XX. LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS
Santa Cruz de la Sierra, capital of all the vast department of eastern Bolivia, owes its fame largely to its isolation. Like those eminent men of many secluded corners of South America, it is important only because of the exceeding unimportance of its neighbors. The only tropical city of Bolivia, it stands some 1500 feet above sea-level on the 18th meridian, very near the geographical center of the republic, so far from the outside world that mail deposited on January 7th reached New York on March 11th. Of its 19,000 inhabitants, 11,000 are female. The emporium and distributing point of all this region and of the rubber districts of the Beni, its commerce is chiefly in the hands of Germans, though the two houses that all but monopolize the trade pose as Belgian, with headquarters in Antwerp. There are few Bolivian, and only three cruceño houses of importance, and these for the most part buy of German wholesalers in Cochabamba. Three or four native families have as much as $150,000, a fortune by cruceño standards, won from rubber, or from cattle ranches roundabout the city. Yet there is much primitive barter, even in the town,—an ox for a load of fire-wood, and the like, with no money concerned in the transaction. Santa Cruz is the place of birth of those famous Suarez brothers who are kings of the rubber districts of the Amazon.
It is a city of silence. Spreading over a dead-flat, half-sandy, jungled plain, its right-angled streets are deep in reddish sand in which not only its shod feet—by no means in the majority, though the upper class is almost foppish in dress—but even the solid wooden wheels of its clumsy ox-carts make not a sound. There is no modern industry to lend its strident voice, though the town boasts three “steam establishments” for the making of ice, the grinding of maize, and the sawing of lumber, and every street fades away at either end into the whispering jungle. Narrow sidewalks of porous red bricks, roofed by the wide overhanging eaves of the houses, often upheld by pillars or poles, line most of the streets. But these are by no means continuous, and being commonly high above the street level and often taken up entirely, especially of an evening, by the families, who consider this their veranda rather than the pedestrian’s right of way, the latter generally finds it easier to plod through the sand of the street itself. In the rainy season, which begins with the new year and lasts through April, there are many muddy pools and ponds in the outskirts, along the edges of some of which the streets crawl by on long heaps of the skulls of cattle, bleached snow-white by the sun, and the larger of which, almost lakes, somehow carried the mind back to Kandy, Ceylon. Frequently the streets in the center of town are flooded for an hour or more, until the thirsty sand has drunk up a tropical deluge. For these eventualities Santa Cruz has a system of its own. At each corner four rows of atoquines, weather-blackened piles of a kind of mahogany, protrude a foot or more above the sand; and along these stepping-stones the minority passes dry-shod from one roofed sidewalk to another.
The houses, usually of a single story, their tile roofs bleached yellowish by the tropical sun, present a large room, wide open by day on the porch sidewalk, and rather bare in appearance in spite of a forest of frail cane chairs, black in color. From the once whitewashed adobe walls protrude several pairs of hooks on each of which hangs, except during the hour of siesta, a rolled-up hammock. On or near the floor sits a little hand sewing-machine, the exotic whirr of which sounds now and then; and just inside the door are usually a few shallow tubs, like small dugout canoes, holding tropical fruits, soggy bread cakes, and sugar in all its stages; for many, even of the “best families,” patch out their livelihood with a bit of amateur shopkeeping. Through this main room, parlor, and chief pride of each family, past which one cannot walk without glancing in upon the household, a back door gives a glimpse of the patio, a pretty garden hidden away after the Moorish fashion—strange that the Arab influence should have reached even this far-distant heart of South America—airy and bright and large, for space is not lacking in Santa Cruz, often almost an orchard and blooming with flowers of many colors. On this open several smaller rooms which, being out of sight of the public, are often far less attractive than the parlor.
In the outside world the climate of Santa Cruz is reputed obnoxious to whites; about its name hover those legends, common also to India, of Europeans being worn to fever-yellow wrecks. As a matter of fact, the temperature does not rise higher than in southern Canada in July, and a cool breeze sweeps almost continually across the pampas about it. Mosquitos are rare, fever all but unknown. It is not loss of health, but his energetic view of life which the Caucasian immigrant risks. Especially during this hottest season of January the heat was humid and heavy, and I found myself falling quickly into the local mood of contentment just to lie in a hammock and let the world drift on without me. It took an unusual length of time to make up my mind to do anything, and then required more will-power than usual to force myself to get up and do it, particularly to keep on doing it until it was finished. But it is perhaps as largely due to environment as to the climate that Santa Cruz is visibly lazy. The region roundabout is so fertile that almost every staple except wheat and potatoes grow, and the slightest exertion earns sustenance. There are sugar plantations and sugar- and alcohol-producing establishments scattered here and there; the province of Sara to the north supplies food not only to the city but to the rubber districts as far away as the Acre; coffee, rice, and tobacco can be produced in abundance; hides already constitute an important export; the region to the west is reputed rich in oil. Yet Santa Cruz makes small use of her possibilities, languidly waiting for the arrival of a railroad and the influx of foreign capital to develop them.
The rumors that seep up out of Santa Cruz of her beautiful pure-white types are largely of artificial propagation. It is true that she has a larger percentage of Spanish blood than any other city of Bolivia, but this is rarely found in its unadulterated form. Some negro and considerable Indian ancestry has left its mark, and while there is not a full-blooded African, or perhaps a full Indian, in town, and Spanish is the universal, if slovenly, tongue, genuine white natives are few in number. As to the beautiful girls and women of popular fancy, they do exist, but certainly in no larger proportion than pearls in oysters. The overwhelming majority are coarse-featured, with heavy noses and sensual lips, crumbling teeth that hint at degeneration, and little attractiveness beyond the quick-fading physical one of youth.
Some cynic has said that a wall set about Santa Cruz de la Sierra would enclose the largest house of ill-fame on earth. So broad a statement is unkind. Yet not merely are the majority of cruceños born out of wedlock—that much can be said of all Bolivia—but those who are accustomed to investigate such matters agree that the seeker after feminine favors in Santa Cruz need never leave the block in which he chances to find himself. Plain-spoken foreign residents put it baldly that virginity never survives the twelfth year, but this is no doubt an exaggeration. The causes of this lack of social tautness are several. The overstock of one sex, due largely to the migration of the young men to the rubber forests of the Beni, often never to return; a widespread poverty and the lack of any independent means of livelihood for women; and a tropical apathy, even of character, are perhaps the chief. Then, too, there is a marked absence of good example. The higher officials and more wealthy men have, with rare exceptions, at least one irregular household; not a few have only irregular ones. The story is current of one of the chief political powers of the department who decided to visit his daughter at school in Germany. Forewarned, that startled young lady hastened to write: “If you and mama are coming to Germany, you must get married first.” The father yielded good-naturedly to this quaint whim of a favorite daughter, and during the weeks before his departure, spread the story far and wide as one of his best after-dinner witticisms. The native priests almost invariably have concubines. Some, using the transparent subterfuge common to all Latin-America, refer to their families as “housekeeper” and “nephews.” Not a few frankly speak of “the mother of my children.” With rare exceptions this runs to the plural. Among the masses, naturally, these conditions are not improved upon. Marriage, troublesome, expensive, and conspicuous, hardly bringing even the advantage of neighborly approbation, is apt to be looked upon as a nuisance; and it is always hard to go to useless trouble in the tropics. The nineteen-year-old son of an American resident was pointed out by both sexes as a curiosity, because he was still without natural children. The laws of Bolivia recognize three classes of offspring,—legitimate, natural, and unnatural. The second are inalienable heirs to one fifth the father’s property. The third division comprises those born out of wedlock to parents who could not marry if they wished,—that is, one or both of whom is already married, or has taken the priestly vows of celibacy. The town has little notion of the viewpoint of the rest of the world on this subject. Like an island far out at sea, all but cut off from the rest of mankind, it has developed customs—or a lack of them—of its own, its individual point of view; and, like all isolated groups, it is sure of its own importance in exact ratio to the lack of outside influence; so that barefooted cruceños are firmly convinced that their ways are vastly superior to those of the rest of the world, which they judge by the few sorry specimens thereof who drift in upon them bedraggled by weeks on wilderness trails. The term “Colla,” used to designate the people of the Bolivian highlands, and passed on by the masses to the world at large, is here a word of deprecation.
With few exceptions the foreign residents soon fall into this easy, tropical way of life. The two “Belgian” firms bring in scores of young German employees trained in the European main house; and there are normally some 250 Teutonic residents. The percentage of these is low who are not established within a month of their arrival in any part of the region with their own “housekeepers.” The recruit is shown the expediency of this arrangement by both the precept and the example of his fellow-countrymen. Celibacy is alleged to be doubly baneful in the tropics; there are no hotels or restaurants worthy the name; the pleasure of forming a part of the best native family would soon wear threadbare, even if the Moorish seclusion of these did not make admittance impossible. To live with even a modicum of comfort in these wilds the white man must have a home of his own. The frail walls thereof are slight protection against theft. Unless he will reduce his possessions to what he can carry to and from his stool or counter each day, a “housekeeper” is imperative. Though a neighbor might be induced to provide meals and such housekeeping as she has time for, the cruceña brings her personal interest to bear only on those things of which she is genuinely, if temporarily, a part. To her, wages are neither customary nor attractive; the reward for her labors must be a temporarily permanent home. Hence the “servant problem” is most easily solved by adopting the servant. Whatever principles contrary to this mode of life the youthful Teuton brings with him from his native land, they quickly melt away under the tropical sun, and there is commonly little resistance to the new environment.
Let it not be understood that there is unusual betrayal or persecution of innocent womanhood in Santa Cruz. Rather the contrary is true. It is the man who runs the most constant gauntlet of temptation. The arrival of a new clerk is sure to cause a crowding of young women about the door of the establishment, and to swamp it with pretended purchasers. Report has it that a daughter of almost the “best families” may be won by the employee who will remain a few years and buy her a house or leave her a small income at his departure. With the poorer classes the usual procedure is to open negotiations with the girl’s family, to give her mother a present, or win her consent through her taste for strong drink. In the wilder regions of the interior the gift of a rifle, or something equally coveted, to the father is usually sufficient. Daughters are easily acquired, but rifles are scarce. Coming under short contract, the recruit, grown to a darker-skinned bookkeeper or sub-manager, goes his way, or is transferred, and leaves behind whatever family may have befallen him, frequently recommending his “widow” to a newly arrived compatriot. Though there is said to be less taking of “housekeepers” than formerly, in a given group of thirty Germans, twenty had female companions, six had German wives, and four, legal cruceña wives. At the time of my stay in Santa Cruz, 49 native women were calling monthly upon the cashier of a single commercial house for the pension granted them for the rearing of their from one to six half-German children; and these were the abandoned mates only of such as were still employees of the firm elsewhere, or of the rare few who had themselves left some stipend for their offspring. The point of view of the Teuton on this subject is that he is no worse, but merely more free from “hypocrisy” than the Anglo-Saxon. Even the German women accept the condition with little protest, often joining in the celebration at the baptism of the illegitimate infant of a compatriot. In an isolated corner of the department I found a well-educated, likable German keeping house with a jet-black negro girl; and not only was his wife in Germany aware of the arrangement, and amused by his letters concerning his companion, but advised him to keep her as long as he remained in Bolivia, that he might have “some one to look after him and keep him in health.”
Were the results of these attachments an improved human stock, there might be less to condemn. For in its present stage of progress, tropical Bolivia is more amenable to economic than to “moral” improvement; and the country is sorely in need of population. But the foreign blood injected into cruceño arteries is as nothing against the environment. The sons of Europeans may be an improvement upon the natives, at least in those rare cases where the father has remained to add the vigor of his training; but the succeeding generation is only too apt to degenerate quickly into the most native of natives. The assertion of scientists that new blood must constantly be brought to the tropics if these regions are to progress, is plainly demonstrated in Santa Cruz. Throughout the department may be seen to-day in the flesh those conditions which, centuries ago, followed the coming of the Conquistadores without their own women or the Puritan’s point of view, which have made Latin-America from end to end the abode of a chiefly mongrel race.
Attempted improvement of the status quo meets with as little approval as in all other centers of the universe. The American directress of the government girls’ school found herself balked at the outset in the simplest matters. Her edict that pupils must not come to school without some other nether garment than the customary skirt was bitterly opposed both by mothers and by her assistants, on the ground that “it is so hot in Santa Cruz.” Cruceños blame the heat for most of their shortcomings, as the gringo miners of the Andes sweepingly “lay it to the altitude.” In the school in question there were 300 girls of the “best families” of Santa Cruz. One in every four of them was of legitimate birth. The teachers were in many cases decrepit grand-dames, yet no one with a relative or a friend in the government offices could be removed, because these saw to it that no report against their protegees ever reached higher officials. In the faculty meetings it was impossible to criticize a pupil, whatever her delinquency, for she was sure to have at least one relative among the teachers to precipitate an uproar.
On New Year’s Day I had taken up my abode with the only permanent American resident of Santa Cruz. “Juan” S. Bowles, born in Ohio—a cavalry troop of which state he had commanded from Atlanta to the sea—had come to Brazil nine years after the war and ascended to Santa Cruz by way of the Amazon, in the years when 80 days of hard labor were required to cover the 280 miles now served by the Madeira-Mamoré railroad. He had never since seen his native land. His ice-plant was for many years the only producer of that exotic commodity in tropical Bolivia, where, in the early days, it ranked as a luxury at 25 cents a pound. Under his unwilted American energy and indifference to local caste rules the plant still produced its daily quota, if at something less than that regal reward. On his back veranda stood a leather bed—an ox-hide stretched on a wooden frame on legs—just the place to spend a cruceño night, and his stories of “Johnny Rebs” alone made the week I spent there well worth while.
Sometimes, though with difficulty, his reminiscences could be staged in Bolivia. After Santa Cruz had drunk and died of swamp water savored with dead cats for some three centuries, this energetic new resident imported machinery and drove an artesian well, coming upon excellent water some fifty feet below the surface. This he offered for sale, putting out of business the friars who, watching the barometer, successfully prayed to the Virgin for rain. The first woman to arrive with her cántaro on her head asked the son in charge if he were not “ashamed to sell the water God gave.”
“But he didn’t give the pump or drive the well,” retorted the boy; “There is plenty of God’s free water over there in the swamp.”
To-day the former captain of cavalry has ten wells to his credit and is trying to get the municipality to let him install an “aeromotor.”
For all his long residence, the Ohioan had by no means reconciled life to the cruceño point of view. His criticisms on this subject were biting. Though the town swarmed with “educated” loafers, well-dressed according to their ideals, it was all but impossible to get native assistants. The youths, egged on by their mothers, flocked to the already overcrowded white-fingered professions, rather than become mechanics or learn to run an engine, two occupations sadly needed in Santa Cruz. As the old man put it, “They won’t come here and learn a good, useful trade, with pay while learning; yet if you throw a stone at a dog anywhere in town and miss him, you are sure to hit a priest, a lawyer, or a doctor—with nothing to do.” The boys he could hire, of the most poverty-stricken families, would not work where anyone could see them. Agapito would tote bricks within the patio without a protest, but he would take his discharge rather than carry a parcel to or from the post-office. The mothers would rather have their daughters earn their living in the local feminine way than have their sons descend to manual labor. A “caballero,” wearing shoes, without socks, requiring his gun repaired to go hunting, could not get it to the shop until he could find an Indian to carry it there.
Bowles was an interesting example of the transplanted American. A man of education and of shrewd native wit, he had developed here in the wilderness a quaint, isolated philosophy of his own, and was one of those rare white men who have spent many years unbrokenly in such an environment and climate without “going to seed.” Not merely was he a wide and reflective reader on all subjects from the scientific to the curious, but still, at seventy-five, produced in the interstices of his labors as chief mechanic of the region authoritative articles for the Buenos Aires, London, and American periodicals. How great a feat this is only those can understand who know the enervating effect on both mind and body of long tropical residence. His staunch individualism and independence of the verdict of the world was little short of startling to those of us who live more nearly in it. Set away in the fastnesses of the earth, with only his own mind to feed upon, instead of having his opinions delivered at his door each morning by the newsboy, he had developed a thinking-machine of his own that grasped firmly whatever it took hold of, and a hard, unsentimental common sense fitted to his environment. His speech carried one back to the Civil War, and his vocabulary had quaint, amusing touches; for the words he had added to it since his migration had been chiefly from books, with rare and brief intercourse with English-speaking persons. Thus his pronunciation of many terms unknown to the world in the seventies had been evolved from his own mind amid his Spanish-tongued environment. He spoke of “alumeénum,” and called the recently discovered cause of all earthly ills “Mee-crów-bays.” Words like “poligamic,” rarely heard from any but scientific mouths, appeared in the same sentence with “ketched,” the past participle of Civil War days. Edison’s noisy invention he called “pho-nó-graph,” but the word “leisurely” he pronounced correctly, not a common American feat.
This New Year’s Day was notable to Bowles for another reason. His youngest son and last effective assistant made his first appearance in the uniform of a Bolivian soldier, and moved from home to the cuartel. Conscription is theoretically universal in Bolivia. On the first day of each year every youth within the republic who has reached his nineteenth birthday must report at the capital of his department, ready for service. Those that are not physically unfit, or have not sufficient influence, are given three months training, after which they draw lots to serve two years at 40 centavos a day. During my time there the plaza of Santa Cruz was overrun with lank country boys and sallow city youths, in most cases still in their civilian garb of baggy, road-worn linen or near-Parisian gente decente attire, awkwardly practicing the right and left face under the commands of youthful officers. By Bolivian law a child born in Bolivia is a Bolivian, whatever the nationality of the father. The Civil War veteran, who had strictly kept his American citizenship, though married to a Bolivian wife, had appealed in vain to the American minister in La Paz. Prospective immigrants to this, as to several other South American countries, should not overlook this point in the future of their children. As Bowles expressed it, “Fifteen hundred bolivianos for every son born in the country is too much tax to pay for the privilege of living in it.” When the time came for choosing by lot the recruits needed to make up the peace quota of the Bolivian army, Teutonic in its discipline and formation, this useful son of an American “drew unlucky” and was obliged to serve two years, though fate had left behind in Santa Cruz many a worthless native loafer.
