the lower classes; the town’s name, indeed, is derived from the Quichua words kocha (lake) and pampa (plain)—which the Conquistadores as usual corrupted by pronouncing it as if they had a cold in the head. There is little question but that the surrounding valley was once a lake-bottom. Founded in 1574, the place was christened by a high-sounding Spanish name, which, as so often happened in South America, failed to stick. It has a restful, summer-resort air, with birds singing in its shaded alamedas, reminding one faintly of Granada, with its sand and cactus and half-arid soil requiring irrigation. The little river Cocha wanders by the north and east sides of the town on its way to join the Mamoré; the surrounding hills are less brown than the altiplanicie, half-clothed with trees and with patches of green running up the sides of the range. The showers were no highland drizzles, but perfect sheets of water for an hour or more—fine prospects for my continued travels at the end of wheel-going!

Yet it is a colorless place compared to La Paz. Adobe is the chief building material; there is no structure of great importance, though “La Compañía” of the early Jesuits has the usual ornate façade. Its houses are of the light yellow mud of the surrounding plain, less painted than those of the capital, and even the tile roofs are of so dull and dusty a red as scarcely to excite the eye. On a barren knoll at the back of the town is a ruined adobe bull-ring, once large and ornate, and still higher up, before the monument to the “Heroes of Cochabamba,” the gaze stretches away across a yellowish land, flat as a sea, baking in the blazing sunshine. Costumes, too, show far less color than those of La Paz. La chola wears a similar hat, but it is flatter and therefore uglier, and she has neither the immaculateness, instinct for pleasing color combinations, nor the sprightliness of her Aymará cousin. Natives of pure Caucasian blood are so rare as to be almost conspicuous. Important commerce is largely in the hands of Germans; even the English vice-consul was a Teuton. The municipal library bore a large sign announcing that it was open from 9 to 11, 1 to 4, and 7 to 9. At nine-thirty the doddering old librarian appeared, and at 10:05, when he had finished reading the morning paper and smoking his cigarette, he put on his hat and remarked, “Nos vamos, señores,” and go we did, sure enough. In the afternoon and evening he did not appear. Cochabamba has been called the paradise of priests. Fat, coarse-featured men of the cloth swarm, and the town is rated the most fanatical in Bolivia. As late as ten years ago a hogüera was lighted in the central plaza to carry out an auto de fé against a Protestant who had dared to preach his doctrines in a private house, the materials, for the inquisitorial bonfire being the holy books and furniture of the evangelist. The troops were called upon to interfere and prevented the consummation of the act, but they were not able to keep the “heretics” from being cruelly stoned by the populace. The approach of the railway, however, the arrival of many gringos, and a now firmly established mission-school with a government subsidy is wearing down somewhat this medieval point of view.

In a corner of the main plaza of Cochabamba, where the sunshine streaks upon it through the trees, was the “gringo bench,” a rendezvous at which there was always to be found at least an American and an odd Englishman or two, generally miners and even more generally penniless. For Bolivia had proved less golden than the rumors that had oozed forth from her interior, and there is no better climate than that of Cochabamba in which to sit waiting for whatever chooses to turn up next. At the time of my arrival the bench had three principal occupants. The most permanent fixture was “Old Man Simpson,” over eighty, not merely a fellow-countryman, but originally from the same town in which I had spent my youth; indeed, he was still a subscriber to the weekly newspaper I had earned more than one school-day dollar folding and “carrying.” A “Forty-niner” who had drifted from California to Chile, he had been in South America unbrokenly—though frequently “broke”—many more years than I had been on earth, his fortunes rising and falling with miner’s luck and open-handedness, his “Spanish” still atrocious. Now he was so nearly blind that he could recognize us one from another only by our voices; and every day he sat from sunrise to dusk, except for his “breakfast” and siesta from eleven to one, in the shaded corner of the plaza, a cud of coca-leaves in one cheek, his gnarled and leathery hands folded on the head of his chonta cane. All day long he would weave endless tales of the prospector’s life, wandering disconnectedly over all the western side of the continent, as long as he could get a single gringo to sit and listen. When he could not, and was, or fancied himself, alone, he sat hour after hour motionless, murmuring each time the clock in the tower above struck, “Well, it’s —— o’clock,” and relapsing again into silence.

After Simpson came Sampson, an extraordinary cockney, resourceful, quick-witted, full of quaint sayings, of a strikingly personal philosophy of life, so much of a “hustler” that his initiative often boiled over into audacity. He spoke fluently a colloquial Spanish and considerable Quichua, chewed coca incessantly, and came close to being the ugliest man I had ever set eyes upon. This last mentioned quality was enhanced by the slap-stick clown garb he wore,—faded overalls with a bib, some remnants of shoes here and there about his ham-like feet, a woolen neckcloth à la Whitechapel, and an Indian felt hat on the back of his bullet head. His view of life he summed up—among friends—briefly with, “I am strictly honest; I never tyke anything I can’t reach.” As to his resourcefulness: in this identical garb he had gained the entrée to the haughtiest class of natives, with whom outward appearances constitute some 99 percent., and had talked his hypnotic way into the confidence of a lawyer and ex-senator of Cochabamba to such an extent that the latter contemplated giving him charge of a large tract of land to plant with cotton.

The third bencher, Tommy Cox, had been “down inside” with Sampson on some prospecting scheme that had failed. Originally from Toronto, he was in appearance and speech a “typical Englishman,” a little sandy-haired fellow of twenty-five, the antithesis of his companion in initiative, of so dim a personality compared to Sampson that one barely noted his existence when the two were together.

When I arrived in Cochabamba nothing was more certain than that I should continue my tramp down the Andes, through Sucre and Potosí, into the Argentine. But plans do not keep well in so warm a climate. I sat one day musing on the trip ahead of me, when Sampson cut in:

“’Ere! If you’re looking for something new, why don’t you shoot across country by Santa Cruz to the Paraguay river and down to Asunción and B. A.? Least I don’t think it’s never been done by a white man alone and afoot.”

