On November 11th I took train southward. Though my original plan of following the Inca highway from Quito to Cuzco had been accomplished, the thought of turning homeward with half the continent still unexplored had become an absurdity. But the scattered life of that dreary region to the south of the Imperial City promised too little of new interest to be worth covering on foot. If I did walk down to the station, behind my belongings on jogging Indian legs, it was because to have waited for the nine o’clock mule-car would probably have been to miss the nine-thirty train. Cuzco, like its rival to the north, has been connected by rail with the outside world since 1908. The train leaves on Tuesdays and Saturdays, spending a night at Sicuani and another at Juliaca, whence a branch descends to Arequipa. Every Friday there is a vertiginous “express” that makes Puno in one day. A fertile valley, the great bolson, or mountain pocket, that stretches from the pampa of Anta in the north to Urcos on the south, with many grazing cattle, frequent villages, and strings of laden Indians and asses, rolled slowly past. Before noon we caught the gorge of the muddy VilcaÑota, the same stream that under the name of Urubamba encircles Machu Picchu, with little patch-farms far up the face of the enclosing ranges and here and there steep, narrow side valleys rich with cultivation. Yet cultivatable ground was scarce, so scarce that it was easy to understand why the ancient population spared as much of it as possible by walling up their dead in caves and planting all but perpendicular slopes. Next day the valley rose gradually, until cultivation gave way completely to cattle and sheep, then to llama and alpaca herds grazing on the tough ichu of broad punas stretching to arid foothills that, in turn, rolled up into a great snow-clad range on our left. An aggressive, despairing aridity, rarely touched with a cheering note of green, spread in every direction. A dreary land indeed would this have been The drear and barren land across which lay the branch line of the third day rolled ever higher to the Crucero Alto at 14,666 feet. Two large lakes, cold, steely-blue in tint, with a few barren islands, broke upon the scene and sank slowly as we panted upward; patches of snow lay above, around, and then below us; the glare of the arid, sun-flooded landscape grew painful to the eyes, recalling that many an Andean traveler holds colored glasses an indispensable part of his equipment. Towns there were none; and the stations consisted of one or two wind-threshed buildings of stone or sheet-iron, dismal beyond conception. Then we descended gradually. Here and there in the edge of reedy lagoons stood parihuanas,—long-legged, rose-tinted birds the feathers of which in olden days formed the Inca’s head-dress, when capital punishment was meted out to anyone of lesser rank who dared decorate himself with them. Equally sacred were the vicuÑas, the undomesticated species of the llama family that furnished the imperial ermine. Ordinarily the traveler is fortunate to catch sight from the train of one or two of those timid animals. To-day a group of fourteen appeared not five hundred yards away across the pampa; then within an hour we passed close by flocks of nine, twelve, seven, and eight respectively, a total of fifty, more than my Peruvian seat-companion, who crossed this line several times a year, had seen in all his life. Unlike the three domesticated species, llama, alpaca, and guanaco, the vicuÑas are uniform in color, a reddish-brown with whitish belly, legs, and tail, not unlike a fawn in general appearance. A more delicate animal could scarcely be imagined; the neck seemed hardly larger than a man’s wrist, the legs fragile in their slender daintiness. They were graceful, as well as swift, even in their running, which resembled the gait of the jack-rabbit in the way they brought front and hind legs together. The flocks still belong to the government as in the days of the Incas, when they were protected by royal edict, under penalty of death. For some ten years past Peruvian law, too, has forbidden killing them, but the valuable wool and skins are still to be had in the larger cities, for game-wardens are conspicuous by their absence. What seemed a hopeless desert thinly covered with dry, wiry bunch-grass, now spread in all directions. We were crossing the vast Suddenly a deep-green patch of alfalfa burst out among the glaring rocks, trebling their barrenness by contrast. It was the little oasis of Yura, fed by a small stream, the water of which, reputed efficacious to disordered livers, is bottled and sold—less widely to-day than before the priests, whose rival establishment produces the “Water of Jesus,” threatened to blackball out of heaven anyone who drank the other. Then far away across the Egypt-tinted world the eye made out well below, at first dimly, a green oasis with a great, or at least a widespread, city covering about half of it. “Ari, quepay!” (“Yes, let us stay a while!”) the first settlers are said to have cried when they caught sight of this garden spot; and the train seemed like-minded, setting us down at last in Arequipa, second city of Peru. Three dawdling days had been required to cover 412 miles. The only place of importance between the Pacific and Titicaca is strikingly oriental in atmosphere, with a suggestion of Cairo, thanks to its shuffling donkeys—a hole is slit in their nostrils that they may more easily breathe this highland air—and its encircling desert, yet exceeding the latter in beauty by reason of the snowclads hovering about it. To the north lies Chachani, fantastic with its peaks and pinnacles and jagged ice-fields; nearer at hand stands hoar-headed Misti, rivalled in symmetry of form only by Fujiyama and Cotapaxi. From any second-story roof the arid, yellow sand stretches away as from the summit of the pyramids to a horizon far more broken and tumbled than that of the Sahara. The hills are streaked with what The city itself is flat, of one, or at most two stories, always with the bulking mass of Misti or its neighbors behind it. Earthquakes have been frequent in Arequipa. Because of these visitations, perhaps, the town has everywhere