But the then most widely-known gringo sojourner in Santa Cruz was an Englishman who chose to call himself “Jack Thompson.” His habitat was the departmental prison. His story was well-fitted to the “Penny Dreadful” or the cinema screen. Some years ago “Thompson” and a fellow-countryman had drifted out of the interior of Brazil into Corumbá, and offered to sell their rights to a rubber forest they had discovered. The Teutonic house that showed interest asked them to await a decision, and meanwhile offered them employment in the escort of a party of German employees, peons, and muleteers carrying £7000 in gold to a branch of the establishment in the interior of Bolivia. On the trail a German of the escort drew the Englishmen into a plot to hold up the party. A week or more inland, at a rivulet called Ypias, the trio suddenly fell upon their companions and killed three Germans, a Frenchman, a Bolivian muleteer, and the chola “housekeeper” of the chief of the expedition. The rest scattered into the jungle; except one old Indian arriero who, unable to run, managed to crawl up into the branches of a nearby tree. There he witnessed the second act of the melodrama. For a time the trio remained in peace and concord, washed, drank, and concocted a meal over jungle brush. But soon the question of the division of the gold became a dispute. The German asserted that, as author of the plan, he should take half. The Englishmen insisted on an equal division. The dispute became a quarrel. At length, late in the afternoon, when the unknown observer was ready to drop to the ground and a quick death, from exhaustion, fear, and thirst, the Englishmen fell upon their confederate with a revolver, two rifles, and a sabre. Even a German must succumb under such odds. Leaving the body where it fell, the pair divided the gold, and each swinging a pair of saddlebags over a shoulder, struck off into the trackless jungle, for some reason fancying this a surer escape than to mount mules and dash for safety in Brazil.
Meanwhile some of the refugees had reached nearby settlements. Several search parties were made up and, having buried what the vultures had left, took up the scent. The natives of these jungle regions are not easily eluded in their own element. For four days the Britons struggled through the tropical wilderness, half-dead from thirst—for it was September, at the end of the dry season—and soon reduced to a few native berries as food. The gold became too heavy for their waning forces. They managed to climb to the summit of a jungle bluff and bury most of it. On the fifth day a search party came upon them resting in a shaded thicket. A volley killed his companion and slightly wounded “Thompson.” Leaving the corpse for the vultures, the pursuers tracked the wounded man all night and next morning caught him at bay. Having pointed out the hiding-place of the gold, he was set backward astride a mule with his hands tied behind him and, amid such persecution as the savage, half-Indian Bolivian can invent, was escorted to San José, and later driven through the jungle and lodged in the departmental prison.
All this had occurred three years before. Twice “Thompson,” who was a Mason, as are some of the officials of Bolivia, “escaped.” The first time he was found drunk in the plaza before his evasion was known; the second, he walked the 160 leagues to Yacuiva through the jungle without once touching the trail, only to celebrate too early what he fancied, for lack of geographical knowledge, was his escape into the Argentine, and be forced to walk all the way back. Finally, after more than a year in prison, he had been tried—on paper, as in all Spanish-America—and within another twelve-month had coaxed the judge to deliver his verdict and sentence him—to be shot. The supreme court and the president had still to pass upon the matter, and another year had drifted by.
Of late years it is not easy to gain admittance to the prison of Santa Cruz. About its doors swarm ragged sentinels who scream frantically “Cabo de Guardia!” (“Corporal of the Guard”), and swing their aged muskets menacingly whenever a stranger pauses to speak to them. But a note from the prefect brought me the attention of the haughty superiors of the “Policía de Seguridad,” who saw fit to permit me to wade across the first patio of the prison. There an insolent half-negro in the remnants of a faded khaki uniform felt me carefully over for firearms, and at length deigned to open a wooden-barred door. Beyond another mud-floored anteroom and through another wooden gate, I found myself in a bare patio some forty feet square, with a deep open well and signs that the entire yard became a pond whenever it rained. This was surrounded on all sides by an ancient low building of adobe, under the projecting eaves of which, on the ground or in hammocks, and inside squalid cell-like rooms, loafed a score or more of men and several women of all known human complexions and degrees of undress. A single boy soldier of simian brow, with a disproportionately heavy loaded rifle on his shoulder, paraded in the shade of the eaves. He looked, indeed, like one to whose ingrown intelligence could safely be trusted matters of life and death!
My errand made known, several of the prisoners, without rising, began to shout, “Don Arturo!” By and by a voice came back, “’Stá bañandose!” I crossed to one of the cells, a small room filled with sundry junk, chiefly the tools of a mechanic, of which the wooden-barred door stood ajar. Inside, on a piece of board laid on the earth floor, stood “Thompson,” in the costume of Adam, pouring a bucket of water over his head. I explained that I was drifting through Bolivia and fancied he might be glad to hear his native tongue again. He was, having had only two such visitors during the year just ended. Wrapping a towel about his loins, he stood and chatted, while an anemic half-negro in what had once been khaki leaned against the door-post watching our every movement, and several other prisoners crowded round in the customary ill-bred South American fashion.
“Thompson” was an unattractive man in middle life, rather thin, with the accent and bad teeth of the Englishman of the mechanic class, and the uninspired and rather hopeless philosophy of life common to that caste. Otherwise his attitude was in no way different from what it would have been had we been a pair of tramps met on the road. He smiled frequently as he talked, and was neither more sad nor more cynical than the average of his class. He made no secret of his part in what he referred to as “our stunt,” and gave me detailed information on how to find the graves along the trail “where we pulled it off,” in case I should continue to the eastward. He plainly regretted the crime, but only because he had been caught. Knowing he had already published a doctored account of the occurrence in an English monthly and had found the remuneration exceedingly useful in eking out his existence in a Bolivian prison, I suggested the writing of the whole story.
“Aye, but they ’re not going to give me time,” he answered, rolling and lighting a cigarette. “I just got word from Sucre that they have confirmed the sentence. Now as soon as the president signs it, they’ll call me out and ...”
“Oh, I don’t believe Montes would do that to a gringo,” I remarked encouragingly. “He is a Mason, too—”
“Well, I don’t care a rap whether they do or not,” he replied, with considerable heat, “I’m perfectly willing they do it and have it over with. Even if he commutes the sentence, it means ten years more of this”—he pointed to the slovenly yard and dirtier inmates—“and it’s quite as bad as the other; I don’t know but worse.”
When he had dressed and stepped outside to pose for a photograph, he presented rather a “natty” appearance, though his low-caste face could not be disguised. Together we wandered through the prison. “Thompson,” in his striving to be “simpático” amid his surroundings, had become quite a “caballero” in his manner, and spoke Spanish unusually well for one of his class and nationality. The prisoners found it as necessary to earn their own living inside the prison as outside, for though the government theoretically furnishes food, it would not have kept the smallest inmate alive for a week. “Thompson” asserted that he had not touched prison fare since his incarceration. His “cell” was fitted up as a workshop, with a bench, a small vise, and such tools of a mechanic as he had been able to collect, and he earned a meager fare and other necessities by mending watches and at the various tinkering jobs that reached him from outside. Shoe-making was the favorite occupation of his fellow-jailbirds. More than a dozen had their open “cells” scattered with odds and ends of leather and half-finished footwear. Formerly, the public had passed freely in and out of the prison, and prisoners, underbidding free labor, since their lodging was already supplied them, had always earned enough to satisfy their appetites. Now, the rules had become somewhat more strict, at least to outsiders, and with less opportunity to sell their wares more than one inmate suffered from hunger.
We passed into one of the two large common rooms, foul-smelling mud dens in which “Thompson” had seen as many as 37 persons of both sexes and all degrees of crime, age, and condition sometimes locked in for an entire month by some whim of carcelero or judge. The room being completely innocent of any convenience whatever, the conditions of prisoners and prison when the door might finally be unlocked needs no description. Just now the room was open, and there were but 26 inmates, men and women mixed indiscriminately, for there were no rules, even at night, as to the sleeping-places of the two sexes. The female prisoners, in fact, earned their food as do so many cruceñas outside, from such of the male inmates and soldier guards as could reward their favors, and had advanced to a point where even privacy was no longer requisite. Even then several slovenly couples reclined together on the uneven floor in half-amorous attitudes, and on a species of crippled bed in a corner sat an evil-eyed fellow of some negro blood, on the floor at whose feet, her uncurried head resting affectionately between his legs, squatted a native woman in the early thirties, who might years before have been almost beautiful. She had killed the “Turk” with whom she had been living, and was for a time under sentence to be shot. The president, however, after making her two accomplices draw lots for fifteen years’ imprisonment and execution respectively—by Bolivian law two persons cannot be executed for the same crime—the supreme penalty falling upon a Chilian, had commuted her sentence to ten years. Outside the prison the rumor was prevalent that her lenient treatment arose from the fact that she had borne a son to the prosecuting attorney.
During my stroll my companion ceremoniously introduced me to several of the six “gringo” prisoners. One was a German-Peruvian, eight months before the manager of a local bank, and since then in prison, still untried, on the charge of disposing of bad drafts. When a powerful company does not feel it has sufficient evidence to convict a man whose arrest it has caused, it is the Bolivian custom to see that the judge does not bring the case to trial. Nearly every government official semi-openly having his price, the prisons are apt to hold chiefly those who have underbid in the contest for “justice.” “Thompson” asserted—and he was corroborated by many outside the cárcel—that for some £200 he could make his escape. The savage half-Indian conscripts serving as carceleros vented their hatred of the gringos at every opportunity, and made their lives constantly miserable by watching for the slightest breaking of the rules to give them an excuse to shoot. In former times, when rubber was high in price, the Intendente de la Policía frequently sold prisoners to the “rubber kings” of the Beni at 1000 bolivianos a head, and it was a rare victim of this system who did not end his days as a virtual slave in the Amazonian forests.
As we shook hands at the gate of the inner patio, “Thompson” remarked:
“If Montes signs it, I’ll have forty-eight hours left with nothing to do and I’ll write you something. I believe the thoughts of a man waiting to be shot”—it was the only time he used that word during the interview—“would make interesting reading. The ending would be all right if these Indians could make a good job of it, but they’ll end by bashing in my head with the butts of their muskets, as they have all the others.”
If I have inadvertently given the impression that there are no stern laws and rules of personal conduct in Santa Cruz de la Sierra let me hasten to disavow it as quickly as I was disabused in the matter myself; for it was here that I tarnished my hitherto spotless record for non-arrest in South America. I had come to give “Thompson” a bundle of American weeklies and was leaving the prison again, when a German who had ridden in from Cochabamba asked me to serve as interpreter while he procured a gun license. As we stepped into the comandancia, an anemic, yellow-skinned half-Indian youth in uniform shouted in the most insolent tone at his command, “Take off your hats!” The German quickly snatched his close-cropped bullet head bare, but the tone aroused my antagonism in spite of myself; moreover, a dozen unwashed natives lounged about the miserable mud hall with their hats on. To obey the orders of this class of Latin-American officials requires a certain degree of humility, of which, thank God, I have not a trace. At the second command I retorted, “What for?”
“In respect for the Bolivian government!” shrieked the evil-eyed, ill-smelling official behind the main desk.
“But I have no respect whatever for the Bolivian government,” I protested, warding off with an elbow the boy soldier who was attempting to snatch the hat from my head; and I stepped out into the street. There I was legally immune. There is no law requiring one to uncover in the streets, even in straight-laced Santa Cruz. But the legal aspect of a case is easily overlooked in Bolivia. The official screamed, “Cabo de la Guardia!”, and there poured out upon me five boy soldiers with loaded muskets, who, clutching at me like cats, began pushing me back into the prison. I had been long enough a policeman myself to know the folly of resisting arrest, however unjustified; moreover, there was an entire regiment of these little brown fellows in town, most of whom would be only too happy to give vent to their dislike of gringos.
Once I had entered an empty mud room on the first patio, the door was quickly bolted behind me and I stood looking out through the wooden-barred window upon the mud-hole yard, back and forth across which marched the jeering little soldiers and several loungers, grinning at me nastily behind their blackened stumps of teeth. I was in great danger—that I should be late for the dinner to which I had been invited at eleven. For though my arrest was not legal, those responsible for it had the very simple old Latin-American expedient of holding me “incomunicado” and keeping everyone outside ignorant of my plight. I sat down on the window-ledge and fell to reading the Spanish paper edition of Ernst Haeckel I was so fortunate as to have with me. A half-hour passed. Meanwhile that dinner was a bare hour away, and formal feasts are not so frequent in tropical Bolivia as to be missed without regret. Luckily, I caught Tommy’s eye as he dodged under the eaves to escape a new cloud-burst and, beckoning him to the window, managed to say, before he was driven off by three soldiers with fixed bayonets, “Go tell the prefect ...”
The matter never got as far as the prefect. No sooner did the comandante of the prison learn that a man, who only yesterday had been hobnobbing with the supreme chief of the department, had been visited with the indignity of imprisonment, than he hastened to order me set at liberty.
Before we leave Santa Cruz, the story of “Thompson” permits a bit of anticipation. Months later, in far southern Chile, I chanced to pick up a newspaper, among the scant foreign despatches of which my eye fell upon:
“Bolivia, 14 May—In Santa Cruz de la Sierra was shot to-day the criminal ’Thompson,’ of English nationality, condemned to the supreme penalty for having assassinated the conductors of money of some local houses.”
Another half-year passed before there reached me in Brazil local papers and letters giving details. According to these, the judge wept when he read the sentence, but “Thompson” shook hands with him, telling him the sentence was just, and that the only criticism he had to offer was that the execution had been so long delayed. As his last favor, he asked that jail conditions be improved, that his friends might be more humanly housed. On his last night he got permission to have a few of these—all jailbirds—to dinner with him, but refused to touch liquor himself, “so I shall be able to take in every detail clearly.” In the morning he informed friends that he had parents, brothers, and sisters in London, and a wife and son in the United States. To these he had been writing since his arrest that he was engaged in an enterprise that would in time make him rich, if luck was with him. On the evening before his execution he wrote bidding them all farewell, saying he had suddenly contracted a tropical disease the doctors despaired of, and would be dead by the time they got the letter. He was shot at noon, while the bells of the cathedral were striking, so that nothing should be heard outside the prison.
In Santa Cruz Tommy fell victim to that loathsome ailment popularly known as “cold feet.” An attack of fever and a hazy promise of employment for his trusty trowel were no doubt among the causes; it is probable, too, that he had not entirely lost faith in the attractiveness of sandy hair. But the inoculation was chiefly due to the replies to our inquiries about the road ahead. These were not exactly reassuring. It was characteristic of Tommy, however, that he pretended to be eager to push on, while secretly planning to remain behind.
There is one of the sand streets of Santa Cruz de la Sierra which does not run out to nothing in the surrounding jungle, but dwindles to what is known locally as the “camino de Chiquitos,” and pushes on to the Paraguay river, some 400 miles distant. “Road” in the cruceño sense, however, means anything but a comfortable highway. As usual, the town was scornful of the suggestion that two lone gringos could make the journey on foot. Disheartening stories assailed us of the dangers from snakes and “tigers,” of the unending pest of insects, of the almost total lack of sleeping-places and even of supplies. For the first week we must carry all food with us; in this rainy season the route was sure to abound with chest-deep mud-holes and miles of swamps; the last twenty leagues, near the Paraguay, would be completely inundated and impassable for months, until the waters subsided. Or, if the rains did not come on at their accustomed time, there was as much danger of the country being wholly waterless for long distances. Moreover, beyond the Rio Guapay, eight leagues east of the capital, stretched the notorious Monte Grande, a dense, unbroken forest in which roamed wild Indians given to shooting six-foot arrows of chonta, or iron-heavy black palm, from their eight-foot bows, with such force that they pass clear through a man at fifty yards. This was said to be quite painful. Nor were these mere idle rumors; we had only to drop in on one of several men in town to be shown arrows taken from the bodies of victims, and a sojourning fellow-countryman had several relics of the tribe he had had the good fortune to see first while prospecting on the banks of the Guapay.
Reading Tommy’s real opinion of the journey behind his face, I laid plans to continue alone. Experienced travelers asserted that boiled water, a careful diet, a selected medicine-kit, waterproofs, a tropical helmet, and a woolen cholera-belt for night chills were prime necessities. I had all but six of this half-dozen requisites. By choice I should have turned rural native entirely and worn a straw hat, a breechclout, a pair of leather sandals, and a towel. But life can seldom be reduced to such charming simplicity. Two things at least were indispensable,—a cloth hammock and a mosquitero to hang over it; for the only sleeping-place on most of the journey would be that which the traveler carried with him. Then I must “hacer tapeque,” as they say in Santa Cruz, or “pack” a bag of rice and some sheets of sun-dried beef, to say nothing of distributing about my person a kodak, revolver, cartridges, and money in various forms of metal. Add to this a few indispensable garments, sealed tins of salt and matches, kitchenette, photographic and writing materials, and the other unavoidable odds and ends for a scantily inhabited 400-mile trip of unknown duration, and it will be readily understood why, after mailing the developing-tank and even my coat, razor and accessories, I staggered heavily across town on January 8th, to begin the longest single leg of my South American journey.