The idea sprouted. I suddenly discovered that I was weary of high altitudes and treeless punas, of the drear sameness of the Andes and the constant repetition of the serranos that inhabit them. To that moment I had, like most of the world, conceived of Bolivia as a lofty plateau, arid and cold; whereas more than half of it is a vast, tropical lowland, spreading away from the slopes of the Andes to the borders of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, making it the third largest country of South America. There was, it seemed, a fourth way of entering or leaving this mediterranean land, and it was neither by way of Mollendo, Arica, nor Antofagasta; but a route all but unknown to the world at large, yet followed by many of its imports and exports. The montaña or yungas promised a new type of people, a new style of life; a knowledge of South America would be only half complete without including in my itinerary the immense hot-lands and river-webbed wilderness stretching eastward from the Andes. I wished some day to visit Paraguay, anyway; the distance to Puerto Suarez was evidently greater than to railhead in the Argentine—by striking an average of varying information, with the assistance of such maps as the local librarian gave me time to glance over, I came to the conclusion that it was roughly 800 miles—but on the other hand much of this new route was floor-flat, and I had had my fill of climbing over such labyrinths of mountain ranges as lay to the south. True, in this season the region to the east would be wet and muddy, but with no bitter cold nights in prospect I could throw away much of my load, and at least there would be brilliant sunshine most of the time, which is half of life. Besides, is not the chief joy of travel the privilege of suddenly and unexpectedly smashing fixed plans, to replace them with something hitherto undreamed?

To all these arguments there was added another still more potent. When I began to make inquiries, I learned that the proposed trip was “impossible.” Several of my informants quoted recently received letters to prove it. The last hundred leagues would be entirely under water; the wild Indians of the Monte Grande would see to it that I should not get so far, to say nothing of miles of chest-deep mud-holes, “tigers,” and swarms of even more savage insects, and many days without food or human habitation. That settled it. In Bogotá the tramp down the Andes had been “impossible,” but had long since lost completely that charming quality. I decided to strike eastward in quest of the Paraguay.

“I wouldn’t mind tackling it myself,” sighed Tommy, when I mentioned my decision to the benchers. “I’m badly needed in B. A. But I’m stony broke. Of course if I could find anyone who would take along a steamer-trunk-size man as excess baggage—”

“If the senator doesn’t make up his wandering Bolivian mind soon, I’ll quit embellishing this plaza myself,” put in the cockney, though there was a glint in his eye that suggested, long afterward, that he had meant the hint as a hoax, and considered the trip as impossible as did the rest of Cochabamba.

Were I to have a companion, I should not have chosen Sampson. He was a man with far too much mind of his own to be good company in an uncivilized wilderness. Tommy, diffident, unresourceful, totally lacking in initiative, without self-confidence, wholly innocent of Spanish, to all appearance tractable and harmless, was much to be preferred. Moreover, he was better looking. Though I was thinly furnished with bolivianos and the nearest possible source of supply was Buenos Aires, I concluded that the code of world-wanderers forbade me to leave Tommy to waste away on the “gringo bench,” and we joined forces. He was to carry his proportionate share of such baggage as I could not throw away, including the tin kitchenette and the bottle of 40 percent. alcohol that went with it—if experience proved I could trust him with that—leaving me, thanks also to the offer of a fellow-countryman to carry the developing-tanks to Santa Cruz on his cargo-mule, only a moderate load. I should have bought a donkey, or another chusco, rather than turn ourselves into pack-animals, but for two reasons: first, such a purchase would have relieved me of most of the billetes I had left; secondly, the fate of “Cleopatra” and “Chusquito” caused me to doubt whether any four-footed animal could endure the journey.

It was two months from the day I had walked into Cuzco that one of Cochabamba’s toy trains carried us past adobe towns and mud fences, with dome-shaped huts that gave the scene an oriental touch, and set us down in Punata in time for dinner in the picantería where Tommy had once before washed down a similar plate of stringy roast pork with a glass of chicha. Then we swung on our packs and struck eastward into the unknown.

Beyond Arani next morning came the real parting of the ways. The trail that swung to the right along the base of the hills went on to Sucre and the silver mountain; that by which we zigzagged up the face of a stony range led across the continent. Here the mountains closed in, and the vast, fertile, yet dreary and desolate plain of Cochabamba, that had seemed to stretch out interminably in the brilliant sunshine, disappeared at length below a swell of land and was lost forever behind us.

For a week the going was not unlike that down the Andes, though it grew gradually lower as the endless ridges of the eastern slope calmed down slowly, like the waves of some tempestuous sea. It was only on the road that I began really to make the acquaintance of Tommy. In spite of his Canadian birth he dressed like a Liverpool dock-laborer, with a heavy cap, a kerchief about his neck, and a heavy winter vest—that is, “w’stc’t”—which he could not be induced to shed, however hot the climate, though he readily enough removed his coat. He spoke with a strong “English accent,” and a man following behind with a basket could have picked up enough H’s to have started a supply-store of those scarce articles in Whitechapel itself. He had given Cochabamba ample opportunity to show its gratitude at his departure, but the fourteen bolivianos of his last eleemosynary gleanings turned out to be barely sufficient to keep him in cigarettes on the journey. His share of the load he carried in the half of a hectic tablecloth, of mysterious origin, tied across his chest, as an Indian woman carries her latest offspring. His own possessions consisted wholly and exclusively of a large, sharp-pointed, proudly-scoured trowel; for Tommy was by profession a bricklayer and mason. This general convenience, weapon, sign of caste, and hope of better days to come, he wore through the band of his trousers, as the Bolivian peon carries his long knife, and the services it performed were unlimited. I was never nearer throwing my kodak into a mud-hole than when it failed to catch Tommy solemnly eating soft-boiled eggs with the point of his faithful trowel.

The hospitality of the Bolivian soon proved low, even in comparison with the rest of the Andes, and every meal and lodging cost us a struggle. At Pocona, for example, I ended a 36-mile walk down the nose of a range on which a coach road descended by never-ending S’s to a narrow valley bottom below. Tommy had fallen behind, and I had begun to wonder whether he could endure the pace our scantiness of funds made necessary. As I debouched into the grass-grown plaza, I paused to ask a dim-minded person drowsing before one of the doors where one could find a night’s lodging. He silently projected his lips toward a building before which stood the empty stage-coach. There a group of supercilious, unwashed cholos of varying stages of insobriety informed me, with an air that plainly said “We are purposely deceiving you,” first, that there was no tambo in town, then that there was accommodation only for travelers “á bestia.”

“For horsemen only, eh?” I cried, in the voice natural to an all-day fast. “Where does the corregidor live?” What are gobernadores in Peru become corregidores in Bolivia.

“Down the street,” mouthed a half-drunken fellow, with a lazy toss of the head in no particular direction.

I snatched a youth out of the group and pushed him before me. Some way down the foot-torturing cobbles he halted at the open door of the usual slatternly, earth-floored room, saying:

“The corregidor lives here.”