Fortunately, the German who had sought my assistance in the matter of the gun license, was bound for at least a few days in the same direction. Heinrich Konanz, born in Karlsruhe, had served the last of three years as a conscript in the expedition against the Chinese Boxers, and had since worked as a carpenter in China and California, until he had concluded to seek a permanent home as a colonist in some region where population was less numerous. He was largely innocent of geography, spoke habitually a painful cross between his once native tongue and what he fondly fancied was English, with a peppering of Chinese, and knew almost no Spanish. The mule that had carried him from Cochabamba he found it necessary to turn into a pack-animal for the tools, materials, and provisions he had purchased in Santa Cruz, and was to continue on foot. He had been placidly making plans to push on alone, when rumors in his own tongue suddenly reached him of the Monte Grande and its playful Indians. His first inclination had been to throw up the sponge and return to Cochabamba. But his capital had been greatly reduced and his hotel room was heaped with the supplies sold him by his local fellow-countrymen, who would not have taken them back at a fourth of the original cost. He made a virtue of necessity, added a new rifle to his revolver and shotgun, and offered to find room on the mule for the heavier portion of my baggage in return for the reassurance of my company.
It was a brilliant day when I shouldered the German’s rifle, my own revolver well oiled and freshly loaded, and led the way out of town. Mud-holes, along which we picked our way on rows of the whitened skulls of cattle, soon gave place to a great pampa, with tall, coarse grass and scattered trees, across which lay a silent sand road so utterly dry that we had already suffered long from thirst when we reached the first “well,” a mud-hole thick with green slime, attesting by its taste the also visible fact that all the cattle for miles around made it their loafing-place and protection from the swarms of flies and insects. Here we not only drank, but filled the German’s water-bag. When the liquid mud in this gave out, my companion took to lapping up that in the cart-ruts and the footprints of cattle along the trail. I held out until I overtook a boy carrying on his head a pailful of guapurú (wah-poo-roó), of which I bought a hatful for a medio. This is a fruit cruelly like a large luscious cherry in appearance, growing without a stem on the trunk of a gnarly pampa tree, of a snow-white meat not particularly pleasant to the taste, but a welcome antidote for tropical thirst.
Twice during the day we met a train of heavy, crude ox-carts roofed with sun-dried ox-hides, that recalled the “prairie-schooners” of pioneer days, eight oxen to each, creaking westward with infinite slowness. In the afternoon the forest closed in about us, and we plodded on through deep sand alternating with mud-holes. Soon all the woods about us were screaming like a dozen suffragette meetings in full session and, fancying the uproar came from edible wild fowls, I crept in upon them, rifle in hand. To my astonishment, I found a band of small monkeys shrieking together in a huge tree-top. Even a monkey steak would not have been unacceptable. I fired into the branches. Instantly there fell, not the wherewithal for a sumptuous evening repast, but the most absolute silence. The little creatures did not flee, however, but each sprang a limb or two higher and watched my slightest movement with brilliant, roving eyes. A qualm came upon me and I hurried after the German.
That night we camped in a clump of trees about a water-hole. The native who pointed out the trail to it did so in a surly, regretful manner, as if he resented the consumption by strangers who should have remained in their own country of a priceless treasure insufficient for home consumption. Down at the bottom of a deep hole in the sand, strongly fenced with split rails, was an irregular puddle barely four inches deep, full of fallen leaves, wrigglers, and decayed vegetable matter; yet from it radiated trails in all directions. The blocks of crude brown sugar we had purchased that morning had melted during the day and smeared everything within reach; the boiled leg of mutton already whispered its condition to the nostrils. The breeze a slight knoll promised treacherously died down, and the swarms of insects that sung about us all night frequently struck home, in spite of the close-knit mosquitero that kept us running with sweat until near dawn.
Monkeys were already howling in the nearby woods when we pulled on our clothes, wet and sticky, in a soggy morning that soon carried out its promise of rain; and parrots now and then screamed at us in dull-weather mood. A heavy shower paused for a new start and became a true jungle deluge. My poncho would have been useless; besides, it was wrapped, in Australian “swag” style, around my possessions on the mule. Past experience told me that the only reliable waterproof in the tropics is to let it rain—and dry out again when opportunity offers. We settled down to splash on indifferently, soaked through and through from hat to shoes, dripping at every seam. The weather was not over warm either, and only the heaviest moments of the storm dispersed the swarms of ravenous mosquitoes.
In dense woods punctuated with mud-holes, a yellow youth in two cotton garments overtook us well on in the afternoon, and asked if we would need a “pelota.” We would. He stopped at a jungle hut some distance beyond and emerged with an entire ox-hide, sun-dried and still covered with the long red hair of its original owner, folded in four like a sheet of writing paper, on his head. For a mile or more he plodded noiselessly behind us. Then suddenly the forest opened out upon the notorious Guapay, or Rio Grande, a yellow-brown stream, wide as the lower Connecticut, flowing swiftly northward to join the Mamoré on its journey to the Amazon. We splashed a mile or more up along its edge, to offset the distance we should be carried downstream before striking a landing opposite. Here two men of bleached-brown skin, each completely naked but for a palm-leaf hat securely tied on, relieved our companion of his load and set about turning it into a boat. These “pelotas de cuero” (“leather balls”) are the ferries of all this region, being transportable, whereas a wooden boat, left behind, would be stolen by the “indios bravos.” Around the edge of the hide were a dozen loopholes through which was threaded a cord that drew it up into the form of a rude tub. To add firmness to this, the hat-wearers laid a corduroy of green poles in the bottom. Then they piled our baggage into it, set the German atop, and dragged it down the sloping mud bank into the water, while the youth coaxed the mule into the stream and swam with it for the opposite shore. This seemed load enough and to spare. But when I had fulfilled my duties as official photographer of the expedition, I, too, was lifted in, as they would no doubt have piled in Tommy also, had he been with us, and away we went, easily 500 pounds, speeding down the racing yellow stream, the naked ferrymen first wading, then swimming beside us, clutching the pelota, the “gunwales” of which were in places by no means an inch above the water. Had the none-too-stout cord broken, the hide would instantly have flattened out and left us—for an all-too-brief moment—like passengers on the magic carpet of oriental fairy-tales.
Before and high above us, where the peloteros coaxed the crazy craft ashore, stretching like a Chinese wall of vegetation further than the eye could follow in either direction, stood an impenetrable forest, the famous Monte Grande, or “Great Wilderness,” of Bolivia. Here was the chief haunt of the wild Indians of the penetrating arrow, a region otherwise uninhabited, through which the “road” to the Paraguay squeezes its way for hundreds of miles almost without a shift of direction. We swung our hammocks on the extreme edge of the river, where the breeze promised to blow—and failed of its promise, like most things Latin-American. For though the day was not yet spent, the journey through the Monte Grande is fixed in its itinerary by the four “garrisons” maintained some five leagues apart by the Bolivian government as a theoretical protection against the nomadic Indians. At dusk a man swam the river with his clothing and possessions in the brim of his hat, and soon afterward the stream began to rise so rapidly that it is doubtful if we could have passed it for several days.
Almost at once, in the morning, we met a train of nine enormous roofed carts of merchandise from Europe by way of Montevideo, each drawn by eight yoke of gaunt, way-worn oxen, straining hub-deep through the mire at a turtle’s pace. The forest crowded them so closely on either hand that we must back into it, as into the shallow niche of an Inca wall, and stand erect and motionless until the train had crawled by, the wilderness bawling and echoing a half-hour with the cries of the dozen drivers with their long goads dodging in and out, knee-deep in mud, among the panting brutes. We met no other person during the day. Travelers through the Monte Grande go always in bands, and the ox-drivers stared at us setting out alone, as at gringo madmen.
We deployed in campaign formation. Our revolvers loose in their holsters, the German marched ahead, closely followed by his affectionate “mool,” while I brought up the rear with his new Winchester. Mine was the post of honor and most promise, for the Indians of the Monte Grande do not face their intended victims, but spring from behind a tree to shoot the traveler in the back, and dodge back out of sight again. They shoot seated, using the feet to stretch the bow, a slight advantage, in point of time, to their prey. Rumor has it that the tribe is by nature peaceful; but they were long hunted for sport and are still shot on sight, with no questions asked, and so have come to look upon all travelers as tribal enemies. They are said to be entirely nomadic, to wear nothing but a feather clout, and to bind their limbs in childhood, so that the forearm and the leg below the knee become mere bone and sinew with which they can thrust their way through the spiny undergrowth without pain. This improvement on nature draws the foot out of shape, and the footprint of a savage, showing only the imprint of the heel, the outer edge of the foot, and the crooked big toe, is easily distinguished from that of the ordinary native. However, that was not my lucky day, and I caught not so much as a kodak-shot at a feather clout, though I glanced frequently over my shoulder all the day through.
But if the Indians failed us, there were other visitations to make up for them. Every instant of the day we fought swarms of gnats and mosquitos; though the sun rarely got a peep in upon us, its damp, heavy heat kept us half-blinded with the salt sweat in our eyes. The road was really a long tunnel through unbroken forest meeting overhead, into which the thorny undergrowth crowded in spite of the ox-cart traffic. All day long, mud-holes, often waist-deep for long distances, completely occupied the narrow forest lane. The region being utterly flat, the waters of the rainy season gather in the slightest depression, which passing ox-carts plough into a slough beyond description; while the barest suggestion of a stream inundates to a swamp all the surrounding territory. For the first mile we sought, in our inexperience, to tear our way around these through the edge of the forest. But so dense was this that it barred us as effectually as a cactus hedge. We took to wading, now to the knees, now to the waist, sometimes slipping into unseen cart-ruts and plunging to the shoulders in noisome slime.
It grew monotonous, but so does life under the best of conditions. Moreover, whatever gloom our surroundings created was more than offset by the German. Not that he was gay, nor, indeed, cheerful under adversity. But the genuine comedian, like an Italian Hamlet, has no inkling of his humor. Konanz was at his best when he fancied himself most tragic, putting me frequently to excruciating labor to preserve outwardly that solemn gravity that was indispensable to peace between us. He insisted on speaking “English.” This astounding tongue he had concocted by the simple rule of learning the corresponding English for each German word, and jealously retaining the German grammar and form; all this with so guttural an accent that the hearer could not distinguish “lake” from “leg.” Thus I was informed that “He put it his hat in,” and “He set him by a boat the river over.” Our snow-white pack-mule was of that affectionate nature that craves constant companionship. But the Teuton had no affection to spare, and whenever the animal chanced to stray a yard from the spot in which he had left her, he fell upon the poor brute with a bellow of rage:
“Oh, py Gott, Mr. Mool! Ven I don’t hat to lug myself der loat all to San Yozay, I rhight avay shoot her der head through. To-morrow, py Gott, I bind her der dree on, der ...”
At sunset we waded through a barred gate into the pascana, or tiny natural clearing, of Cañada Larga, the first of the four fortines. Five miserable thatched huts, some without walls and the others of open-work poles set upright, were occupied by eight boyish soldiers in faded rags of khaki and ancient cork helmets of the same color, and a slattern female belonging to the lieutenant. The latter was a haughty fellow of twenty-five, sallow with fever and gaunt from long tropical residence, a graduate of the Bolivian West Point in La Paz, and permanently in command of all the garrisons of the Monte Grande. The others were two-year conscripts between nineteen and twenty-one, assigned to the forts for a year, usually to be forgotten by the government and left there months longer.
Our official paper ordered the commander to “give us all facilities, wood and water, and to sell us food—provided there was any.” He waved a hand in a bored, tropical way, and two of the handsomest children in uniform brought us wood, and soon came lugging a huge bucket of water on a pole across their shoulders. What food could he sell us? Not a thing. Some yucas, at least? Señor, we have only half rations of rice for ourselves. But the prefect said we could depend.... The prefect, señor, has not sent us any supplies for more than a month. There was nothing left but to cook some of our own rice and charqui, and try to be thankful for even that miserable substitute for food. Its staying powers were slight. Twice during the night I ate a large plate of it cold, and spent most of the time hungry at that. Not that I got up to eat; much of the night I wandered up and down the pascana, fighting the mosquitos and a tiny gnat whose bite was out of all proportion to its size, and which the fine gauze mosquitero designed for the purpose by no means kept out, though it did effectually any breeze that stirred.
The lieutenant insisted on sending along a soldier to “protect” us from the savages. He was a girlish-looking boy of Indian features, armed with an ancient Winchester of broken butt, thick with rust inside and out. Most of the day he lagged far behind, for the sun-dried stretches of road between the swamps and mud-holes hurt even his calloused feet. We tramped unbrokenly for seven hours, the endless forest-wall close on either hand, without sighting another human being, until the jungle opened out slightly on the little pascana of Tres Cruces. The sergeant in command dragged himself out a few yards to meet us, a rifle-shot having warned him of our approach. He had four soldiers and a gnat-bitten female. They called the bucketful they brought us from a swamp, “excellent water.” It was clear, to be sure, and a decided improvement on what we had drunk from the mud-holes during the day, the swampy taste not quite overwhelming. But it was lukewarm from lying out under the sun, and had at least a hundred tadpoles swimming merrily about in it. One dipped up a cupful, picked out the tadpoles gently but firmly, and forced as much of their vacated bath as possible down the feverish throat.
The gnats of Tres Cruces quickly got wind of the arrival of fresh supplies and attacked us in battalions. The previous camp had been gnatless compared to this. Known to the natives as jejenes, they are almost invisible, yet they can bite through a woolen garment or a cloth hammock so effectively that the mosquito’s puny efforts pass unnoticed in comparison. Wherever they alight they leave a red spot the size of a mustard-seed that itches and burns for days afterward. What such a host of them had hoped to feed on, had we not unexpectedly turned up, I cannot guess; surely they were taking long chances of starvation here in the unpeopled wilderness. Under no circumstances did they give us a moment of respite. Even the soldiers, tropical born and long accustomed to them, ate their supper plate in hand, marching swiftly up and down the “parade-ground” and striking viciously at themselves with the free hand. We could not leave off fighting them long enough to lift a kettle off the fire, without a hundred instantly stinging us in as many distinct spots. In bookless Santa Cruz I had had the luck to pick up a paper edition of Nietzsche in Spanish, but even in that tongue the journey through an entire sentence was impossible. I could not write a word or speak a sentence without pausing to slap savagely at some portion of my anatomy. My notes of those days are all short and choppy. A long sentence was impossible. It seemed unbelievable so tiny a thing could bite so. The mosquitero was useless. They could bite through sheet-iron. A real dinner would have been a joy, but an hour’s relief from these incessant pests would have outdone a week of banquets. One wanted to run and dance and scream, but tired feet forbade. Much as we needed rest, we must keep walking swiftly up and down the pascana, wondering how long a man would last on charqui and rice, walking day and night. “Oh, py Gott!” cried Konanz, attempting in vain to slap himself between the shoulder-blades. “In China py der Boxer der mosquito he pinch is very much, aber here!”
Tramping doggedly back and forth in the dusk, I heard the sergeant in his hut singing and apparently happy. I raced to his door. Eureka! Necessity is the mother of invention, even among the uninventive. He was swinging swiftly back and forth in his hammock. I grasped a pack-rope and was soon rushing swiftly through the half-arc of a circle. The relief was startling. But to work incessantly with the arms was little better than tramping the pascana. If only the inventor of perpetual motion had not put his invention off so long. The relief from torture quickly made me drowsy. But if the swinging flagged for an instant, the jejenes at once brought me wide awake. Before long, too, a few hardy gnats solved the problem of catching their prey on the fly, like experienced “hoboes.” More and more learned the trick, until I gave up in despair and took once more to tramping the parade-ground; kept it up, indeed, most of the brilliant, moonlit night.
In the morning I found that ants had eaten into decorative fringes the edges of my leather leggings. Vampire bats had smeared our white mule with her own blood. For a long time I could not make the German understand what had happened to the animal, until I dug up out of the depths of memory the word “Fledermaus.” To watch him pack was always amusing—also a torture. He had learned to do everything in the German style of systematized routine, in which the longest way round is always the shortest way between two points; and he knew nothing of “efficiency,” of that dovetailing of work in such a way as to hasten the process. Instead of lighting a fire first and having his breakfast ready by the time he was dressed, he must be entirely garbed before touching a stick or a pot; and so on clear through the loading. However often he made up the pack, each detail must be laboriously thought out again, and as he could never think of more than one thing at a time, the operation was endless. Bring him what he needed to load next, and he stared stony-eyed at me, as if wondering why I was trying to disturb his meditations. Though we rose at dawn, we were fortunate to be off before the sun had surmounted the jungle tree-tops.
The sergeant insisted, languidly and tropically, on sending one of his armed boys along. We refused. Should anything have happened to the child, such as a sprained ankle in “protecting” us from the savages, we could never have forgiven ourselves. All day long we tramped due eastward through unbroken forest. Monotonously the swamps and mud-holes continued. It would not have been so bad could we have waded all the way barefoot; but the sun-dried stretches between made shoes imperative. Never a patch of clearing, never a sign of human existence—though I still glanced frequently over my shoulder—never the suggestion of a breeze to temper the heat or to break the ranks of the swarming insects! We threw ourselves face-down at any mud-hole or cart-rut, gratefully, to drink. “It was crawlin’ an’ it stunk, but”—anything that can by any stretch of the word be called water is only too welcome in tropical Bolivia. The red-hot poison with which the gnats of days past had inoculated us from head to foot itched murderously. Amateur wilderness travelers have a theory that “dope” smeared over the body will afford protection in such cases, but it would be a strong concoction indeed that could rout the jejenes of the Monte Grande. The only method is to get bit and heal again, as one gets wet and dries again, or goes astray and finds oneself again. The one absolute rule is, Don’t scratch! Not to scratch may drive the sufferer mad, but to do so will drive him doubly insane; and swamp water is infectious to any abrasion of the skin, and an open sore is the greatest peril of tropical travel.
Let it not be fancied, however, that life was sad even with these drawbacks. The song of the jungle was unbroken, the brilliant sunshine joyful, for all its heat. In places the road was completely veiled by clouds of beautiful white butterflies. Sweating freely, there was a spontaneous play of the mental spirits and a sense of splendid physical well-being, not the mind-paralyzing gloom of our northern winters. Up on the high plateau the mind might work as freely, but with this difference: there it seemed to be using itself up, each period of exaltation being followed by the feeling that one was much older, much more worn out, while here there were no such after effects. Though we drank water which, in civilization, would have caused us to die of cramps within an hour, the constant sweating carried off its evil effects, and though gaunt and gnat-bitten, we both looked “the picture of health.” The main rule for keeping well in the tropics is to live on the country, to avoid canned food and dissipation, and above all to get plenty of hard exercise and exposure to the elements. Unfortunately, where food is most needed, it is most difficult to obtain.
A toilsome eighteen miles ended at Pozo del Tigre—there was something fetching about the name of this third fortín,—the “Tiger’s Drinking-place.” Here were four boys, a cossack post in command of a corporal; also at last there was something for sale, for some one had planted a patch of corn back in the forest. Two soldiers brought us choclos and huiro,—green-corn for ourselves and stalks of the same for the mule. The conscripts preferred coffee and rice in payment, for money is of slight value beyond the Rio Grande, but demanded five times what the stuff was worth. It was not sweet-corn, and was either half-grown or overripe, but was welcome for all that. We threw the ears into the fire and raked them out, to munch what was not entirely burned or still raw. The jejenes made it impossible to hold them over the fire to toast. We squatted so closely over the blaze it all but burned our garments, yet the relief was so great, in spite of the smoke in our eyes, that we all but fell asleep into the fire.
The life of these garrisons is dismal in the extreme. The soldiers had absolutely no drill or other fixed duty. In most cases they were too apathetic to plant anything, even to dig a well, however heavily time hung on their hands, preferring to starve on half-rations, to choke in the dry season and drink mud in the wet, rather than to exert themselves. Each “fort” had in the center of the “parade-ground” a crude horizontal-bar made of a sapling. But it was used only for a languid moment, when utter ennui drove some one to it. The impossibility of “team-work” among Latin-Americans was never more clearly demonstrated than by the fact that each soldier cooked his own food separately three times a day over his own stick fire. There was not faith enough among them even to permit division of labor in bringing fire-wood. Each set his marmita, a soldier’s tin cook-pot shaped to fit between the shoulders, on the ends of burning sticks and sat constantly on his heels beside it, lest it spill over as one of the fagots burned away. The fellows were astonished to learn the use of Y-shaped sticks for hanging their kettles.
Toward morning I slept an hour or two from utter exhaustion. It was astonishing how one recuperated for all the day ahead with so short a rest. After all, tramping is not like mental labor; a brief repose is all that is necessary. The savages having deceived us for three days, we lessened our burdens by fastening rifle and shotgun within quick reach on the mule, though still keeping our revolvers handy. Wild animals are commonly hidden away in the silence of the forest, even in such wildernesses, and rarely cross a path used by man; but they are not always unseen. We were tramping side by side when I pointed excitedly at the narrowing vista of the road ahead.
“Deer!” I cried.
The German, his mind perhaps on Indians, all but sprang over his mule. Some two hundred yards ahead a reddish fawn stood grazing, and fresh meat would have been more acceptable just then than eternal riches. As a three-year soldier it was surely my companion’s place to shoot; besides, the rifle and cartridges were his. But he marched stolidly forward. With no officer behind to give a stentorian command, his mind refused to work. Every step was increasing the probability of seeing a splendid venison repast for ourselves and for the soldiers ahead bound away into the trackless forest.
“Schüsse doch!” I cried, in a hoarse whisper.
Alas! I had overlooked the preliminary routine of “Ready! Load! Aim!” The German snatched hastily and blindly at the pack, leveled a gun, and fired. A discharge of bird-shot sprinkled the nearby tree-trunks, and the startled deer sprang with one leap into the unknown. Konanz had caught up the shotgun instead of the rifle!
It must not be gathered, however, that he was not an effective hunter, given prey fitted to his abilities. All this region is noted for its petas, a large land-turtle, with the empty charred shells of which any camping-ground is sure to be scattered. During the afternoon the German actually ran one down.
Tied on the pack, it arrived at the fourth and last fortín of the Monte Grande, Guayritos, a larger clearing surrounded by matorrales or palm-tree swamps, and noted for attacks by the savages. The corporal ordered one of his three men to prepare the turtle. He split it open with a machete and, removing all the meat, spitted the liver, the chief delicacy, on a stick, while I set the rest to boiling. When it had cooked for an hour, the addition of a handful of rice and a chip of salty rock made the most savory repast of several days. All through the cooking Konanz had sat moodily by, fighting clouds of jejenes and smoking furiously for protection. When the meal was ready he refused to touch it. Evidently turtle is not eaten in the German army. But for once the inner man all but overcame the iron discipline of years. It may have been the smoke that brought tears to his eyes as I fell upon the mess; at any rate he moved away from the fire and went to tramp gloomily up and down the edge of the pascana. The thick muscles, that in life are so strong that a man cannot pull a leg from its shell by main force, were of a dark-red meat far superior to the finest chicken—unless appetite deceived me—and almost boneless. The comatose condition induced by the feast lasted with only an occasional break all night, so that I slept considerably, even though the gnats roared about my net like a raging sea on a distant cliff-bound coast, and a few hundred managed to gain admittance.
A tropical shower was raging when we finished loading. Even the soldiers were in a snarling mood. The going was so slippery that it was painful. For long distances there were camelones or barriales, as the interminable corduroy-like mud ridges with troughs of slime between them are called. Every step was perilous, until we were splashed and soaked from hat-crown down; after that a misstep and a sprawl did not matter. Skeletons of oxen were numerous along the way. When the rain ceased, the day remained thick, and the heat was heavy enough to cut with a spade. For long stretches we waded waist-deep through swamps of long green grasses. A few slight pascanas began to break the endless forest. In one of them, and scattered far beyond, we met the first travelers since entering the woods,—four rusty and mud-plastered wagons, hopelessly mired, others with their several yokes of oxen lying indifferently in water, mud, or on dry land.
That afternoon our journey seemed to have come ignominiously to an end. An immense swamp or lake a half-mile wide spread across the trail and far away in both directions into the now thinner forest, the notorious “curiche de Tuná.” We attempted to flank it, only to have a faint side path end in the impassable tangles of an even greater swamp. Wandering in this for an hour, we regained the road at last, and, putting everything damageable in our hats and strapping our revolvers about our necks, attempted the crossing. The lake proved only chest-deep, but the glue-like mud-bottom all but swallowed up the mule, and the pack emerged streaming water from every corner.
The sun was getting low when we sighted a little wooded hill above the sea-flat forest ahead. The road dodged the hillock, however, and we slushed hopelessly on through endless virgin forest. Night was coming on. The insignificance of man in these primeval woods was appalling. Suddenly a large, rail-fenced cornfield appeared in a clearing beside the “road,” but this plunged on again into the wilderness without disclosing any other sign of humanity. Darkness was upon us when a man in white rode out of the gloom ahead, and all but fell from his mule in astonishment. We had passed unseen the branch trail to the scattered hamlet of El Cerro, a score of thatched huts, constituting the first civilian dwelling of man beyond the Rio Grande.
XXI. SKIRTING THE GRAN CHACO
We took possession of a galpón, a thatched roof on poles, up in the edge of the jungle. But the anticipated feast was scanty. El Cerro had little to sell and less desire to sell it. Konanz was so completely worn out that he threw himself down supperless, without even swinging his “hang-net.” After a hut to hut canvass I coaxed a cerrito to sell a pound of fresh beef, which, with rice and some little red beans, made such a stew as roused even the German from his stupor. We topped it off with the succulent luxury of an empanisado, a smeary block of crude, dark-brown, unpurified sugar, wrapped in leaves and costing eight times what it would have in the jungles of north Peru. Of this we each ate fully a pound, so great was our craving for sweets. Gnats were few in El Cerro, and we slept such a night as seldom comes to the tropical wanderer.
Two of them, for that matter. For a time next morning it looked as if I should have to continue alone, “packing” my own food and possessions. Konanz liked the appearance of the soil round about El Cerro and was half inclined to settle there. We went to discuss the matter with the horseman of the night before, a Spaniard long resident in the region, I acting as interpreter. But in spite of my over-fairness in trying not to influence his plans, the German decided to push on a few days further, chiefly because the best land was largely held by absentee owners. But he insisted on resting for a day. We removed some of the grime of travel and dried out ourselves and possessions, and in the end even “fed up.” For, seeing us by daylight, the people of El Cerro regained confidence and decided that they had more to sell than they had fancied. For twenty centavos a woman brought us the first bucketful of clear water we had seen beyond Santa Cruz. I canvassed the town thoroughly and gleaned some green plantains, three eggs, and a sheet of charqui, and finally metamorphized sixty centavos into a spring chicken. Most of the inhabitants were too apathetic to plant anything to break the endless monotony of their rice diet, to say nothing of being too selfish to part with what little they did grow. Their clothing consisted of two calico garments and a straw hat for the men and a species of flying night-dress for the women; and their industry was chiefly confined to lying in a hammock in the shade. The women carried their children astride a hip, as in the Orient, the Andean custom of slinging the papoose on the back having entirely disappeared. Each family kept a smudge fire burning just outside the door, as a protection against the jejenes. Rested up and somewhat relieved from the “pinch” of insects, Konanz grew reminiscent and now and then prefaced some characteristically Teutonic anecdote with some such dreamy remark as:
“In China ve every day chip more ass two hunderd heads from der Boxers off.”
Beyond El Cerro the landscape changes. The dense Monte Grande with its glue-like loam gives place to a few suggestions of rocks and hills, and the palm-trees and frondoso vegetation characteristic of Chiquitos appear. From the “Panteón,” a bit of clearing in the jungle, with blackened wooden crosses tied together with jungle creepers standing over the graves of former residents of El Cerro, we caught a short-cut through somewhat thinner forest to the scattered hamlet of Motococito, so named from the motocú with which the roofs are thatched. Then we went on all day without another sight of humanity. Now and again the trail undulated over little rocky ridges, where the woods were a bit more open and the danger from wild Indians—if there ever was any—decreased. All day the unshaded tropical sun beat down upon us like molten lead. In the afternoon an enormous palmar,—a swamp with a sort of leaf-and-bulb growth protruding from the water and thickly grown with slender palm-trees—opened out on our left and we should have had to wade for miles chest-deep but for a new trail recently cut along the edge of the stony, wooded hills, not always out of reach of the rising waters. Birds large and small, from herons to noisy parrakeets, enlivened the vast, flooded wilderness.
About four, we made out through the salt sweat in our eyes the first cattle-ranch beyond the Rio Grande, and soon limped into the corral of the “Estancia Equito,” at the foot of a slight knoll. A large two-story house in wretched condition faced a yard overrun with swine and carpeted with the trodden droppings of animals. From the balcony above, a surly Indian-negro female grumpily gave us permission to spend the night where we were, and offered no further assistance. Konanz had dropped on his back in the first patch of shade and could not be stirred, even to unload the mule; which was as well, for when tired out he was hopelessly rattle-brained and apt to be of more annoyance than assistance. While I piled our possessions into a covered cart out of reach of the militant pigs, he complained of being ill and for the first time accepted some quinine pills. Evidently these are permitted the Kaiser’s troops, once they are visibly ailing. The meanness of the estancieros was so Bolivian that they would not even point out a water-hole. I hobbled about for some time without finding anything better than a hog-wallow, which dogs, fowls, and the Indian servants used indiscriminately. The breath of the cattle corral drove off the insects somewhat, but the inhabitants, two and four-legged, gave us no peace where I had swung the hammocks after much effort. I coaxed the German to his feet, and with half the load on the mule, half on my own back, led the way a few hundred yards down the road to some abandoned reed-and-mud shacks. It required a considerable tramp to gather dry wood, and the water, sickly warm and ill-scented, had to be carried a long distance from a swamp completely covered with a weedy bulb. Luckily, we had acquired in El Cerro the “sister” of yesterday’s chicken, which, in spite of having jolted on the pack all day under the blazing sun, was still half-alive. By the time I had “chipped” off its head, performed the autopsy with a dull machete, and finally sat down to supper—quickly to get up again under the flagellation of insects—black tropical night had fallen, and it was not easy to fetch more water to wash the dishes, without falling into the source of supply. The German had not stirred since he had dropped on his back again—except to drink a pail of soup and eat two drumsticks and a wing. Then I must fetch another sackful of water, for the sweat of the day, drying on the body, made the gnat-bitten skin so many square inches of torture. Under the circumstances bathing was no easy task. To have calmly disrobed would have been to be instantly flayed alive by the army of insects. I piled on brush until the flames blazed high, though artificial heat was not exactly required, then threw sand upon them until only a heavy smudge remained. Standing astride this, weeping copiously, mosquitos and jejenes falling furiously in massed formation upon any patch of skin for an instant unsmoked, I poured the sackful over me, and finally rolled into my hammock in the streaming moonlight between two palm-trees.
Under the mosquitero the sweat ran in streams along my itching skin; outside it millions of insects fought to reach me, not a few succeeding. Bulls wandered by, bellowing in amorous anger. Now and then one paused to sniff at me, pawed the earth savagely, and thrust his snout and horns madly into it. Long rolls of thunder sounded in the east, growing louder and nearer. The flashes of lightning became almost continuous. But the sudden coolness and the fleeing of the insects before the rising wind gave such a relief from torture that I fell quickly asleep. Suddenly huge raindrops struck me in the face, and before I could snatch down the hammock and race for one of the ruined shacks, the skies were pouring. Then I must go back for my possessions, the damageable portion of which I had taken the precaution to tie in a bundle. Konanz had gone to no such trouble, so that all he owned was scattered over the surrounding country, and such things as we were able to snatch in the flashes of lightning proved in the morning to be those that could best have stood a wetting. We swung our hammocks again in separate shacks, and enjoyed some relief from heat and insects. But only a corner of the split-bamboo roof above me did not leak like a sieve, and that was not sufficient to cover more than half my length.
The rain had spoiled a tolerable road, tons of which we carried along in the first fatiguing miles of slipping and sliding with every step. All day we slapped through “der chungle” with no other sound than the swish of our footsteps, as monotonously rhythmical as the ticking of a clock. The mule had transferred her affections to me, perhaps because I did not use a cudgel on her flanks or torture her ears with a stentorial guttural bellow at every step, and no dog ever followed a fond master more closely. Had I climbed a tree, the animal would certainly have got up after me somehow. Konanz was therefore advanced to rear-guard. The woods being a bit more open, we managed to dodge some of the sloughs by crawling around them, though at the expense of being torn and cut by cactus, wild pineapple leaves, and every known species of thorny tropical undergrowth, so that each day saw us bleeding from a score of superficial lacerations and our clothing rapidly becoming a tissue of tatters. But the mule hated to wet her dainty feet, and must be pushed bodily into each mud-hole and driven through it with loud words and well-aimed clods, even then often turning back to follow me through the underbrush. Once, in mid-morning, when I fancied her well across a slough, I heard a crashing in the brush behind me and turned just in time to see the affectionate animal emerge stark naked from between two trees, the pack stripped completely off her.
“Now you see vat you do!” cried the German tearfully.
“What who did?” I demanded. “Is it any fault of mine that the sex pursues me through thick and thin?”
But he was already studying out which knot of the diamond-hitch to tackle first in such an emergency.
In a way it would have been easier to carry my own bundle than to work for and humor the German so incessantly. A species of tropical madness, familiar to many travelers in the wilds, frequently came upon him. The simple question of whether or not he wished a block to sit on would bring from him a roar of rage, as if he who did not know his wishes in the matter were the king of fools. It was all but impossible to keep up my notes, to say nothing of lifting myself above the surroundings by an occasional page of Nietzsche. If I dared draw out pen or book during a pause in the shade at noonday, steeling myself against the swarming insects, my companion took to looking askance at such occupation. Like most illiterates—meaning by that those who can, but have not the habit of reading—he subconsciously resented such action. Perhaps it isn’t done in the best circles of the German army. He had not heard of Nietzsche, but admitted during a cheerful mood that it sounded like a German name. In most cases he quickly found some useless topic of conversation, or some chore for me to do, going so far as to fly into an open rage if I ignored these hints. His moods were varied. From the deepest gloom, in which he would not answer yes or no to the simplest question, he would grow suddenly bland and garrulous, almost maudlin in his good humor, from no apparent cause, and a bare half-hour after some fit of rage he would be bellowing songs of the Fatherland in a voice to call down upon us all the savages of the region, had the peril not been neutralized by a lack of tunefulness tending to produce the opposite effect. The German army ration, he took frequent occasion to specify, consists of exactly so many grams of this, that, and the other, and Konanz considered any man who wanted his supplies in any other proportions a pervert, a weakling, and a rascal.
Once we passed a train of ox-cars laden with boxes of merchandise marked “Via Montevideo en transito para Bolivia,” suggesting that the Atlantic was becoming more accessible than the Pacific. Most of them also bore the information “Ausfuhrgut,” denoting their origin; and all were so old and weather-worn that they seemed to have been months on the road. Indeed, goods for Santa Cruz have been known more than once to be two years en route. The government seeks to make this trans-Bolivian route more popular by reducing by 15 percent the duty on imports by way of Puerto Suarez.