“Go in and fetch him,” I answered, blocking his attempted retreat. He called out two or three times in the singsong with which neighbors greet neighbors in the Andes, then obeyed my order to enter and summon the “authority”—at least he disappeared inside the building. Some time later two chola girls appeared at the door to ask in pretended surprise what I desired.

“Where is the corregidor?”

“He is in the country. He doesn’t live here,” they replied respectively in one breath, betraying themselves by their carelessness in not rehearsing the reply before appearing.

“Where is the boy who brought me here?”

“Escapado—he escaped—through the back door.”

I had long ago learned this trick of local “authorities” in Andean villages of hiding away at the approach of a stranger bearing orders from the government, and the complicity of all the population in the concealment. But I had learned, also, one means of bringing him to light. I marched into the house and, throwing my pack on an adobe divan covered with blankets, announced that I should sleep there. The cholas would call the corregidor at once, they had called him, they couldn’t call him, he was coming in a minute, he did not live in town, and a dozen other falsehoods poured in a chaotic flood from their lips. For an hour I held to the divan. But as evening settled down, it became evident that the ruse of Peru would not work in Bolivia; that though I might sleep there by force, I should remain thirsty and hungry. I shouldered my bundle and hobbled back to the plaza. There ten centavos spent for chicha convinced the sceptical inhabitants that I was not penniless, and in time it paved the way to a request for food.

“Cómo no?” came the mechanical answer, and a long time after dark a big bowl of broth, luke-warm of temperature but sizzling hot with ají, was followed by some hashed black chuño, or frozen potatoes, mixed with an egg, and some bran-like bread.

“How much do I owe?” I asked when I finished.

“Pues—ah—será setenta centavos.”

“Está bién. And who is going to sleep on those beds?” I continued, pointing to the long adobe divans, each with a roll of thin mattress and blankets, at either end of the room.

“Nadie.”

“No one? How much do you charge for a bed?”

“Un boliviano, no más,” replied the chola in that droning, soothing voice in which the Andean always names an exorbitant price which he knows the traveler cannot refuse to pay. “Voy á tender, no?” “Yes, spread it out.”

I was stripping to crawl into the “star” bed of the tambo—in which only horsemen are accommodated—when there sounded at the door I had fastened ajar with a bench, the worn and humble voice of Tommy. Having fallen behind because of a half-sprained ankle, he had stumbled on into town down that stony, looping descent which I had found bad enough even by day. Fortunately there was a bit of cold broth and some chuño left, after devouring which he turned in on the other divan.

Next day we passed a wind-blown, rain-gashed plain, with a few huts on which to practice my neglected Quichua and, early in the afternoon, reached Totora, so named from a long rush which grows in swampy ground. It is the largest town between Cochabamba and Santa Cruz and capital of a province, with several thousand inhabitants. Set in a hollow of the treeless hills, it was dreary and colorless as a mining town, with breakneck cobbled streets, and a little tile-paved plaza surrounded by what Tommy called “drapers’ shops,” all with the selfsame display of bayeta and other crude-colored cloths. The vista of many a street was enlivened by swinging red signs, like Japanese or Chinese banners, above the doors where chicha was for sale. Far better, and almost given away in Colombia, this native drink had come to cost twice what a larger glass of beer would in the United States. In the upper corner of the plaza we spread ourselves at ease on a shaded bench. Around the pila in the center of the square a constant crowd carrying earthen jars fought for the two trickles of water. Behind us stood what dared to call itself the “Hotel Union,” consisting of a billiard-table and an absent proprietor, who, according to the disinterested cholas, might be back during the evening to discuss with us our offer to spend the night with him. The neighboring tambo was closed “because of a wedding in the family,” so rare a ceremony in Bolivia that we had not the heart to complain. Tommy tired of sitting, and went to lie down in frank “hobo” fashion in the plaza band-stand. As dusk came on we made a round of the shops, warned that there would be none for some days ahead. We bought eggs, and blocks of crude sugar, now called empanada, coca to chew when thirsty, several loaves of the bran-like bread that weighed us down like grindstones, and some shelled peanuts which we found next day to be unroasted. Any chip of stone or scrap of iron served as weights in the shops, though some had brass cups full of shot, over which a paper was pasted by the rare government inspector, soon to “break itself” until he came again. That purchaser who got twelve ounces to his pound was as lucky as the one whose vara came anywhere near being a yard long. A half-pound weight was commonly the heaviest on hand, and the old woman who sold us sugar poured that amount in with the weight in the other side of the scales, and so on until she had made up the unprecedented quantity we demanded.

A telegraph wire strode bandy-legged over the hills with us on the twenty broken and panting miles to Duraznillo. Across a flanking valley the range was mottled with all colors from deep red to Nile-green, the depths of its gullies purple under dense cloud-shadows, while all the rest of the world lay in brilliant sunshine, and vast banks of snowy-white clouds took on fantastic shapes which the imagination could animate into all manner of strange beings, or people with innumerable plots and fairy-tales. One mighty descent brought us to a “river,” but at the very moment we reached it, it turned suddenly muddy from rains somewhere in the hills above and spoiled our plan for a “bathe,” as Tommy expressed it. In the dry, burning hills beyond, my companion went astray, but found himself again by following my hob-nailed footsteps. He had so little initiative that he would not lead the way, and his favorite plan of plodding at my very heels having been vetoed, as he did not mix well with the landscape, he commonly trailed a half-mile behind, usually taking care not to lose sight of me.

Duraznillo had a public “rest-house” that had once been an adobe chapel, but which was now as bare as a millionaire’s room in heaven. I boiled oatmeal and eggs in the water Tommy brought from a stagnant pool not far away, but waited in vain for the return of the only European-clad resident, who had volunteered to “arrange us.” As the shades of night spread, the beaten-mud floor looked harder and harder, and in nosing about we were astonished to discover several once-imported mattresses covering a pile of adobe bricks in the back corredor of the chief house of the village, apparently uninhabited. Still, it was possible that the local “authority” would in time come out of hiding, and we lolled patiently, if road-weary, in the moonlight.

We had waited until—well, perhaps eight, though without a watch it seemed hours later, when patience ceased to be a virtue, and we slipped through a hole in the mud fence, each to embrace a mattress. It may be that a trap had been set for us. As we approached the wall again, an unusually large half-Indian, wrapped in a poncho, loomed up on the other side, and shouted in an authoritative voice:

“What are you doing inside that fence?”