Beyond a swamp which we managed only partly to dodge we met a disorganized band of soldiers, each attended by his chola, who might be, but probably in most cases was not, his wife, crawling painfully toward Santa Cruz with strange assortments of odds and ends on their backs, including the indispensable hammock each and several babies. According to them, the next settlement was so far distant that we gave up hope of reaching it that day and camped in the road, where there was barely room to pile our baggage beside a mud-hole for cooking and drinking. Every hint of breeze was cut off by the forest walls high above us, and the night that followed our stew of rice, beans, and charqui was one to be quickly forgotten—if possible. Stripped naked, the sweat ran off me in streams, soaking through the hammock. Into this the iron-jawed insects swarmed in such masses, in spite of the net, that I was forced to abandon it to them entirely. For a time I tramped up and down the road in the moonlight. But every few steps I stumbled half asleep. I built a fire about my hammock and covered it with sand, but the smudge had little effect on the insects and made the heat and sweat all the more unendurable, so that I stumbled back and forth in the roadway most of the night.
We tramped four red-hot hours to Piococa, all but falling on our faces from sleepiness, and dodging the worst sloughs only by many a struggle with the jungle. Here, in a small open green backed by rock-faced, wooded hillocks, was the estancia-house of a cruceño to whom I had a letter. Only an Indian girl, stupid and filthy beyond words, was there, however, and we got a guinea-hen and some boiled yuca at last only by infinite coaxing. At least there was plenty of rich grass for the mule, and a clear running stream in which I bathed and laundered and lay emerged most of the afternoon in protection from the gnats. In our hammocks under the trees the insects were almost as bad as ever. The only possible relief was to walk swiftly up and down. Had I been alone, I should have pushed on without a stop until I reached a place of rest, but the German was so worn out that not even the “pinching” of the mosquitos could stir him up. There was at least a certain curiosity to know how long the human frame could hold up under these unbroken hardships.
At dusk three youths rode up on saddled steers, the chief means of transportation in these parts. The saddles were not unlike our “Texas,” and the single leather rein passed from the ring in the nose over the forehead of the animal, between the horns. Steers cross deep mud more easily than horses or mules, but are much slower and more easily exhausted, and the width of their flanks makes long riding painful to the hips. The motion is mildly like that of the camel. The natives sat for hours all but motionless, smoking cigarros de chala, cigarettes rolled in corn-husks. Between a few gnat-bitten snatches of sleep I tramped the yard, pausing now and then to squat beside the fire that smudged all night before the native hut, forming a veritable curtain of smoke through which the insects hesitated to pass. The family inside swung in their hammocks all the night through. What secret means the people of this region have to keep their hammocks constantly moving, while to all appearances they are sound asleep, I was never able to learn. More than once I watched them for a long half-hour swinging back and forth with no evident means of propulsion, lying all but on their backs, one bare leg hanging over the edge of the hamaca, as if these children of the wilderness had long since solved the problem of perpetual motion that civilization has so far sought in vain.
In the morning the tendency to fall down asleep in full march remained. The road was wider and the forest more open, so that the sun beat upon us like an open puddling-furnace. We paused to drink from any cart-rut or swamp, and to wash from our eyes the blinding sweat that quickly filled them again. A huge hairy spider now and then ran by underfoot. The natives say they are deadly. We did not halt to investigate. Beyond the breathless corner of the woods where we cooked the last of our beans we met a welcome sight,—a woman with a bundle on her head; not merely the first traveler since passing the soldiers, but a sign that we were approaching a town. An hour further on we waded a small river, climbed a gentle slope heavy in sand, and found ourselves in a silent hamlet of sandy streets and an enormous grass-grown plaza backed by a stone church, as out of proportion to its surroundings as the Escorial in its village. We had reached at last the famous old town of Saint Joseph.
The heels of my boots had worn away until they protruded from my ankles like spurs, and I had been forced to chop them off entirely with the machete. My hat had been trampled by the German and the mule during the thunder-storm until it was no longer recognizable. Torn, smeared, and bewhiskered with twelve days of jungle travel and mud-hole wading, tattooed from hair to soles with insect arabesques, bleached and faded by sweat and the raging sun, we were no fit sights for a ladies’ club as we hobbled out upon the broad plaza. One of the huts facing it was the home and office of the subprefect. He, however, was “out on his farm” a few miles away, recuperating no doubt from the rush and roar of the city. “But all strangers lodge in the monastery.” We hobbled in at a door under the four-story stone tower of that incongruous church, and found ourselves in a former residence of the Jesuits. The traveler asks permission of no one, but goes and takes possession; for the owners are far away and long absent. Now the ancient monastery is in the last stages of dilapidation. Under the arched corredores, backed by noisome ruined pens that were once the vaulted cells of monks, were a score of hammock-posts. A half-dozen soldiers and their females occupied some of these. We swung our hammocks in the long space left and picketed the mule out on the grassy plaza. Here and there on the stone walls were crude, life-size drawings of Bolivian boy-soldiers shooting Indians clad in feather clouts and armed with long bows and arrows. Three arched cells up against the church across the patio had been roughly walled up to serve as the provincial jail, with an earth floor and a log of wood as bed or bench, its one window protected by hoop-iron bars a girl could have pushed off with one hand. In the back arches lived the cura, a little, dried-up, hare-minded cholo, with the half-dozen of his children not yet old enough to shift for themselves, and their two mothers. We learned later that he had twenty-two recognized children, some of them men of importance in the department. Though he went about pleading poverty and begging from the Indians, the padre owned nearly half the carts that ply the road through San José, and no small amount of the surrounding acreage.
San José de Chiquitos is the capital of a province so named because the early Spaniards found the doors of the native huts so small, as a protection against gnats and their tribal enemies, that they could only enter them by making themselves chiquitos (tiny) and crawling in on all fours. In 1560 Ñuflo de Chaves, ascending the Paraguay river, founded here the original Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the street plan of which may still be imperfectly traced in the jungle a league away at the foot of a rock-faced hill. This first settlement was later removed to its present site, but in 1695 the Jesuits established here, in what is to-day Bolivian territory, under the name of San José, one of their ten “reductions.” Not even the ruins of Paraguay, the republic most associated with the memory of the Loyalists, give a better notion of the establishments in which the Indian tribes “converted” by the good Fathers were gathered to toil for the safety of their souls and the filling of the coffers of the society in Paris. The mission remains much as it was when the order was expelled from Spanish territory, too isolated to be picked to pieces by visitors, its people too apathetic to make use of its cut-stone for their own buildings.
These “reductions” were all alike in plan,—a large central square was enclosed by a wall, a ditch, and a stockade, as much to keep the “converts” from escaping as to protect them from the wild Indians and the mamelucos of Brazil who came in quest of slaves. An immense church, in the building of which the Padres made use of their subjects as freely as the Pharaohs, stood high above all else. The enormous mission of San José, conspicuous in its grandeur amid the solitude of the jungle as are the monuments of Egypt in their desert setting, was built of brick and stone under Spanish artisans, the four-story tower bearing the date 1748, and a stone sun-dial in the center of the patio, by which we could still tell the hour, that of 1765. From the summit of the tower the town below looked like an oasis in a desert of dense green, stretching ocean-wide on every hand. The huge bells were still suspended by ropes of güembe, a vine used in place of nails in modern constructions, and so strong and durable that it has held these immense masses in place more than a hundred years. The tolling of church-bells, striking even amid the rumble of civilization, was solemn in the extreme above the utter silence of the trackless selva and savage tropical solitudes.
The evidence is convincing that the first Jesuits to arrive were self-sacrificing idealists, filled with a zeal for converts that made even trickery,—decoy Indians, abundance of food, dances and festivals—fair play. Conversion was absurdly simple. Catch an Indian, sprinkle him with holy water, and shut him up within the mission stockade, and his soul was safely on the road to heaven. But once these idealists had gathered the Indians together and won their confidence, they were superseded by astute, hard-headed men of keen business ability, less interested in “saving souls” than in winning temporal power and earthly riches for their society. The later Padres lived like the princes of medieval Europe, surrounded by every luxury the forced labor of the Indians could buy. With virtually a monopoly in trade, having neither wages nor taxes to pay, they were almost wholly free from individual competition. They gave each Indian the education they considered fitting to his place in life, taught as many trades as the society had need of, forbade intercourse with strangers or the learning of the Spanish language, made early marriage compulsory, often mating couples offhand, as did the Incas, and ruled over their subjects sternly, requiring all to rise, eat, work, and sleep in unison at the beating of a bell or drum; in short, they treated the “converts” like valuable domestic animals. From the cradle to the grave the Indian lived in complete submission to the Padres. In church and at work there was a complete segregation of the sexes under the old régime. But by night all were gathered together, often several families under the roof of a single galpón, with all the degeneration of customs thereby suggested. Thanks to the careful fostering of the race, there is said to have been 100,000 “converts” in the “reductions” at the height of Jesuit power. San José is doubly notable historically, for it was here, rumor has it, that the Loyalists were planning to build the capital of a kingdom of their own when they were overtaken by the decree banishing them from Spanish dominions.
The last census in Jesuit days credited San José with more than 2000 inhabitants. To-day it has barely a fourth as many, drowsing through life in low, mud huts scattered carelessly along the sand streets some three blocks on all sides of the plaza. Not a few of the original converts of the Jesuits, suddenly regaining their liberty at the expulsion of the Padres, “went back to the bush,” which accounts for the unmistakable signs of European blood in more than one naked savage laid low by a traveler’s rifle. Even to-day such reversions to type are not unknown; and this, with the drain of the rubber fields of the Beni, has done most to reduce the population to its present low ebb. The inhabitants belong to the same general family as the several tribes of wild Indians that attack travelers on the road across Bolivia, and which are even to-day the terror of San José itself, having more than once assaulted the place with fury. But in the town this Indian blood is commonly mixed with negro or white, and though Spanish is more general, the chiquitana tongue, a branch of the Guaraní or Tupy of eastern South America, is still spoken.
The chiquitano is in features about the antithesis of our inherited Greek idea of beauty. His head is round, with little or no back to it, the hair thick, jet-black, and coarse as a horse’s mane, his face wide, all its features bulky, especially the nose, which recalls the negro, as do also the thick, prominent lips. His eyes are black and rather small, his ears plump and prominent, his teeth generally white and strong, the chin neither prominent nor receding. In color he is light-brown, not unlike the Hindu—or the tint of a tan shoe after a month of wear and polish. His body is heavy, thick-set, and muscular, though without what we call “development” of any particular set of muscles. This thick-setness is even more noticeable in the women than among the men, the former being more erect and high-chested from carrying water-jars and other heavy loads on their heads from childhood. The feet are large, with strong, well-separated toes. Their clothing is simple and excellently adapted to the tropics, where the looser the garment the better the health. The men wear a felt or straw hat and thin cotton jacket and trousers, loose-fitting and generally white in origin, with a wide leather belt containing several pockets and frequently decorated with large silver coins. The women never cover their heads and wear nothing whatever except the tipoy, a single loose gown, thin and white as a night-dress, without sleeves and with the neck cut as low as is possible without danger of losing the garment entirely. In these they frequently march into the stream behind the town—for the inhabitants of this tropical region are far more cleanly than those of the upper plateau—rolling up the garment as the water covers them, until it is folded on the head in the form of a turban. As they arise from the bath, they unfold a clean gown so skillfully that the sharpest glance will catch nothing but tipoy and water. As a race the chiquitanos are extremely independent, and very incommunicative to any than their own people; like all American aborigines, they show outwardly very little of their thoughts and impressions. Hurrying is utterly unknown to them, though at times they work with a leisurely steadiness. They show few signs of affection, or on the other hand of aversion or anger, being, indeed, strangely like automatons or lay-figures in their deportment.
There is far less religion, or at least outward sign of it, in these tropical towns than up on the bleak Andean plateau. Is it because the highlands, drear and mysterious, like Palestine or the wastes of Arabia, bring on a dread that is not felt in the tropics, where nature is, or at least seems, more kindly? When a native dies he is buried at once, then his family and friends start a “santa novena,”—nine days of mourning in which they gather together each day to pray and to drink themselves into complete intoxication. He who has given occasion for the festival is looked upon almost as a benefactor. But there is very little hint of mysticism or worship in these post-mortem antics.
In the “good old days” of Chiquitos, following the expulsion of the Jesuits, the cacique brought each traveler a maid for his service. To-day it is the mothers or sisters who offer the guest of the monastery a companion during his stay. Not even Santa Cruz can compare with the former “reduction” in the complacency of its customs. The Indians of all this region, it seems, were as free and natural in their sexual relations as the ancient Greeks or several other pre-Christian nations, seeing no harm in the indulgence of a natural appetite; and while the Jesuit fathers had a decided influence in other matters, they had little in this respect. Indeed, there is evidence that the Padres set an example in this regard quite at variance with their preaching.
In San José I discovered that Konanz could not speak his mother tongue. We had called on the manager of one of the two “Belgian” houses for information in the matter of homestead colonists in the region, and at every few words my companion spilled over into his home-made “English.” A dozen times I had to remind him that the manager did not understand that tongue. Here was exactly the type of immigrant Bolivia sadly needs, a man prepared to spend his life in the country, capable of sustained toil, and likely to leave strong children behind him. Yet already the politicians of La Paz had given three large syndicates title, almost for nothing, to all the fertile portions of this immense territory, and these held it shut against settlers who did not accept their terms, which, as I heard them outlined to Konanz, virtually made them vassals to the companies. Instead of assisting a fellow-countryman far off here in the wilderness, the manager used all his suave persuasiveness to get my companion’s name signed to a contract of benefit only to his own “Belgian” house, and would in all probability have succeeded had I not been there with counteracting advice in English.
These houses are more jesuitical than their predecessors in exploiting the natives—“and their own employees,” a former one has added, on reading my notes. The bribery of government officials to obtain immense concessions of land which they make no effort to develop is a mere detail of their business methods. They sell at from 200 to 800 percent increase over buying prices even of Puerto Suarez. A German imitation of a $12 American plow was held at 100 bolivianos ($40); a roll of barbed wire at 40 Bls.; ordinary shoes, as much; a four-gallon can of kerosene, 20 Bls. Not merely do the Germans take advantage of their virtual monopoly to buy of the natives at a fifth of the just value, and sell again at five times that; but even their dealings with each other are unprincipled. One episode will stand as typical. A bank failed in La Paz. The government, seeing all the Germans as brothers, notified one of the firms that the bills issued by that bank had become worthless, expecting one house to warn the other. Instead, the manager gathered together all the worthless billetes in his possession and sent them one at a time by natives to the rival house, with orders to make some small purchase and bring back the change in good money.
Barter is the chief form of commerce in all this region. We chanced to be chattering with the manager of a “Belgian” house in San José, when the wobbly-minded old cura came in with a long document written on the firm’s stationery. It proved to be the certificate of baptism of a daughter recently born to the manager, whose “housekeeper” had insisted on this formality. After much chaffering the priest was at last beaten down to three bolivianos for his divine services.
“Caramba!” cried the German, in pretended anger. “If you ’re going to mulct me this way every time, I’ll discharge my housekeeper and bring you no more to baptise. And what are you going to take for those three billetes?” he went on.
The priest ran his dull eyes around the shelves, packed with all manner of cheap imports, until they fell upon a long array of bottles. Then he glanced back at the manager, who was at that moment offering him a cigarette.
“Pues, señor,” mumbled the old ecclesiastic, as he accepted a light, “I wonder if you have a real good wine, proper to say mass with.”
“Cómo no!” cried the German, in his throaty but self-confident Spanish. “There is a splendid wine, just the thing for mass, worth five bolivianos even in Europe, but”—with a wink at Konanz and myself,—“to you, as my compadre as well as priest, I’ll make it three.”
The cura accepted the exchange and wandered back to the monastery with the bottle under his arm. To judge from the condition he was in when we returned to our lodging, he said at least a half-dozen masses that very evening.
We were lolling luxuriously in our hammocks one morning, when a man in a sun-faded straw hat, cotton jacket and trousers, a long lack of shave, and feet that had never known the restraint of shoes, wandered into the compound and asked Konanz if he spoke English. The latter, full of the self-confidence of his race, had already misinformed the newcomer in the affirmative when I drew his attention. There was not a hair of the man’s head that did not cry native, yet he spoke my own tongue rapidly, with only the intangible hint of a foreign accent.
“Where did you learn English?” I yawned.
“Why, I am an American!” came the startling answer. “My name is Jim Powell. We was born in Texas,” he went on without urging. “I don’t remember what place, an’ when I was small paw an’ maw they went away with five of us children because North America was fixin’ to fight. I don’t know what country they was aimin’ to fight, but paw he didn’t want to, ’n’ so we sailed across the ocean to Bolivia. The other seven children was born in Chiquitos, an’ finally paw he up an’ died last year. Maw she’s livin’ out to San Antonio, an’ the rest is mostly scattered around. One of the girl’s married to a judge in Santa Cruz an’ the others is on the rocks.”
His language was that of the “white trash” of our southern states, but was academic compared to the illiterate brogue of his brother, “Hughtie,” who arrived soon after him. The latter had come to Bolivia so young that Spanish and chiquitana were his native tongues. He was a bullock-driver for a native owning several carts, and had recently been released from eight months in the prison of Santa Cruz, at the cost of all he owned,—“Jes’ becoze I killed a feller thet was monkeyin’ with one o’ my women.” Accustomed as we are to transplanted foreigners of all nationalities in our own country, it was a distinct shock to come upon a Bolivianized American. Such atavism brought the reflection that civilization is at best a weak and artificial thing.
So completely native had the pair become that the natives themselves never thought of them as foreigners. “Hughtie” was soon to leave for the Paraguay river with a train of carts, and invited us to go along, pretending, native fashion, that he was in charge of the expedition, of which, in reality, he was a mere peon. When the time set came, he wandered into the monastery to say that we should start the following night—“if thet there mozo finds thet there bull that run away;” or if not, then the next night. “Hughtie” was a true Bolivian in putting his trust chiefly in to-morrow.