Now I do not like any man to address me in that tone, least of all a South American Indian. It is neither good training for his own primitive character nor advantageous to future gringo travelers.

“Speaking to me, indio?” I demanded.

“I am corregidor of Duraznillo, also guardian of this house.”

“Corregidor! Then you are the very fellow we have been looking for these last four hours. You will kindly lend us two mattresses to sleep on.”

“I will not lend you one mattress to sleep on. What are you doing?”

Plainly he was of Aymará rather than meek Quichua blood.

“And where have you been hiding yourself, señor corregidor? We have a letter for you from the government.”

“Ugh!” he snorted, with an effort at sarcasm. “Let’s see that letter from the government.”

“It is in my pack in the chapel.”

“Bring it over here.”

“Since when have caballeros run after Indians to show them government orders? Are you going to lend us two mattresses?”

“Not one!”

“Tommy, chuck them over.”

He did so with trembling hands, for something had given the diminutive bricklayer an extraordinary respect for “authorities.” The corregidor followed at our heels, bellowing, as we carried our finds into the ex-chapel and spread them out. A stocky youth and a woman with a flickering candle appeared behind him in the doorway, and the Indian demanded my papers.

“Can you read?” I asked.

“I can,” he snarled; which he could, to the extent of spelling out the order at about a line a minute.

“Bien,” he admitted at last, in a surly voice, “but you are to ask for things, not take them.”

“From a corregidor who hides himself?”

“And the prefect orders that you be furnished what you need at a just price,” he added triumphantly, ignoring my reply.

“Exactly.”

“Then you will pay two bolivianos for each mattress.”

“Very well; but you will first make out a receipt for that amount, that I may send it back to the prefect.”

It was not the first time I had played this unfailing card against an Andean “authority” attempting extortion. He knew he was beaten; for though he could read, after a Bolivian fashion, he probably could not write, and certainly would not dare let such a document reach the prefect. Like a true Latin-American, however, he saved his face as long as possible:

“Very well, give me some paper to write it on.”

“As corregidor, you should furnish your own paper. I have none.”

“Well, you may use one mattress, but not two,” he growled.

“You lose. In my country we are not accustomed to sleep two on the same mattress.”

A shiver of rage seemed to pass over him, while his Castilian pride struggled for expression behind his mask of Indian features. Then he faded away into the night and was heard no more, though I was not so certain of him as not to prop a heavy wooden beam against the door in such a way that an attempt to sneak in upon us during the night would quite likely have been followed in the morning by the intruder’s funeral.

Never-ending spiral descents, so steep we had to set the brakes constantly, making our thighs ache, brought us at last to a hot and stony river-bed across which a luke-warm, knee-deep “river” snaked its way incessantly. We stuffed leggings and Fusslappen into our bundles and walked all the rest of the day barefoot in our unlaced boots, crossing the stream perhaps a hundred times, and envying the hoof-soled natives as often as we paused to pull on our footwear. Tommy found it too much trouble to roll down his trousers after each crossing, and complained of sunburned legs for days to come. But at least the going was level. The stillness and lack of population recalled Jaen in the far north of Peru. For hours we tramped stonily between ever lower cactus-grown hills, only the mournful note of the jungle-dove breaking the silence. The first gnats and giant-jawed insects we were doomed to endure more and more as we advanced to the eastward began to annoy us. As scrub trees thickened, bird life grew more prevalent. Bands of parrakeets screamed by, as always along these dry, tropical river-beds; now and then a parrot or two, forerunners of many to come, passed overhead. The rare huts squatting in scant patches of shade were now of mere open-work poles. To sleep in them was far less inviting than to lie on the ground under a shrub.

But the Andes did not subside so easily. Next morning the trail shook off the river and climbed wearily to a wind-swept puna, then dropped by a leg-straining bajada into another cañon with a muddy, lukewarm brook, only to pant upward again to another summit. Several times each day we sweated to a hilltop and lay down in a cool breeze we should not often enjoy in the days to come. Range back of blue range spread away into ever-bluer, purple distance. The region recalled the Malay Peninsula—with all its romance rubbed off and even more inhospitable inhabitants tucked away in the undergrowth. Yet surely, if slowly, the Andes were flattening down, and each summit was less lofty than the preceding.

One afternoon passing arrieros told us that three of our paisanos were not far ahead. We increased our pace and strode at five, with thirty miles in our legs, into the miserable mud town of Chilón. In the corral and corredor back through one of the dismal dwellings we found, camped with their four mules, the American prospectors, Scribner, Kimball, and Owen, who had burdened themselves with my developing-tank. We foraged together. These interior villages are less useful to the seeker after supplies than a lone country hut, for in them each native “passes the buck” by sending the inquirer on to someone else. The traveler who has lived for days chiefly on the anticipation of what he will eat in the town he has been assured is “provided with everything,” is fortunate to collect the ingredients of even one real meal, and that only at the expense of wandering from door to door, like a Buddhist priest with his begging-bowl. Chilón was even more anemic and indifferent than usual. It is rated the most fever-stricken region of Bolivia, and the government has striven in vain to drive out the almost universal chucho by planting the eucalyptus and sending doctors to study its cause. The only water to be had was a yellow liquid mud dipped up in the back yard. Kimball prepared to cook in it some of the charqui he had bought at blockade prices, only to bring to light a swarm of maggots. A can of peaches from Chile—some time in the last century—cost two bolivianos; four ounces of tea, a boliviano, a pound of sugar as much, and at that it was a coarse, dirty, stony stuff, so hard an ax was required to break it. One slattern a bit less sullen in aspect than the town in general asked if we “knew how” to eat mote and charol. We assured her we knew how to eat anything we could get our fingers on, and she set before us a single plate of boiled shelled corn and little cubes of fried fat pork, which we ate with the spoons nature had provided us. In the entire town we gleaned two whole eggs. Most of the huts that displayed them answered with that clumsy old Andean lie, “Son ajenos—They belong to some one else.” A woman squatting behind one of the huts admitted she had eggs to sell, but said she did not feel like getting up to sell them. That was the attitude of all Chilón. It may be that the hookworm, as well as the chucho, was prevalent.

When I awoke at dawn, Kimball, in retaliation for the state of the charqui, had already picked a chicken from one of the trees in the corral and managed to stuff it into his alforjas without a squawk. By the time we were off, it began to rain. A half-sand, half-mud road splashed and skated away through semi-tropical scrub woods, caking our feet with glue-like mud, and soaking our garments from both inside and out. In spite of the rain the tropical heat weighed down upon us like water-logged blankets, and nowhere was there water to drink. Rarely among the spiny scrub trees we came upon a miserable hut of poles and sticks, in each of which lounged a dozen or so of the colorless, mongrel natives of the region. Rancho was being cooked in one such hovel, and though the householders showed no joy, or any other species of emotion, at our presence, when the meal was ready, a small wash-basin of rice, charqui, and pepper stew was set on the ground before us, and we were each silently handed a wooden spoon. There was, of course, no bread, but a gourd bowl of mote was added for our competition. This was one contest in which Tommy was easily my superior. The languid, fever-yellow chola would not accept payment for the food, though she did so readily enough for the chica we had drunk, calling up to Tommy far-off memories of the land of “free lunch,” so that several times during the blazing afternoon I heard his sheet-iron voice torturing the wilderness behind me with his own version of a one-time Broadway favorite:

“_S_take me back to New York town....”

Not two hours beyond we drifted into a saw-mill hacienda, and before I knew it Tommy had told his tale so feelingly to the Italian owner, who had the misfortune to understand a little English, that we must go in and have a plate of cold spaghetti, imported to these wilds at nerve-shaking prices. Best of all, after nothing better than liquid mud for days, was several glasses of almost clear water. The Italian was bubbling over about some new invention by one of his countrymen that would forever abolish war. Half the world might be abolished without our hearing of it in these wilds. Before we left he inquired whether we had quinine, and forced upon Tommy a box of pills, with the urgent advice to take one every morning. I had already begun to dose myself daily, but was never able to convince my companion that ills might be forestalled far more easily than they could be ousted after they had staked their claims.

It was December 21, the longest day of the year, and the sun was still high when we again overtook our “paisanos,” camped this time along a brick-floored corredor under the projecting eaves of a large tile-roofed hacienda-house, among scrub trees and scattered huts to the right of the trail. The building was imposing for the region, for the owner held title to a vast tract and many cattle. I recalled the plump hospitality of many a similar hacendado of Peru, but was quickly reminded that we were in Bolivia. Our “paisanos” had already eaten. Having come on foot, Tommy and I were too low caste to be invited into the brick-floored dining-room with the swarming family. After much reconnoitering I found a hut where a lean chicken could be bought at a high price, and the señora of the hacienda grudgingly agreed to have her servants cook it. Here, too, the only water was a thick yellow liquid flowing behind the house and common to all its animals. At sight of it we had abandoned our plan to bathe, yet we must drink it and cook in it. The apathy of life in these parts is exemplified by the fact that an hacendado of comparative wealth will drink mud all his life, rather than dig a well.

Long after dark an unwashed chola came waddling into the corredor with a single bowl of charqui stew and two wooden spoons. Tommy fell upon this gratefully, as he would have upon a bone discarded by a dog. Personally I was not pleased with the metamorphosis the fowl had undergone, and calling out the haughty hacendado, I thrust a handful of bills toward him, asking if he could not sell us something fit to eat, even if he did want the chicken for himself. The hint caused him to turn a livid green. These landowners of the interior, too “proud” to sell food to travelers, are yet too tight-fisted to give it away; and a lifetime on their own broad, if worthless, acres, with only a few cringing Indians about them, lording it over even their own women, causes them to consider themselves vastly superior to all mankind, and to treat travelers accordingly. So thoroughly had I ruffled his pomposity that the fellow, visibly shaking with anger, went to sit under a scraggly tree in the grassless sand before the house and rage in silence, then took to pacing back and forth, in and out of the building, and kept it up until well into the morning. He might have vented his rage more effectually, for law has but slight foothold in these wild regions, but for the half-dozen revolvers, rifles, and pistols lying about us in the corredor. Meanwhile a servant brought my chicken in a pot, and though it was tougher than life in Bolivia, we drank the broth and hung the remnants of the fowl to a rafter above our heads, out of reach of dogs, Indians, or ants.

It rained most of the night, and the wood we could find in the chill slate-tinted dawn was so wet that it was a good hour before we boiled tea and rice in the yellow mud—and coaxed Tommy to get up in time to eat. Barely two hundred yards beyond, we came to the muddy river, must unshoe the feet we had just carefully shod for the day, and had a provoking task dressing them again on the mud-reeking further bank. Tommy went to hunt cigarettes—which are to be had in these parts only by inquiring at each hut until one has found some old woman who has inadvertently rolled a dozen or two beyond her own consumption—and it was hours later that he overtook me. We undulated on over half-sandy country, a thorn-tree desert without sight or sound of human life, grown with thousands of immense cactus trees of the pipe-organ species from which fell myriads of tunas, an “apple” Tommy called it, the outer spines of which fall off when ripe, the juicy interior, full of tiny black seeds, with mildly the taste of strawberries, effective at least in quenching the thirst.

At a scattered cluster of huts called Mataral we found a group of drunken Indians, male and female, celebrating the customary wake in and about a hut where a baby had died. The corpse of the angelito lay pale-yellow and half naked on a bare, home-made table, a lighted candle on either side of its head, its nostrils stuffed with cotton, and already beginning to make its presence known to another of the five senses, while all about the premises rolled maudlin, fishy-eyed half-breeds, only too glad of any excuse for consuming gallons of overripe chicha. Outside, a half-sober cholo was piecing a coffin together from the odds and ends of boxes that had once held foreign imports. The priest’s assurance that infants, properly baptized, go directly to heaven makes such a death the cause almost for rejoicing among the ignorant population of Bolivia, even if it leads to nothing worse than passive infanticide.

Frequent ridges and a stream that forced us to unshoe and shoe a score of times, reddening our legs where our leggings should have been, decidedly reduced our pace. Not without surprise, therefore, did I sight at dusk, among the trees on a low bluff across a nearly waterless river-bed, a village of moderate size, thirty miles from where we had started in the morning. It was Pampa Grande. My fellow-countrymen had already commandeered a mud room on a corner of the second street, and chucked their possessions pell-mell into it. Among the luxuries the place offered was bread, soggy and gritty, dark of complexion as the inhabitants, but bread for all that. While we were swallowing chunks of this and of empanada, some one discovered that it was Christmas Eve. A celebration was imperative. Kimball dug up an ancient fife from his pack, I still possessed a battered mouth-organ, and all but Owen, who had none, lent their voices to the lusty, if not musical, carols that astonished the apathetic hamlet so thoroughly that a few found energy to gather in a drooping group in the noiseless street outside. We ended with our patriotic anthem, in the midst of which Kimball’s fife suddenly broke off its wail long enough for him to assure Tommy:

“Here, young feller, don’t get it into your nut that’s ‘Gawd save no King’ we’re treatin’ these greasers to!”