The shadow across the Jesuit sun-dial was exactly horizontal when, refreshed by four long gnatless days and nights in San José, we pushed on along a road that stretched like a tunnel through the greenery. Konanz had decided to travel a few days further eastward. The road was of sand that drunk up the rains quickly, but thirst was correspondingly worse. Jejenes were fewer, though swarms of swamp flies added their annoyance. The danger of savages was less than in the Monte Grande; on the other hand “tigers,” as the natives call the jaguar, were said to be plentiful. The mosquitero protected us from these, however, were any protection needed, even when sleeping in the wilderness; for the animal is never known to attack unless it can see the head of its victim. We were soon splashing again waist-deep through swamps, and often wading as laboriously through deep sand between them. Beyond the palm-thatched hamlet of Dolores, where we saw our first wild ostriches, the country grew more open, with scrub trees, the way strewn with appetizing petas, or land turtles, the hollow charred shells of which marked more than one camping-ground of former travelers. We should have reached the ranch of an American off the main trail on the second day, had not the German given out at Las Taperas, a cluster of three huts at the forking of the ways. We camped under a heavily loaded lemon tree, beside a swampy lake backed far off by a blue range of low hills. From this flowed a clear little stream in which I lay most of the afternoon with only my nose and hands out of water and finished the volume of Nietzsche, to the disgust of the German, who did not believe in “vashing all over der body.”
In the morning we struck off by the faint trail around the lake. The day was brilliant, and the going pleasant enough to be enjoyed amid my own meditations. I let the German and his animal draw on ahead, until they were lost to view in the placid chiquitano landscape. At Las Taperas we had bought for twenty cents a whole bunch of the fat little “silky” bananas of the region, and hung them on the pack. As I plodded on through a low scrub forest and a tough and wiry grass, knee-high, hunger gradually intruded upon my dreams, and almost at the instant it grew tangible a fresh banana appeared in the trail before me. After that they were as nicely proportioned to my requirements as manna to the Israelites in a not wholly dissimilar wilderness. But what had become of Konanz? Hour after hour passed without a sign of him. He was not accustomed to lead the way for so prolonged a period. I pushed on more rapidly, not entirely free from visions of savages falling upon him. The sun stood high overhead, casting down its rays like the contents of an overturned melting-pot, when I caught sight of him at last some distance beyond. He lay panting and dripping in the scant shade of a bush, while the mule stood tied to another, eyeing him suspiciously. It was a full minute before he gathered breath to relieve my anxiety.
“Oh, you —— —— mool!” he gasped, shaking his fist at the animal so savagely that it all but tore itself loose, “Rhight avay now I shoot you der head through, you ——”
Expurgated of its adjectives, the story, during which I was forced to retain a deep solemnity, was that the mule,—after having been beaten and kicked during all the loading that morning—had suddenly taken fright when the German started up from a log on which he had rested for a moment, and had run away. For hours the angry Teuton had pursued the animal, trailing her by the clue of bananas she had dropped at intervals for my benefit, until, no doubt frightened to find herself alone in the wilderness, “she come valking pack against me. Chust like a vomans, py Gott! Rhunned avay un’ den gum scneaking pack, pegause she haf to haf der home un’ der master!”
Beyond the rancho of Pablo Rojo the pampa gave place to monte, dense tangled growth not tall enough to shade us from the blazing afternoon sun, yet high enough to cut us off in the trough-like trail from every breath of breeze, until our tongues and throats went parched and charqui-dry, and the red-hot sand sifted in through the holes in my shoes and burned my toes. Konanz could only be coaxed along a mile at a time, between which he lay like a log in any patch of shade to be found. Luckily, the sun was still above the horizon when the endless jungle was enlivened by the welcome sight of a thatched house framed in corn and banana fields and backed by slight wooded ridges. About the gate, toward which we tore our way through jungle grass shoulder-high, were toiling three men in long-uncut hair and beards, barefoot in their leather ajotas, and wearing the customary chiquitano garb of two thin and faded garments topped by sun-faded hats of local weave.
To my astonishment, all three turned out to be Americans. Henry Halsey, whose welcome was as genuine as any I received in South America, though less expressed in words than deeds, was owner of this wilderness estate; his employees were “Chris” and George Powell, younger brothers of the pair we had met in San José. Halsey was a Virginian whose career had ranged from teaching country school to mining in Zaruma and Cerro de Pasco. The altitude bothered him and he had drifted to Paraguay, only to find “too much government” and to push on into this wilderness as far from the world as a man can easily get. Not because the government of Bolivia is an improvement on that of Paraguay, but because its tentacles rarely reach so far into the wilds, he had prospered. He had all but come to grief at the outset, however. Barely had he chosen a knoll on which to build his hut, when he was bitten by a small viper that swelled one leg to thrice its natural size and left him half paralyzed. For four days he could not move from where he lay, and only by good fortune had he water within reach, for no other human being appeared until long after his recovery. Now, with a native wife and child, as well as his peons, he was in no danger of repeating the experience. With American energy he had cleared of the primeval, tropical forest a large space that now waved with corn-fields and sugar-cane, with bananas and productive ground-vines, and had built a large house in the native style and a distillery to turn his sugar-cane into value, while his cattle spread over a broad region in which he had no neighbor to dispute his sway. His chief problem was to get peons; for as often as a native was named subprefect of the district, he rounded up all the laborers for many miles around and forced them to work on his own estate. Thus Halsey was reduced to the intermittent assistance of “Chris” and George. These Bolivian-born sons of the Texan who didn’t “aim” to fight were as truly peons as the lowest of the natives. They were subject to the same “slavery” that prevails in all the region, hiring themselves out for an advance and getting ever more deeply into debt to their employer. “Chris” was just then “working out” a rifle, and his brother a saddle-steer. They had all the diffidence of the native peon, the same point of view, the same loose habits, spoke “English” only when forced to, lamely and without self-confidence, ending every sentence with an appealing, “Ain’t thet right, maw?” to their mother. The latter was strikingly typical of the erosion of customs, a “poor white” of our south grafted upon the life of tropical Bolivia. Completely illiterate, barefoot, bedraggled as any native woman, whom she went one better by incessantly chewing tobacco, she had wholly succumbed to her environment, and spoke fluently one of the most atrocious imitations of Spanish it has ever been my fortune to hear in a long experience with all grades of that tongue.
Here we made up royally for all the hungry days behind us. The products of Halsey’s exotic industry ranged all the way from fowls to milk—huge bowls of real, honest-to-goodness milk, unboiled, unspoiled in any Latin-American way—lacking only bread, which could not be had in these wilds at a dollar a nibble. Its rôle was filled by cold boiled squash, or plantains fried in lard. The craving for sweets I found was no personal weakness. Halsey ate huge quantities of sugar—which he refined by the primitive method of covering it with a layer of mud—sprinkling it on every possible dish and often munching it like candy. The longing for fats or grease, commonly supposed to be chiefly confined to the arctic regions, was also extraordinary in this climate. So great was the demand for lard that it sold at 50 cents a pound; the axle-grease supplied by the owners of bullock-carts was mixed with soap to prevent the peon drivers from eating it. Among the children of the region dirt-eating, due to some morbid condition of the stomach, is almost universal, frequently resulting in death unless the vigilance of parents is constant. The majority are chalky white, weak and sickly, with enormous, protruding bellies. One of Halsey’s sources of income was the carting of salt from the salinas, shallow lakes some days to the south, around the shores of which it gathers in large quantities, to the neighboring hamlet of San Juan, where it sold at 25 bolivianos a hundred-weight. The region was well stocked with deer; wild cattle belonged to whoever shot them; jaguars were not hard to find and antas were so numerous that he shot at least one a week to feed his hogs. This stout, bulky animal, largest of the South American fauna, known to us as the tapir, lives in the dense thickets near streams or water-holes, in which it bathes by moonlight or in the gray of dawn. The experienced hunter has little difficulty in waylaying the anta, since it always follows the same path to and from the water. The Bolivian variety is about the size of a yearling calf, with short legs and a long, flexible, porcine snout. Its skin, excellent for the making of harness, is so tough that it dashes with impunity through the densest spiny thickets, often tearing from its back by this means its chief enemy, the jaguar. Caught young, the anta becomes as tame as a puppy, following its master with marked devotion.
Four days I swung my hammock under a great tree before Halsey’s door, reading belated magazines of the light-weight order, the neurotic artificiality of which seemed particularly ridiculous against this background of primitive nature, as the complexity of life in great cities stood out by contrast to the simple ways of the region. Lounging in the tropical shade it was easy to understand why men so often settle down in the tropics and let the world drift on without them, easy to lose the feeling that life is short and fleeting, that one will be a long time dead, and must grasp existence as it passes. The day after our arrival Konanz had fallen victim to chills and fever. My regret was tempered by the memory of many a vain struggle to get him to take a daily dose of quinine. When he recovered, which did not promise to be soon, he planned to explore the region round about for a spot on which to settle. I took leave of my fellow-men on one of the last mornings of January and struck off alone.
That day’s experience emphasized the difference between trackless jungle and even the poorest of roads. Some twelve miles separated Halsey’s estate from the traveled trail. The faint path through wiry grasses and low brush, which he had pointed out to me, died out even sooner than I had feared. I pushed on in the direction I knew I must go,—south and a shade east. A wooded bluff standing above the jungle landscape, like the Irish coast from the sea, gave an objective point. It was on the summit of this that “Thompson” and his fellow-assassin had planted in vain their ill-gotten gold; in just such jungle as that about me they had wandered starved and choking for days; somewhere in this sea of vegetation lay the sun-bleached and vulture-picked bones of the more fortunate of the pair.
To keep a due course in the trackless wilderness is not so easy as to set it. I was soon among heavier undergrowth that cut down my progress like a head wind that of a “windjammer,” then in head-high jungle that made every step a struggle, then in full forest with the densest undergrowth snatching, clinging, tearing at me for all the world like living beings determined to stop my advance at any cost. Vines enwrapped me, head, chest, waist, and feet, at every step. Thorns and brambles gashed and tore my sweat-rotted clothing, leaves of wild pineapple laid bare my bleeding knees, the jungle reached forth and snatched a sleeve from my shirt, slashed my hands, broke my bootlaces, poured blinding sweat into my eyes, and treacherously tripped me up, so that I smashed headlong into masses of vegetation where who knew what might be sleeping or lurking. The scent of wild animals was pungent; now and then I fell into their recent lairs or signs of their passing. Every plunge left me so breathless from the incessant struggle that I was several minutes gathering strength to crawl to my feet and tear my way onward.
All day I fought nature hand to hand, with the growing conviction that I should still be struggling when night came upon me. The sun beat pitilessly down into the breathless tangle. Once, when thirst seemed no longer endurable, I had broken out upon a small swamp and thrown myself face-down to drink it half dry. From it radiated the paths of wild animals, and every inch of the wet sand was marked with their footprints, as fresh as if they had that moment passed. I recognized those of the deer, the anta, the cat-clawed jaguar; and those of at least a score of smaller species were plainly visible. Beyond the waist-deep swamp the waterless jungle was even thicker. The blue headland of Ypias had long since been lost to view, and I found that I was indeed going round in a circle, like the heroes of fiction, until I drew out my compass and insisted that nature let me through the way it indicated. Hunger was completely routed by a thirst like a raging furnace within me. Frequently I brought up against thorn-bristling thickets so dense that further progress seemed impossible, and must tear my way back and forth, as along some fortress wall, seeking a weak spot in the impregnable density.
Then all at once, toward sunset, when I had concluded I was hopelessly lost, I fell suddenly out of the jungle into a sandy road, fell indeed on hands and knees, for the way was worn several feet deep into the soft soil. An hour along it brought me to the pascana of Ypias, uninhabited, yet like all these rare natural clearings on the trans-Bolivian route, so important as to have its name solemnly engraved on the map of the republic. This was the scene of what “Thompson” had called “our stunt.” In a bit of space scolloped out of the jungle were the six weather-blackened wooden crosses of the victims, the largest crudely carved with the names of all, that of the German confederate with its cross-piece at a sharp angle, the natives of the region apparently resenting his claim to full Christian burial. Beyond the clear little stream that makes Ypias a favorite camping-ground, four ox-carts were preparing for the customary night journey after a day of rest and grazing. One of the barefoot drivers under command of a cholo astride a saddle-steer proved to be “Hughtie” Powell. I climbed into his wagon and stretched out on the great balls of rubber from the Beni with which it was loaded.
Each cart was drawn by twenty oxen, gaunt, reddish, long-horned animals that seemed Patience done in flesh and bone. Their pace averaged perhaps two miles an hour. Now and then “Hughtie,” like the other drivers, sprang noiselessly into the sand and, racing ahead, lashed each yoke in turn, with insulting words of encouragement, and the entire team crowded into one of the close-set jungle walls until the massive two-wheeled cart was dragged over small trees and head-high bushes at a slight acceleration of pace. A dozen strange cries were used in urging the phlegmatic animals forward. When a halt was ordered, the drivers sprang to the ground and ran alongside them, voicing a long, soothing wail of peculiarly mournful timbre that often lasted a full minute:
“So-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o.”
Once, in the thick black night, the train halted to boil rice and make “tea” of a willow-like jungle leaf, then dragged drowsily on. At daylight we broke out into the pascana of Motococito, where the animals were turned loose to graze for the day, each pair still yoked together by a beam that was almost a log, fastened across the front of their horns with rawhide thongs, while the peons swung their hammocks under an ancient thatched roof on poles. We had made four leagues, or a scant twelve miles, during the night.
I made my way to the home of “Don Cupertino” nearby, for no traveler across Bolivia misses the opportunity of at least one meal with this best-hearted of Bolivians. Outwardly ugly, he was a man of fascinating personality, before whom one could sit for hours listening to well-told anecdotes, frequently emphasized in his excitement by the snapping of his long forefinger, and marveling at the grasp of mind of a man who has never emerged from this inland wilderness. So great was his magnetism that he had imposed on all those about him a degree of human kindness and common decency rare in the region. The education of this corner of the republic, wholly neglected by the government, he had taken upon himself; had turned one of his thatched buildings into a school for the children of whatever cast roundabout, and drafted as school-master a Spanish shoemaker who had drifted in upon him. Motococito is frequently favored with attacks by the wild Indians, and not the least dramatic of “Don Cupertino’s” stories was that of the routing of a band of “los bárbaros” the night before.
The pace of the ox-carts was so slow that I pushed on alone. The sky was incessantly growling off to the southwest, banks of jet-black clouds frequently wiped out the brilliant sun, and many a roaring tropical deluge set me slipping and sliding at every step. Swamps of varying length and depth continued monotonously to intrude, until I became amphibious, with water almost my natural element.
Where the road forked one afternoon I took the fainter, left-hand trail for a side-trip to the town of Santiago de Chiquitos. The rumor was persistent that “americanos” lived there; moreover, it was said to be situated on a ridge unknown to insects. The heights to be surmounted were not piled into the sky ahead, as in the Andes. I knew I was rising only by the changing character of soil and woods, the former increasing in rocky sandstone formations, the latter more open, with diminishing undergrowth. After the first few miles up, the forest opened out now and then on little grassy pampas, with V-shaped gaps in the wooded hills through which one could look back upon tropical Bolivia spreading away sea-flat, humid blue to infinity in every direction, with a vast sense of relief after weeks of never seeing the woods for the trees that had shut me in.
The trail split at last into several branches. The one I took at random led me to a thatched hut, then suddenly broke out upon the grassy plaza of a great, or a tiny town, according to the point of view and the immediate previous experience. A native lolling in a hammock answered my question with a “sí, hay” in the impersonal monotone common to the tropics, languidly nodding toward one of the huts facing the plaza. Jungle-worn and all but shoeless, my reddened knees protruding through the remnant of my breeches, my shirt lacking a sleeve and otherwise mutilated beyond recognition, unkempt and sun-scorched, showing many a patch of my insect-arabesqued hide, my face bristling with four razorless weeks, unquestionably the most disreputable sight in all that disreputable region, a hunger like the Old Man of the Sea riding my shoulders, I strode across to the building indicated and paused in the doorway. Inside, seated about a snow-white table, backed by a butler of African dignity, sat five “gringos” in speckless white, dipping their soup noiselessly and without haste with a calm backward motion.
Santiago was the headquarters and place of recuperation of the employees of the Farquhar Syndicate, engaged in surveying the 1500 square leagues of territory recently conceded the company at a nominal price. There I slept in the first bed since Cochabamba. The chickens that died for us were countless, the inevitable phonograph was in full evidence, there were lamps to read by even at night, and books to read by them. When the sun touched the jungle sea to the west “los americanos” strolled homeward from the office, pausing to play ball until dark, with real gloves, but picking green oranges from the plaza trees as often as they needed a new “ball.” Great bands of deep-green parrakeets flew by high overhead, screaming and gossiping deafeningly, but with no suggestion of stopping in a place so high and cold. From this “mountain” top the sunsets across the humid-blue, flat jungle were indescribable, particularly after a rainy day. The enormous conflagrations blazed for a brief time across all the western world, faded to red, to pink, then into the steel-gray of a tropical evening; the distant hills turned from deep blue to purple, banks of white clouds floating up out of the wilderness below; the sky above faded through all the shades of pink to lilac and to purple, until even the flecks of clouds tinged with the last reflected rays were wiped out entirely. At night, looking south, we could see the fires of the wild Indians of the Gran Chaco.
Besides the Anglo-Saxons, there were the managers of two “Belgian” houses—the only stores for some hundred miles around, mere thatched huts like the rest, with no distinguishing signs—an odd German or two, an argentino who wore shoes; and the rest were barefoot natives, except for an occasional sun-faded passerby. Like San José, Santiago de Chiquitos, set almost exactly in the geographical center of South America, was a “reduction” of the Jesuits, with more than 1500 inhabitants at the time of their expulsion. To-day it is a sleepy little hamlet of some two streets of one-story huts among gentle and frondoso hills, with a constant breeze and no insects, lolling through an easy, barefoot, loose-gowned existence, chiefly in hammocks. Coffee bushes fill every back yard, the coffee of Santiago being famous through all Chiquitos. A languid commerce in cattle, sugar, and alcohol is carried on intermittently; the region round about is rich in timber. High above all else a wonderfully beautiful palm-tree stands out against the cerulean sky.