The prospectors pushed on in the morning, but finding ourselves a day ahead of our schedule, and that we could still reach Santa Cruz before the end of the year, we decided to spend Christmas in Pampa Grande. It was ideal Christmas weather. The village stands on the eighteenth parallel, at an altitude of some 4000 feet, giving it a soft midsummer air, with a caressing breeze and a most restful atmosphere. Life had slowed down to a snail’s pace. The mud-housed inhabitants were too indolent to make a noise or disturbance; even our next-door neighbors were too apathetic to come and satisfy their curiosity by staring at us. Lying on the adobe couch under the eaves, we could let our eyes roam lazily over the surrounding sandy, scrub-wooded country of unabrupt hills, utterly silent but for the occasional faint note of the mourning jungle-dove.

But the all-important question was Christmas dinner. The boyish corregidor was duly impressed by my papers, and assured me we could have “anything we might desire.” I took him at his word and handed over a boliviano with a request for eggs. He called in a sandaled youth and sent him away with orders to round up a basketful. Then he wandered home. After a time the youth came shuffling back to say he could not find a single egg; and thrust the coin toward me. I was too experienced an Andean traveler to accept it and thus absolve the “authorities” of any further aid. Blocked in his turn, the corregidor came again in person to suggest a chicken at a boliviano. My extravagance in accepting this offer startled him, but he dropped the coin deftly into my hand and hurried languidly off, ostensibly to look for the fowl, really to sneak home by a roundabout route. He could not be blamed much for such conduct. Appointed by force and obliged to serve without emoluments, the rural “authority” lives between two millstones, the lower composed of his fellow-townsmen and lifelong friends, with whom he must continue his existence, a far more tangible and permanent reality than the somewhat nebulous government that furnishes travelers with imperative orders from far-off La Paz or Cochabamba.

But a Christmas dinner is nothing to grow sentimental or sympathetic about. When I had loafed and drowsed and read an hour or more longer, I wandered a few yards up the sandy street to the corregidor’s hut.

“No,” he mourned regretfully from his hammock, “I have not been able to find a chicken. Nobody wants to sell.”

“But, señor corregidor,” I protested, “we haven’t a thing with which to make dinner—Christmas dinner, and the Minister of the Interior in La Paz told me—”

The official name brought him slowly from the hammock to his feet, a worried look on his face.

“Very well,” he sighed, “then we will make you an almuerzo here in my house, which is your own.”

“Not at all, señor; we would not dream of troubling you. But if you have wherewith to make an almuerzo, let us have the ingredients and we will cook them to suit ourselves.”

“Well, there is charqui—”

“Don’t mention it. We don’t want to insult our stomachs, even on Christmas. I was speaking of food.”

“Well, there is a house down at the edge of the river where they have killed a beef—”

“Yes, three days ago; and the lump of it my compatriots bought this morning all but lifted the roof off our hut. A slice carved out of the middle of it was grass-green. The yellow dog that picked up both chunks of it when we threw it into the street may have had the Christmas dinner of his life, but he is not likely to see another.”

“Ay, Diós, señor, then there is nothing else.”

“Now, for the good of Pampa Grande, I advise you! There are plenty of chickens in town.”

“The people will not sell. The only way is for you to go out and shoot one with your revolver.”

“I never risk my aim on anything smaller than a bullock. Cartridges are expensive in the wilds of Bolivia.”

Such gringo persistency was annoying. Native travelers needed only to be told the same lie two or three times before they left him in peace to drowse in his hammock. With a badly concealed sigh he wandered into the street, and led the way across the noiseless sanded plaza to the house of his friend the alcalde. The two conferred together and finally sent out a cholo with orders to run down a chicken—“anybody’s at all.” The emissary returned by and by to report that he could not find one. The pair looked at me as much as to say, “There, you see the last hope has failed.” I ignored the hint. In despair they called in another cholo and with a mumbled order handed him a shotgun. A long time later a report was heard some distance off. The two officials shivered. By and by the cholo returned with the shotgun and announced that “it was badly loaded.” He said nothing about the aiming. The officials looked at me imploringly. I remained like a statue of patience seated on a cactus. At last the alcalde, with the air of a member of a suicide club who has drawn the black bean, snatched up the gun and, calling upon the cholo to follow, disappeared into the sunshine. For a time only the chirp of an insect in the thatch above sounded. Then a shot was heard, and a moment later the alcalde dodged into the room like a man pursued by bandits, thrust the weapon quickly under a reed mat, and assumed his seat and his most innocent air. Legally he might shoot all his neighbors’ chickens on government order; practically he was not anxious to be seen at it. The corregidor looked sorrowfully but appealingly up at him. His voice was a weak whisper:

“Yes, we got him. It was Don Panchito’s red one. No, the pullet. No, none of the family seemed to see me, but quién sabe?”

For a considerable time more nothing happened. I began to wonder if this, too, had been a well-acted ruse. Now and then the alcalde or the corregidor rose and peered anxiously down the street through the crack of the door. Whenever the patter of footsteps sounded outside, the pair grew stiff with misgiving.

Then suddenly in burst the cholo, carrying under his poncho the pollo, already relieved of its feathers, thus accounting for the last delay. It was a tolerably plump bird, and the corregidor thought fifty centavos would be a just price. He would give it to Don Panchito to-morrow, when his wrath had cooled. I paid it and hurried home. There followed an hour’s wandering and pleading, all of which I must do in person, since Tommy spoke no Spanish, and several more appeals to the corregidor before I got lard, rice, tiny potatoes at ten cents a pound, as well as an unexpected bowl of what purported to be stewed peaches. The pot the corregidor could lend us was large enough for an army. Tommy, who had once been second cook on board ship—after they had found him—was appointed fireman and general assistant, and soon had the three-stone fagot cook-stove out under the back porch roaring. Then with plantains fried in lard and —. But why enumerate? By the time we had fed the ragamuffins at the back door and hung the not yet empty kettle on the top of a hammock-post, even Tommy’s inclination to make tea had evaporated. It may not have been a genuine Christmas dinner. Pumpkin pie, for instance, was painfully conspicuous by its absence. But it produced the same effect. While Tommy stretched out on a mud divan, I spread my poncho on the sand under a tree in the back yard, where the gusts of breeze came often enough to lull me quickly into a siesta.

I had barely fallen asleep when the chicken-shooter came to “give me information about the town,” and I must get up and go back to the room with him. There he picked up the scattered pages of Ibañez’ “Flor de Mayo” I had discarded as I read, then clawed out my copy of a Cochabamba newspaper. When he had perused that he took to fingering my note-book, which fortunately he could not read, until at last in disgust I spread my poncho again on the brick floor and was soon sound asleep. When I woke again at sunset both informant and information had faded away. I went out on the porch to write, and a neighbor came to pull the note-book out of my hands and solemnly “read” it, quite oblivious in his illiteracy to the fact that there was hardly a word of Spanish in it, besides being legible only to the elect. Then he must inspect my fountain-pen and learn all its inner secrets. When I recovered it and continued writing with what ink was not smeared over his person, he thrust his nose between the pages, inquiring:

“Are you noting all the inhabitants of Pampa Grande?”

“No.”

“Ah, only the notable ones, then?”

“Alas, no; you see I have only a moderate-sized note-book.”

In the cool of evening the corregidor came again to share his troubles with me, bewailing the fact that Pampa Grande no longer had a Christmas celebration, because they had no cura. By the same token there was no longer a public market on Sundays and feast-days, “for the Indians only come to town to sell if there is a church fiesta at which they can drink chicha.”

“God save us,” he sighed as he rose to leave, “for want of a priest we are all turning Protestants!”

I respread my “bed” early. But the aftermath of the Christmas dinner had not yet run its course. Some time far into night I was for a long time half-conscious of some hubbub, and at last woke entirely. On his piece of blanket on the floor Tommy was rolling from side to side, in one hand his precious trowel, which he was beating on the flaggings until it rang again, while shouting at the top of his voice:

“Mortar! Mortar! How in —— can I lay bricks if you don’t keep me in mortar?”

All next day he dragged far behind in the twenty-five miles to Samaipata, second largest town of this leg of the journey. Ahead of us was a five-days’ tramp without the suggestion of a village, and we were forced to weigh ourselves down under such supplies as we could purchase. Some two hours beyond Samaipata, 3000 feet or more above the road, up the range on the right, stands what the natives of the region call “El Fuerte.” Here, in a splendid strategic position, covering the flat top of an entire hill, were and still are extensive terraces and the mostly fallen remains of what must have been important buildings, now overgrown with brush, though there are few or no real trees. Scattered about this cold and barren plateau, some 10,000 feet above sea-level, are many carved seats, similar to those of Cuzco and vicinity, and figures cut in sandstone, among which jaguars, ostriches, and other fauna of the Andes can still be distinguished, though many are time- and weather-worn beyond identification. Practical miners who have visited the spot report the existence of ore-washing apparatus of hewn stone. According to tradition the Incas had here their easternmost stronghold, built by Yupanqui, the emperor who aspired to conquer the hated huara-ni, the “breechless” tribes of the tropical lowlands. At present “El Fuerte” is utterly uninhabited. For many years one aged Indian lived here, long reputed to be more than a century old. The people of the region called him “the Inca” and credited him with supernatural powers and untold wealth. The usual rumors of hidden gold and jewels, and of subterranean passages from temple to treasure-house, hover about the place. So far as is known the site has never been visited, or at least explored, by archeologists, to whom it might bring rewards not inferior to those of Machu Picchu.

As the Andes flattened down, ever slowly and as if under protest, the population showed more African blood; and if the people did not grow more friendly, at least they were less incommunicative than those of the highlands. The women took to smoking, a custom almost unknown to the sex on the altiplanicie, until it become quite the fashion. Quichua had finally died out near Totora. Real tropical heat, such as I had all but forgotten the existence of, weighed down upon us, though it did not induce Tommy to be seen without his winter vest. We moved forward steadily, but no longer pushed the pace; the tropics is no place for that. Wandering comfortably along sandy trails through half-woods, we came now and then upon a cluster of weather-blackened wooden crosses tied together with vines, with rudely carved and misspelled lettering, such as:

“Rogad adiós por el alma de Pablo Morales Fallesió 22 julio de 1911.”

The alcalde of Monos, which consisted of a single hut at the top of a stiff zigzag, had already held that honor for years, in spite of his protests. When I handed him the order from his chief in Samaipata, he returned it, asking me to read it aloud, as he could not. I did so fairly, without taking advantage of the occasion to include a command from the president of the republic for him to stand on his head, and, duly impressed, he spread a sun-dried cowhide for us on the unlevelled earth floor of his wall-less lean-to, and set his women to preparing us a caldo, of which we furnished the rice and they the fire, labor, and a bit of what looked and tasted like grass. Food had grown so tasteless that we had to force it down like medicine, simply because we needed the strength. To me fell the task of making the family understand why we should wish to eat again in the morning, before we started.

A couple of hours beyond, I came upon Tommy, who for once had forged ahead, seated beside the trail and overcome with sadness. With reason, as the Spaniard says. Far away across the bottomless wooded hole in the earth at our feet rose a sharp range with red rock cliffs up which the trail climbed to the very gates of heaven—which we should find locked no doubt when we arrived. As Tommy put it, “I think they must have to take part of that hill away when the moon comes over.” We slept that night higher than Samaipata. But this was the last surge of the Andean billows. Next morning we came out on a wonderful vista of tropical South America, an unbroken sea of green, rolling and more hilly than I had imagined it, spreading away in all directions into the purple haze of vast distances. We had come at last to the end of the Andes.

Now and then thereafter came a short descent, but no more rises, and we were soon in real jungle, with palm-trees of many species. Banana plants appeared; and insects bit us from hair to ankles. Upon us came that care-free languor of the tropics, and for the first time I realized the strain of living and tramping two or three miles aloft. Dense vegetation crowded the trail, now heavy in sand in which the constant slap of our feet grew monotonous, close on either hand. Night had no terrors now, for we could lie down anywhere. Fruit of many kinds grew,—plantains, bananas, melons, oranges green in color, papayas,—but was rarely for sale. The rare inhabitants had a more kindly air, addressing us as “Ché”—“Hola, ché gringo!”—the familiar and affectionate term, evidently from the Guaraní for “Look!” or “Listen!”, which we were to hear often from now on clear into the Argentine, but they were still not noted for unselfishness. A belligerent attitude might have won more, but that we had left behind with the bleak highlands. Besides, through it all Tommy would have hung on my coat-tail, had I worn one, shuddering in his English, laboring-class voice, “Don’t! Don’t tyke it! The police!”—and once anything had been obtained, he would have made away with it so swiftly that I should have caught little more than its vagrant aroma. The desire for sweets was alarming. Indeed, it was a craving for food, rather than hunger, that troubled us. We ate great chunks of empanisado, and an hour after the best meal we should have jumped to accept an invitation to a fifteen-course dinner.