The inhabitants retain many of the customs bequeathed them by the Jesuits. Only a wooden church was built here, with four bells in a wooden tower on legs some distance from the main building. Into this an Indian climbs several times a day, and more often by night, to make life hideous. Why the Loyalists were so fond of the continual hammering of these instruments of torture was a mystery to me at the time, but in the library of Asunción I ran across an old volume that explained the matter. The writer, a European member of the brotherhood, visiting a “reduction,” asked the superior why the Padres saw fit to keep themselves awake most of the night for no apparent reason. The Jesuit answered: “Brother, we keep our faithful flock toiling all day in the fields. After the evening meal they drop at once to sleep without remembering their marital duties. Their first fatigue worn off, we remind them of those duties now and then during the night, waking them up with the noise of drums and bells, to the end that the succeeding generation may be larger, to the glorification of the Sacred Church and our Holy Society.” And to think that I had fancied the jangling of church-bells all down the length of the Andes to be a mere caprice of the holy fathers!
The fiestas of Jesuit days are religiously preserved. Several nights we were kept awake by the monotonous, heathenish beating of a drum, often accompanied by a shrill fife. By day, to the “music” of these, most of the population marched round and round the town, holding hands and swinging them high before and behind them in a kind of shuffle and whirl on their bare feet in the silent sand streets, getting ever drunker on chicha of maize or the stronger totay. They danced also the chobena, to the accompaniment of the manais, a hollow calabash with seeds inside it. There was no resident priest, but an old Indian who had assisted the former cura conducted a service each Sunday, always ending it with a debauch that hung over into the middle of the week. There is one custom, however, which even the Jesuits could not bequeath them,—that of industry. In the olden days the entire population was sent to work each morning with drums, prayers, and processions; to-day only the processions, prayers, and drums remain.
As in all Chiquitos, the women and girls of Santiago, chiefly Indian in blood, with now and then a trace of the negro, solidly built as an anta, wear only the loose tipoy. Their customs are, if possible, even more easy-going than those of San José. Yet they are by no means forward, being rather bashful, indeed, with little sense of wrong-doing, and are said to yield more easily to blandishments and trinkets than to money. The former priest demanded fabulous sums for his services, which is no doubt one of several reasons why virtually none, even of the “best families,” are married. The moral attitude of the place may most easily be gaged by an episode that occurred during my stay. A shoemaker living in the other half of the thatched hut occupied by “los americanos” learned that the young woman who passed as his wife had yielded to the entreaties of one of the foreigners. He beat the girl until her cries could be heard in the office across the broad plaza. But when, next day, he met the offending American, he bowed respectfully with a polite, “Buenos días, señor. Y cómo está usté’?”
The distance from Santa Cruz de la Sierra to the Paraguay turned out to be 135 leagues, something over 400 miles, divided as follows: Santa Cruz to San José, 56 leagues; to Santiago, 32; to Santa Ana, 25; to Puerto Suarez, 22. The last stage of the journey I covered astride one of the company’s mules, hardly an improvement in comfort over walking, on such a route. Luckily, the rains were delayed that year, or the difficulties of all this trans-Bolivian journey would have been quadrupled, and I might have been held for months in the hilltop hamlet of Santiago until the floods common to the twenty-leagues or more west of the Paraguay subsided. Day after day we rode through the endless forest that crowded us close on either hand, with no other sign of humanity than the sulky mozo trotting behind me, sleeping in some tiny pascana where a moon so bright one could have read by it looked down upon the crosses of soldiers and travelers who had died on other journeys, or peered dully in at me through the mesh of my mosquitero. Palmares, quagmires thick-grown with hardy palm-trees, in which we plunged to the saddle for long distances, alternated with thirsty stretches of waterless sand. In places the heavier woods gave way to dense brush, head-high and always thorny. Across these, to the right, lay the vast Bolivian Chaco—or the Paraguayan, according to how the dispute shall finally be settled—in which the sun set so blood-red that the painter who dared put half the reality on canvas would be accused of gross exaggeration. A strip of delicate pink sky blended quickly into the wet-blue of the endless jungle, darkness settled quickly down, and we rode noiselessly on, the sky an immense field of stars, bats circling around our heads and alighting again and again in the sandy road ahead, to spring up with a peculiar little squeak when the mule’s hoofs had all but touched them. No other sound was heard, except the chirping of the jungle, chiefly the long-drawn creak and short staccato of two species of crickets, and occasionally the noise of some wild animal fleeing unseen at our approach. On such a night we came to the Tucabaca, the only river of size between the Guapay and the Paraguay. I ordered a halt until the moon appeared, but clouds hid it, and we came perilously near losing a mule in forcing the frightened animals across. Frequently the Tucabaca rises in a few hours to a raging torrent that can only be crossed in a pelota, or in the dugout of a surly old Brazilian negro living in a cluster of huts on the further bank.
At Santa Ana, eighteen waterless miles beyond, we were overtaken by two of the gringo colony of Santiago. Calling itself a city, the place is merely a row of thatched huts around a grass-grown space, with a mud-hole to keep it alive, saintly in its customs as all the towns of this saintly route. Its corregidor takes orders, not from the subprefect of San José, but from the delegado at Puerto Suarez, sent out from La Paz by way of Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil! The place is a headquarters of jejenes, and the wild Indians descend upon it periodically. At the very edge of the hamlet lies a barrizal, a mud-hole three miles long, famous for its victims. But beyond, territory which the year before had been an almost unbroken lake was for long stretches without water to drink, though we wallowed in more than one swamp and slough. Near the corrals of Yacuces, in a low, humid region where rain often falls, we came upon telegraph-poles, old and sagging, heavy with parasites and creepers. The line planned by the government from Puerto Suarez to Santa Cruz had been abandoned some forty miles out, and cart-drivers now cut down the poles and use the wire to repair their wagons.
On the last morning we woke at two to find the moon brilliant, and pulling on our soggy garments, pushed eagerly forward. On the right the Southern Cross stood forth brightly whenever a fleck of cloud veiled the moon. Away in the forest monkeys wailed their everlasting plaint. Great masses of green vines, covering irregular giant bushes, looked like German castles in the moonlight. The first flush of day showed in the V-shaped opening ahead the shoulders of the advance horseman, cutting into the paling sky and blotting out the bright morning star. Then dawn “came up like thunder” out of the endless wilderness, and somehow it seemed wasteful to keep the moon burning after the tropical sunshine had flooded all the scene. Tall, slender palms, and all possible forms of trees, festooned and draped with vines in fantastic web and lace effects, stood out against the sky. Masses of pink morning-glories quickly shrunk under the sun’s glare; brown moor-hens, flicking their black tails saucily, foraged about mud-holes and flew clumsily, like chickens, with little half-jumps, as we passed. Beyond the pascana of Tacuaral, with its myriad of slim tacuara palms, the country that should have been flooded at this season was utterly waterless. Hour after sun-baked hour we jogged on, our thirsty animals stumbling in the enormous sun-dried cart-ruts. An occasional hut with a banana-grove appeared in a tiny space shaved out of the bristling forest. In mid-afternoon we sighted through the heat rays ahead a wide street, with red-tiled buildings and open water beyond, backed far away by low wooded ridges, and the Port of Suarez and the end of Bolivia was at hand. It was two months to a day since Tommy and I had set out from Cochabamba.
Dawn was just beginning to paint red the humid air between jungle and sky across the lagoon of Cáceres, a backwater of the river Paraguay, when I descended to its edge and, by dint of acrobatic feats of equilibrium, managed a bath and left behind in the mud and slime, like fallen heroes of many a campaign, the remnants of my tramping garb. As I climbed the bank new-clad, there persisted the feeling that I had heartlessly abandoned some faithful friend of long standing. The gasoline launch chugged more than two hours across the muddy lagoa before there rose from the jungle, on a bit of knoll, the modern city of Corumbá, in the Brazilian State of Matto Grosso, to the residents of which the appearance of a lone traveler from out the ferocious wilds and haunts of bugres beyond the lagoon that ends their world was little less wonder-provoking than the arrival of one from a distant planet. Here at last was civilization,—expensive civilization—and steamers every few days to Asunción and Buenos Aires.
XXII. SOUTHWARD THROUGH GUARANI LAND
With a deep blast from her ocean-going whistle the Asunción of the Mihanovich Line swung out through the shipping of a crowded port and was off down the Paraguay. The steamer was easily the equal of the best on the Hudson; its officers and stewards, all argentinos, were as white as you or I, though the passengers ran to all shades, and it was little short of startling to see white waiters serving and kowtowing to haughty Brazilian half-Indians and negroes. Green jungle, occasionally broken by prairie-like stretches studded with dainty palm-trees, like wheels of greenery on the ends of broomsticks, sped rapidly past. We stopped at several towns and estancias, now in Brazil, now in Paraguay; here and there a lone passenger, standing erect in his boat, was rowed out by a pair of peons, and picked up as we slowed down for a moment. On the second morning we halted at the estate of an Irishman on Brazilian soil, the passengers going to inspect a jaguar and a huge wild-cat in home-made cages, while cow-boys roped a steer and, dragging it down to the edge of the bank to spare themselves the labor of carrying the carcass, slaughtered in plain sight of all what was served as beefsteak that noon and evening. Now and again we put in at a little Paraguayan town, swarming with barefoot boy-soldiers in faded khaki, with a reputation for shooting on the slightest provocation. Old women came on board with bread, watermelons, and clumsy native cigars, scorning Brazilian money, and demanding the ragged and all but worthless bills of their own land. Here a new language appeared, the palatal Guaraní sounding on all sides. The evening of the second day brought us to Villa Concepción, one of the six incorporated “cities” of Paraguay, which might easily be mistaken for a village. An occasional estancia along the bank had a little railroad, with screeching toy locomotives and an electric lighting plant of its own. The Paraguayan gaucho, or cow-boy, had the independent air of men who will not be imposed upon. He wore a large straw hat, a colored kerchief about his neck, the chiripá, huge, baggy cotton trousers with a puckering-string about his bare ankles as a protection against the gnats and climbing insects, and in most cases a blacksmith’s leather apron with a long fringe, a necessity for riders through the thorny undergrowth. Over this all wore a wide leather belt, with several buttoned pockets bulging with their probably not great wealth, and a big knife in a leather scabbard stuck in carelessly behind, as if ever ready to be drawn on the instant.
On the morning of the fourth day I was awakened by a long blast of the whistle, and peered out of my hammock to find the steamer anchored among extensive docks. It was that soft moment of dawn when the sun is just trembling in stage-fright below the eastern horizon, the lower sky streaked with delicate colors, the air of that velvety texture known only at such hours in the tropics. Then the day blazed forth in all its brilliancy, putting the night breeze to ignominious rout, and disclosing a low city, its chief square lined by two-story buildings, the largest of which I recognized, from photographs, as Paraguay’s government palace. One of a score of hirsute, piratical-looking boatmen, neo-poetic names painted in gaudy colors on the poops of their crafts, rowed me ashore with a few strokes, and at the wooden steps of the custom-house answered my “How much?” with a “What it pleases you, señor.” Either the boatmen of Asunción are unlike their tribe elsewhere, or my face had lost that innocent, childlike air of earlier days. I rewarded his honesty with two Paraguayan dollars,—that is, about eleven cents,—and marching through my trunk-burdened fellow-passengers, thrust my bundle toward a pompous cholo in a cream-colored suit. He peered through the slit in my deerskin kodak-cover, asked a question about the bundled developing-tank, waved a hand with a regal-toned “Puede retirarse,” (“You may withdraw yourself”), and I stepped ashore in Asunción del Paraguay.
The capital of the Inland Republic is its only real city, claiming some eighty thousand inhabitants, or one tenth the present population of a land that once, with nearly two millions, ranked with Brazil and the Argentine as the most important of South America. To-day, thanks to revolutions; anarchy, Lopez and his French mistress, and the consequent stagnation, it is in the far background of modern progress. It spreads over a considerable space of what is really rolling ground—though to one fresh from nearly two years in the Andes it seemed monotonously flat. Across the river, on a curve of which it halts abruptly, lies the sea-flat, trackless chaco, the abode of nomadic Indians, dense-blue by day, and fading to purple under the setting sun. Unfortunately, Francia, “El Supremo,” dictator for a third of a century, sought to “beautify” the town by filling its lagoons, straightening its jumble of tortuous lanes, and reducing it to a featureless similarity to all other capitals of its kind and size. Travelers of past centuries are agreed that the chief charm of old Asunción was due to its delightful irregularity. Certainly its ancient fascination is gone, and to-day it is nothing but a languid little capital of a stagnant country, the least interesting of any I had seen in South America.
The time-worn assertion that the population of Paraguay is wholly Indian in blood is a decided overstatement. In Asunción one sees at least as many whites as in La Paz. Nor is it true that there are nine women to every man. True, Francia wiped out the old Spaniards for conspiring against him; forty years ago, in the days of Lopez, the wars reduced the proportion to seventeen to one. But time and migrating males have all but repaired these ravages, though many a man still lives on the exertions of his harem, one of the several women of which is his legal wife, and the majority of children born in the country are illegitimate. In general the place has a different atmosphere, a blasé air little like the towns of the Andes. Among these less simple people, particularly the denizens of the “Centro Español,” where I was “put up” during my stay, one got the feeling that conventionality was not morality; there was something about their suave, well-bred manners that made one feel that deep down they were no such sticklers for honesty and justice as for the urbanities of life. Or would the artificiality of any “civilized” place have struck a discordant note to one coming suddenly out of a long stay in the wilderness?
It is in Asunción that the traveler from the north notes the first advance of the immigration that is to increase to swamping proportions in the Argentine, as he moves southward. Paraguay is making strenuous, though not very tactful, efforts to increase immigration, under an immigration bureau in the hands of a German. Commerce and government are largely in the hands of foreigners, at least of the second generation, even the president being a Swiss in blood and name. Paraguay’s civilization is not strong enough to absorb the newcomers; one hears German, Italian, or Catalan almost as often as the native Guarani. This latter is the real speech of the country. Spanish is spoken only in the cities, and even there the people use among themselves the remnants of the aboriginal tongue. Teachers in large villages often cannot speak Castilian; the few Paraguayan countrymen who know it are “afraid” to use it for fear their fellows will ridicule them for trying to show off. There has been more than one movement on foot to make Guarani the official, as well as the actual, language of the country.
The money of Paraguay has fallen to low estate. Step into a bank and throw down an English sovereign, and there will be thrust upon you some $90 in native currency, bringing the peso down to little more than the value of our nickel. Metal money is unknown; the paper bills made in London and New York are in universal use, the smaller denominations being ragged and dirty to the point of illegibility, and often patched with scraps of newspaper. “The nation,” runs the device on these tattered billetes “recognizes this bill as fifty strong dollars,” which is quite different from saying it will be redeemed at that rate. Street-car fares, now 75, had been 67½ centavos, and the company had found it necessary to print its own change in 2½-centavo pieces, worth—well, let fractional experts figure it out. Eggs sold in the market at $7 a dozen; a hair-cut cost $5, and it was not a five-dollar hair-cut. On the other hand, postage is the cheapest on earth, evidently because the rates had been established and the stamps printed before the money depreciated.
After the first investigation I put off replenishing my wardrobe until I should reach Buenos Aires. It was not merely because the tailor showed me shoddy stuff and demanded $350 for a suit of it! The local styles were even more startling than the price mentioned in so offhand a manner. The trousers demanded by custom, for example, be they made by a local tailor or imported from Europe, are built up as high as trousers could by any stretch of the word go; then on top of this comes an enormous belt-piece, so wide that it requires three buttons to fasten it, clamping the garment up about the armpits. If only they would use a couple of inches more, they could button the trousers about the neck, fasten a collar on them, and dispense with the expense of a shirt entirely. In the olden days, it is said, the Inca tribes gave the inhabitants of this region the name of “guara-ni” (breechless ones). The bloomer-like amplitude of the trousers of the countryman, and the height of those of his city cousin, suggests that they resent the implied insult keenly, and have resolved to leave no opportunity for its repetition. Somewhere around this uncharted expanse of trouser every one, from merchant to peon, wears a leather belt at least six inches wide, a combination of coin and revolver carry-all, held together with several buckles of the size of those on a horse’s saddle-cinch.
The “International” train leaves Asunción every Wednesday and Saturday morning, and lands the traveler in Montevideo or Buenos Aires fifty hours later. The through and local fares vary greatly, the former being subjected to the competition of the river steamers. First and second-class rates to Buenos Aires are $450 and $325 respectively; local fares are $680 and $460! Luckily, this is in Paraguayan currency; but even when turned into real money, it remains a respectable rate. For half a day we steamed across broad pampas, almost prairies, backed by wooded ridges, isolated masses of dark rock standing forth here and there in the middle distance, dim outlines of low mountains hovering on the horizon. The broad savannas were speckled with cattle, somewhat gaunt, but of vastly better stock than those of the Andes, a bulky China bull here and there explaining the improvement.