We were following now the course of the little, all but waterless, Piray, some day to join the Mamoré and the Amazon. There were many pack-trains of donkeys and mules going and coming. Thunder grumbled frequently far off to the east. Toward sunset we came upon an hacienda-house before which hung a bullock on a clothes-line—in the process of being charquied, and already as succulent as the sole of an old boot. The haughty hacendado grudgingly sold us chunks of the already-too-long-dead animal at the breath-taking price of fifty centavos a pound, and steeping tea in water so thick it could all but stand alone, we cut off slabs of the meat and thrust them into the fire on the ends of sticks, to eat it half-raw and unaccompanied, like gauchos of the pampas.

About the house was thick grass, an unusual feature in South America, for ordinarily either the altitude is too great for it, or the jungle so thick it cannot grow in the constant shade. The hacendado gave us permission to lie anywhere in the yard, with a graciousness that implied we might also eat the longest grass if we chose. All the corrals in the neighborhood were filled with donkey- and mule-trains, with arrieros speaking both Spanish and the Quichua of the highlands, on the way to or from Santa Cruz with cargoes of alcohol, hides, and tobacco coming out and foreign merchandise going in. For a long time we sat in the velvety air of a jungle evening, listening to the singing of tree-toads and crickets and the occasional faint tinkle of a grazing lead-mule’s bell, with now and then the sharp, excited chorus of birds,—all interwoven with the wind-borne voices of the arrieros. Then I picked a spot, as apt to be free from snakes, on the clipped grass a few yards from the house, and lay down on my rubber poncho. The soft breeze soon lulled me to sleep, in spite of the itching of countless insect-bites. I had not slept long probably, when I was awakened by rain striking me in the face. It would not last long, I fancied. I pulled the poncho over me and let it rain. It did. Quickly it increased to a hollow roar; trickles of water began to tickle me along the ribs. Evidently I had picked a slight slope, for the water was soon pouring in upon me in streams. I caught up my scattered belongings and dashed for the house, the wet poncho lapping up all the mud in the vicinity, and some of my effects dropping at each step, forcing me to await the next flash of lightning to find them. Under the corredor roof there was barely room to roll up beside Tommy on the earth floor, trampled hard as an iron casting, and for an hour there roared such a tropical deluge as I had never known in the western hemisphere.

The Piray, now a wide, raging river of red mud, forced us to strip to the waist, and even then splashed us redly far higher as we breasted the powerful current. All day we plowed through dense forest, wet and soggy, singing with insect life, a roaring tropical shower bursting upon us now and then, after each of which the red sun blazed out through the thick, humid air. With dusk we waded heavy-kneed into La Guardia, sticky and sweated as the dweller in the tropics must always be who cannot spend the day in a hammock; fighting swarms of gnats while we waited patiently for the promised antidote for our raging appetites. Twice during the day we had climbed padlocked bars across the trail. I had fancied them toll-gates, but found they were aduanillas, little custom-houses for the collection of duty on goods entering, or produce leaving the department of Santa Cruz. Each hide exported paid about 65 cents; the flour that had come all the way from Tacoma, Washington, by ship, train, and mule had added to its already exorbitant price a high departmental duty. No wonder chunks of boiled yuca commonly took the place of bread.

Beyond La Guardia the country was more open, the forest at times giving place to half-meadows, with single trees and grazing cattle, across which drifted a breeze that tempered the midsummer heat. The way lay so straight across the floor-flat country that the line of telegraph poles beside it looked like a single pole standing forth against the horizon. There were many huts now, roofed and sometimes entirely made of palm branches. Warm, muddy water was our only drink, for we had descended so low that the inhabitants were too lazy even to make chicha. Once we got a watermelon, which are small here and far from being on ice. In passing another hut I was startled by a cry of “Se vende pan,” and went in to pay two females, whose faces were a patchwork of gnat-bites, an astounding price for some tiny, soggy biscuits. Ponderous ox-carts with solid wooden wheels crawled by noiselessly in the deep sand behind three and even four pairs of drowsy oxen. Everything, even the breeze, moved now with the leisureliness of the tropics. The jungle ahead was so flat and green, so banked by clouds, that one had the feeling that the sea was soon to open out beyond. We loafed languidly on, certain that our goal was near, yet though there were other evidences that we were approaching a city, there were no more visible signs of it than in approaching Port Saïd from the sea.

At last, so gradually that we were some time in distinguishing it from a tree-top, a dull-colored church-tower grew up in line with the vista of telegraph-poles. We drifted inertly into a sand-paved, silent, tropical city street, past rows of languid stares, and on the last afternoon of the year, with Cochabamba 335 miles behind us, sat down dripping, a week’s lack of shave veiling our sun-toasted features, in the central plaza of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.

Tommy had heard so many stories of the generosity of the cruceños that he was astonished to have reached the center of town without being invited from some doorway to come in and make his home there as long as he chose. This was doubly annoying, since rumor had it that white men were so in favor with the gentler sex that a sandy-haired one as handsome as Tommy fancied himself to be was in danger of being damaged by the feminine rush his appearance was sure to precipitate. After a time he rose to carry his perplexity back to where we had seen the British vice-consular shield covering the front of a house. When I met him again he had told his sad tale so effectively that he had been “put up” at both hotels by as many compatriots and was eating regularly at each, though taking care not to let his right hand know what the left was carrying to his mouth. After dark, in a humid night made barely visible by a few candle street-lamps, I splashed out to the hut of Manuel Abasto in the outskirts, to sleep under the trees in the canvas-roofed hammock of one of the American prospectors, the legitimate occupant being engaged in the rôle of Don Juan in the city. The hut was crowded with peons already half drunk, languidly fingering several guitars and now and then raising mournful voices in some amorous ballad. At midnight church-bells rang, and one distant whistle blew weakly to greet the incoming year, but the music of the tropical rain on the canvas over my head soon lulled me to sleep again.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us