Every man on the train was armed, the weapons varying from flint-lock, muzzle-loading horse-pistols to the very latest automatic. The revolver is a sign of caste in Paraguay; my companions accepted me as one of them only when I had shown my own. When the conductor came through for tickets, his friends and acquaintances playfully pointed their weapons at him. The faces of many, even youthful, men were scarred from the latest revolution, like the battered façades of Asunción. Every native aboard,—women, children, the train-crew, even the train-guard in his white uniform and helmet—smoked big, black cigars, which are really nothing more than the blackened natural leaf rolled up in cigar form. Brown maidens, physically not unattractive, sat with a half-smoked stogy in a corner of their mouths, and now and then spat through their teeth like New York toughs. The cigarette, all but universal elsewhere on my journey, finds slight favor in Paraguay. At the stations, peons in baggy chiripás mingled with estancieros, their neck-high trousers tucked into soft leather boots, a silver-headed rebenque, or short riding-whip, hanging from their wrists by a leather thong. Women squatted on the brick flaggings, selling anything from raw beefsteaks to the native fire-water. Though there were many stations, the towns were rarely visible, except a single church-tower marking the site some distance off. Being built on knolls, the expense of entering them has been avoided by the railway constructors. The few that were seen were triste at best, the populations, lolling about the openings that serve as doors, ragged and ambitionless. At Loque station, women wearing from ten to fifty coarse straw hats each, languidly offered them for sale. At Patiño a crude tramway was waiting to carry to the bank of the river the passengers for San Bernadino, Paraguay’s “watering-place,” on the beautiful fresh-water lake of Ypacarai. Then came Paraguari, famous for its revolutions, commercial center of all the old missions for a hundred miles around, leaf-roofed, two-wheel carts awaiting freight or passengers. Seventy-five miles from the capital we skirted Villa Rica, second city of the Inland Republic, with a commerce in tobacco, sugar, and lumber, but a mere village in all but name.
At the small prairie station of Borja, from which some fellow-countrymen were constructing a branch line some day to reach the Iguazú Falls, I abandoned the “International,” and was soon speeding away across the flat country in a track automobile. At best the Paraguyan landscape is monotonous, vast plains of reddish soil and coarse grass stretching away until lost to view, here and there broken by thick clumps of forest. Ever and again we were slowed down or halted by reddish half-wild cattle on the unfenced track; the pampa was sprinkled with them as far as the eye could see. The plains either are, or are fancied to be, of no value for agriculture, and are left to grazing, while the languid natives, swinging in their hammocks under their wall-less roofs in the edges of the forest clumps, raised a bit of corn and tobacco in plantations hacked out of the woods, and trusted Providence for the rest. Ponderous, springless, two-wheeled ox-carts that seemed all wheels labored by. Everywhere the tacurú, or cone-shaped ant-hills, stood head-high in the tall grass. My companions told of tacurús erected during a single night in the middle of earth-floored dwellings and requiring the exertions of a band of workmen to dig them out.
At length we drew up before the rough-board headquarters at Charaná. It being Saturday evening, the entire region, men, women, and children, proposed to ride into Borja on the work-train, to squander their month’s wages and remain several days drunk. The young American superintendent, however, issued orders to the Paraguayan soldiers that had been assigned him, and though these looked anything but fierce in their ragged khaki and bare feet, the throng lost no time in obeying their orders to disembark. For all their childlike demeanor, the soldiers of Paraguay have a reputation for shooting on scant provocation.
We pushed on along battered old rails, through forest and jungle, with here and there a bank of red clay, some ten miles to railhead, the line squirming its way around every knoll, the cheap engines to be employed requiring that there be nothing steeper than a one percent grade. Advance gangs had hacked out a cart-road for some distance beyond, where the territory was growing so dense-wooded and hilly that the superintendent was considering the use of balloons to survey the country.
Back at the main camp I had my first mate, or “Paraguayan tea.” The yerba mate is to the life of Paraguay and its adjoining regions what coca leaves are to the Andes. In the yerbales the leaves and smaller branches of an evergreen bush not unlike the holly, growing among taller trees, are spread on a raised platform of poles, smoked and dried, forced through to the earth floor beneath, beaten almost to a powder with clubs, and packed in tercios by sewing up green ox-hides, which shrink until the contents is stone-hard. The gringo engineers had come to prefer this native beverage to coffee or tea, though they drank it in cups, with sugar and milk. The native way is to put a spoonful of the powdered yerba in a little pear-shaped gourd, pour this full of boiling water, and suck the “tea” through a brass or silver tube, or in the case of the poorer people, a reed. One spoonful suffices for a score of persons, the gourd being passed from one to another of a group, each time being refilled with water, the drinker taking care not to burn hands or lips on gourd or tube. To any but a foreigner it would be an insult to offer a separate bowl. The greenish liquid was bitter in taste and by no means pleasant, but was due in time to become my favorite beverage, as it does with most gringos who continue the use of it. Everywhere in this region one runs upon natives loafing in the shade, a mate-gourd, sometimes carved with fantastic figures, grasped in one hand, lazily imbibing the liquid at regular intervals. Unlike the coca, it has no narcotic effect; it is, on the contrary, beneficial in stomachic ailments. The gaucho of the pampas makes it serve as bread and vegetables in his fixed diet of asado con cuero, or beef roasted in the hide. Many an attempt has been made to introduce mate to the rest of the world, so far, unfortunately, in vain.
I fell asleep toward dawn on a cot set out in the breeze, to the rattle of poker-chips, the clinking of bottles and glasses, and cries of “One hundred dollars!” “Two hundred and fifty!” from the “office” in which the gringo community had gathered. Next evening a local train set me down in the heavy darkness at Villa Encarnación, up to a few months before the halting-place for the night of the “Internacional.” In name one of the six “cities” of Paraguay, the place was a drowsy, barefoot, isolated cluster of buildings, rather than a town. Strewn along the side of a red hill, amid half-luxuriant vegetation, on the banks of the Paraná, the southern boundary of Paraguay, it covered a considerable space of rolling, grassy ground, with wide paths of reddish sand where streets should have been. Its slight commerce was chiefly in the hands of Germans. It was humid with the rainy season, and insolent with its big ragged garrison. Green parrots screamed in and out of the orange-groves, the fruit of which was green in color even when ripe and of rather acid taste. Across the Paraná, as wide as the Hudson, Posadas, in the Argentine, lay banked up on the sloping opposite shore, in plain sight from any part of the town.
Life is free and easy in Paraguay, close to nature. Its women, in their loose gowns and bare feet, very erect from the practice of carrying loads on their heads from childhood, have a childlike simplicity, as well as an extremely graceful carriage. Yet I found this the least interesting of South American countries. Its old missions, to the ruined churches of which, overgrown with creepers, a ride of a day or two from the railroad at almost any point brings one, attract many travelers; but I had already seen these and better in tropical Bolivia. With its education at a low ebb, chiefly in the hands of priests to whom sacred history and catechisms are the sum total of wisdom, the present inhabitants of Paraguay leave the impression of being incapable of much advancement.
The change from this languid little country to the live one across the river was almost startling. When the sun had declined somewhat, a motor-boat chugged across to Posadas with a score of passengers, where we landed without ceremony among a group of Argentine officials, well-dressed and courteously business-like. To those coming upon it from the direction of Buenos Aires, Posadas may seem small and backward; in contrast with the drowsy, little grass-grown Paraguayan “city” still in plain sight across the Paraná, it is very much alive. The capital of the territory of Misiones, that tongue of land piercing far up between Brazil and Paraguay and taking its name from the Jesuit establishments of olden times, it already boasts some ten thousand inhabitants, or more than the entire territory contained ten years ago. In spite of being tolerably compact and two-storied in the business section, the town covers a vast amount of ground, with very wide streets and ample elbow-room everywhere, except in the clustered shacks of laborers along the river-brink. A single church, its old red-brick tower still unfinished, rather Protestant than Catholic in appearance, by reason of the simplicity of its adornments and the existence of seats within, takes the place of the score or more that would bulk above a town of similar size in the Andes. Here were hard-paved streets instead of sand-holes, steam road-rollers and up-to-date machinery, business activity and shoes, well-kept parks with plenty of benches, large, prominent buildings as schools—just opening for the new year in this first week in March—and well-dressed policemen of manly demeanor. Canvas cots had taken the place of hammocks. Boys were busy polishing brass name-plates before important business houses. The red liberty-cap now adorned all government shields, while the most beautiful flag of South America, the Argentinian white and sky-blue, flew at the crest of many a façade. Here a stranger could pass in the streets without being stared out of countenance. The inhabitants had a look of eagerness and hope in their faces, signs of at least a material prosperity in striking contrast to the dreary hopelessness of Andean regions. Yet Posadas is not forty years old, while Encarnación, across the river, was founded by the Jesuits more than three centuries ago.
In the second-class car of the N.E.A., the “Nord Este Argentino,” there were no Indian passengers, and though only a mixto, the train made good progress. At the very first farm outside Posadas an American binder was felling the autumn grain—and I had not seen so much as a mower since crossing the Rio Grande thirty months before. At every station were uniformed police; mounted, officers patroled the country roads. Houses along the way were not the dens of human animals, but were supplied with the comforts of home, even American rocking-chairs tucked away in the shade of their verandas. I had come to the end of the great South American monte and jungle, and from now on the great Argentine pampas grew ever broader, slightly rolling here, stretching away to infinity on each hand. The brick-red soil of Misiones was given over to grazing rather than to agriculture, though we passed long autumn-dry corn-fields, the ears broken half off and hanging over to ripen. Cattle were everywhere, and cow-boys were roping them here and there, while gauchos careered across the broad plains on their hardy pintos. The railroad and all its appurtenances were just as orderly as they would have been in England, the railway architecture of which it resembled, though the cars were of the American style. Everything from engine to yards was so English one felt sure that, had they spoken their language, the traincrews would have called the little four-wheeled freight-cars “goods-vans,” and spoken of “metals” and “sleepers.”
It was some time after dark that we pulled into Santo Tomé, or at least into a station bearing that name, and I concluded that I had ridden far enough for the time being. The train did not enter the town, perhaps because it would have been hard to decide just where the town was. In the Argentine these are scattered over a vast amount of ground, in striking contrast to the heaped-up crowding common to the Andes. A half-moon dim-lighted the flat country far and wide. I set out in the moonlight along a broad highway, and wandered until any hope of finding a town died out; then ran upon a few low, scattered houses that suggested some insignificant village, like Bolivia’s tropical “cities”; then I went on and on until there grew up about me an immense town, never crowded together, yet with an enormous plaza, long stretches of electric arc-lamps, a checkerboard city of wide streets and long blocks, each house set in its own big garden, a town well-to-do, citified, with many automobiles, and but a single church, of moderate size and inconspicuous.
Life began to renew about the station at 3 A.M. The restaurant opened, watchmen lighted big gasoline arc-lamps, the “International” rolled in, and we were off again, with ample room even in the second-class car. Three hours later I sat up to watch the sun rise red out of Uruguay, across the river. About the vast, long-haired, unkempt plains stood clumps of pampa trees; at the towns were many gay with blossoms—spring blossoms, I had almost written, until I remembered it was autumn. The aloncita, a bird not unlike a small robin in appearance, though with less red, began to build its beehive-shaped mud nest on the wooden cross-pieces of the telegraph-poles. All day long, for hundreds of miles, there was an average of a nest on every third pole, always on the side farthest from the railroad, as if the noise of the trains were annoying to its inhabitants, the arched doorway always toward the direction from which we came—the north—to catch, perhaps, the warmer breezes. Among hundreds of nests I saw only three or four exceptions to this, and all day long only one built anywhere else than on the cross-piece, close against the pole. One daring architect had set his on the top of the pole itself, neatly capping it. As this particular pole had its cross-piece already occupied, it looked as if the bird above was a hard-headed fellow who had failed to stake his claim in time, but who insisted, nevertheless, on living in that particular spot.
The country grew more and more like our own, in climate, creature comforts, news-stands, block-signals, uniformed mailmen, carts and wagons, some of them of the boat-shaped style of Poland, rattling past on broad highways, busy towns along the way, at only the more important of which the train halted briefly, and between them raced swiftly and smoothly southward. Through the windows the horizon of the great rolling pampa continually rose and fell. Sometimes it was punctuated with a grove of trees, more rarely with a small forest, the chiefly unfenced plains everywhere sprinkled with cattle. Here and there a ñandu, the South American ostrich, trotted awkwardly away across the prairie. Where there were fences, the wires ran through the posts by holes bored in them, rather than being secured by staples. Well-tended fields of fruit-trees in long rows seemed incongruous in South America; it brought a feeling of satisfaction to see industry and decent living again, things being done, instead of merely doing themselves. Some industrious country boys climbed a fence with bags of large, juicy watermelons for sale; boys merely in quest of pocket-money and not because their livelihood depended upon it. The population at large was too busy to bother with station hawking. Countrymen wore bombachos, enormous bloomer-like trousers, tucked into soft top-boots or drawn up about the bare ankles above their alpargatas, or hempen soles, as if the cost of cloth were of no importance. Any lady would have remained ladylike in them. Now and then the river drew up so close beside us that we could look far off across Uruguay, spread out on the other side.
At length we sighted ahead, a sort of oriental mist hovering about it, a whitish city with a two-tower church suggesting minarets, a city set on a knoll, not unlike Jerusalem. Yet this was not the town we were approaching, but Salto, in the “República Oriental” over the river. Great fields of grapes, well tended, began to race by us, suburban houses thickened, and we drew up at the in-all-respects-complete city of Concordia, four hundred miles south of Posadas on the frontier I had left twenty-four hours before. In the Andes, world-famous cities had been mere languid villages; in the Argentine, places the world at large had never heard of were large, flourishing metropolises. Concordia numbers twenty thousand inhabitants, virtually all white and all alive. Yet it is not even the capital, but merely the second city of the Province of the Entre Rios—“Between the Rivers” Paraná and Uruguay, famous for its saladerías, or beef-salting establishments. Well spread out, it has few churches and no over-supply of priests, the former with few bells and those of agreeable tone, which are rung, not too often, instead of being beaten with an infernal din. Liquor-shops are few; the majority of the population finds something more worth while than shopkeeping. Its inhabitants know how to pass two abreast on the sidewalks; women on bicycles bring a frequent start of surprise; swarms of cleanly dressed boys and girls sally forth from big, well-equipped schools, where coeducation reigns; bootblacks clad like business men and carrying upholstered and decorated seats seek their clients in the well-kept streets and plazas; electric street-cars give excellent service. Electric lights both in streets and houses were even more brilliant than our own; the public library was actually open and “functioning,” and did hot spend its time staring at the foreigner who had come to read. In the “Hotel Garabaldi”—just such a place as the name implies—wine was served with meals as freely as in Europe, and though only the abode of workingmen, it was superior to the best hostelry of Andean cities. Real beds had now taken the place of canvas cots; at the rear was an electric-lighted cancha de bochas, or outdoor bowling alley for the clientèle of Italian workmen.
I slipped across the river next afternoon to Salto, in Uruguay, adding another country to my growing collection. One went and came freely; without frontier formalities. Salto is large, and several times older than Concordia, with many well-built buildings, yet with a suggestion of “seediness,” a bit more squalor and barefootedness, its church not so imposing and well-kept as it looks at a distance, its policemen in rather shiny and threadbare uniforms, its streets cobbled, rather than smoothly paved. In short, it is more Spanish in type, more clustered together, with a general air suggesting that this is not quite so live and hopeful a country as that over the river. Many proud old families live here; yet the head of more than one of them slips across daily to do business in the Argentine.
One can go on from Concordia to Buenos Aires by rail, but I chose to take the overnight journey on a big Mihanovich river-steamer, with all the conveniences of an ocean liner. The flat, sometimes rolling, occasionally bushy shores of the Uruguay were broken by several towns, notably the two model establishments producing Leibig’s extract of beef. When I returned on deck next morning a brilliant sun was pouring its rays blindingly over the stream misnamed the Plata, the “River of Silver,” by Sebastian “Gaboto”—who was none other than our own Sebastian Cabot—because he fancied it ran uphill to the silver mines of Peru. The Indians called it the Paraná-Guazú, the “River Large as a Sea,” a truer name, for on the right it stretched away to the dimmest of broken land forms, and soon these, too, disappeared, and a reddish-brown sea spread unbroken to the horizon. For a time we hugged the Uruguayan shore, then swung the blazing sun around behind us and struck out for what, but for its color, might have been the open sea. Soon we began to pass buoys of the Argentine government, marked “R. A. m. o. p.,” with the kilometers to the end of my journey painted upon them. Toward eight, where the yellow sea and the bluish-gray sky met, the vast, perfect circle of the horizon was broken by a patch of faint white. It was only a tiny narrow line down at the extreme edge of the great inverted bowl of sky above us, yet so long—several inches, in fact—that should it turn out to be a city, as I began to suspect, since we were headed directly for it, it would be a large one indeed. Then the white patch began to take on faint individual shape, and above us the wireless was spitting its message to the yet invisible world ahead. An hour later we were in the midst of buoys, large and small, marking the “Canal Sur,” or South Channel. Boats and steamers appeared, and sailing vessels spread their white wings across the yellow waters on all sides of us, while the city stretched along the horizon ahead had turned from white to gray, with a tint of red, neither color nor edifice conspicuous, except for two groups of huge brick smoke-stacks belching forth into the brilliant sky. Even after the long line of buildings had taken on definite form, and one could all but count their windows, the city seemed still to sit on the yellow sea. One was struck, too, by the narrowness of the strip; the buildings seemed for the most part a bare four stories, with only here and there one as high as ten cutting into the landless sky-line. Two tugs took possession of us, dragging us up a narrow channel through a wilderness of shipping, where we must soon stop for lack of space, until we spied an unoccupied bit of wharf and warped gradually into it. It was a late-summer morning, the ninth of March. While the rest waited for their baggage to be examined, an official glanced at my bundle, jerked a thumb scornfully over a shoulder, and I stepped out into the metropolitan rumble of—no wonder gringo residents have abbreviated it to “B.A.”—“la Ciudad y Puerto de Santa María de los Buenos Aires.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s note:
1. Changed “I am not of that kidney” to “I am not of that kind” on p. 48.
2. Changed “going a journey” to “going on a journey” on p. 167.
3. Silently corrected typographical errors.
4. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.