an unfinished appearance, most buildings ceasing abruptly just above the first story and looking as if the rest had been shaken off or suddenly abandoned. A few have ventured to crawl up again to two stories, and here and there a bold adventurer to three, these latter, commonly of sheet-iron, seeming constantly to tremble at their own temerity. As in Lima and the lands of the Arab, the roofs are flat, places of promenade and evening tertulias; for rain falls, if at all, only in brief afternoon showers. The town is built largely of a soft white stone, almost chalk in composition, and light in weight as terra-cotta, which is chopped or sawed out of a desert quarry not far away and which, though it hardens in the air, can still be carved with a knife. Two arched bridges with massive piers, mildly suggesting those by which one enters Toledo in Spain, span the little cliff-sided Chili. The eucalyptus seems less at home here than in the higher cities of the Sierra, but drooping willows abound. As everywhere on the West Coast of Peru, massive mud fences afford places of promenade in the outskirts. I was treading close on the heels of civilization of a material sort. Electric street-cars had appeared in Arequipa a bare three months before; with motormen imported from Lima they afforded an efficient service to nearly every corner of the oasis. The innovation had not been without its difficulties. Strolling one morning, I met three cholos driving a dozen donkeys marketward. Suddenly they began to shout and dance about the animals as if some danger were imminent. A block away sounded the gong of a bright new tramcar, but as I Cuzco and Arequipa are reputed the Peruvian strongholds of conservatism. Of the two, the latter is probably more deeply under the spell of the ancient church. The din of bells was almost constant; during my week in the city I saw no fewer than five images of the Virgin paraded through the streets to the usual accompaniment of kneeling cholos, bareheaded whites, and scores of sanctimonious-faced old beatas following with funereal step. Several of Arequipa’s fiestas are noted for the dancing of wooden saints to barbaric music in the public squares. Others have fixed periods of calling on their fellows, sallying forth from their home churches to the plaza where, manipulated by the cholo bearers beneath, they bow to and finally “kiss” each other, to the fanatical applause of the multitude. The town boasts also several crucified figures operated by wires that cause the eyes to roll, the limbs to quiver, and the head finally to droop as in death, after which a gang of workmen, carrying towels over their arms to wipe away the “blood,” climb up to remove the nails and lay the “body of Jesus” away in a glass coffin until the next holy day. The babies of Bolivia sit in a whole nest of finery on nurse’s back Arequipa is built of stones light as wood, cut from a neighboring quarry. They harden when exposed to the air From a score of stories typical of Arequipa with which I was favored by a fellow-countryman, who had spent many years as the alpaca expert of the chief local warehouse, I pass on two. For months he and his wife had been annoyed by the throngs of beggars who gathered for a bowl of soup each noon at the monastery just across the narrow street from his residence, and then slept out the day in But the ladies seemed merely to be mildly amused, and the native policeman saw nothing in the sight worthy of comment. Children now and then roam the streets of Arequipa in their birthday clothes, and the old fellow had long since been in his second childhood. My outraged fellow-countryman went across town to make complaint to his friend, the prefect. The latter did not see what he could do about it. “Why don’t you send him to the hospital?” grumbled the alpaca-expert. “They wouldn’t receive him, with no one to pay for his keep.” “Well, sir, I couldn’t stand it no longer having that ol’ feller paradin’ around before my house, with my wife inside an’ all of them women folks goin’ to mass, as naked as the day he was born. So next mornin’ I borrowed a stretcher an’ got four Indians, an’ I says, ‘Now you git that ol’ feller on that stretcher an’ tie him down an’ carry him over to the hospital an’ leave him inside, or dump him in the river or anything you like, only so’s you git him out of here. An’ I’ve got a phone an’ when I hear he’s inside the hospital I’ll give you each a sol.’ Well, sir, them Indians just dumped him in the hospital payteeo before the Sisters of Mercy could shut the gates, an’ they had to keep him. “I’ve got a lot of friends amongst them priests across the road, Next day I returned to the highlands in the private car of the railway superintendent, a fellow-countryman. The day was brilliant, the leprous desert flashing in the sun even after it had given way to the ichu-brown tablelands of the great plateau, Misti bulking as large a hundred kilometers away as out at the observatory on her flanks, and snow-caps springing up into the luminous sky about us to all points of the compass. All the afternoon we loafed in cushioned armchairs facing the back platform, on which sat our host shooting with automatic gun-pistol at vicuÑas, a pastime strictly against the law, but Peruvian statutes scarcely reach the altitude of a railway superintendent. Fortunately the animals were scarce and far away, and the nearest he came to breaking the law was to raise the desert dust about them and send them scampering across the rolling pampa at a lope between that of jack-rabbit and a deer, sparing us the necessity of halting the train and sending out the crew to bring in the game. From Juliaca we turned south along a flat once-lake-bottom. Arms and branches of Titicaca, full of shivering reeds, broke in upon the dusk that thickened into night just as we pulled into Puno, cold, dreary, and monotonously like all other towns of the high Sierra. I had timed my arrival to take, instead of the regular steamer directly across the lake, the semi-monthly “Yapura” that makes the round of its shore, with many stops. We were off at ten and out upon the In the afternoon we churned into a wide, semicircular bay as far as shallow water and rustling reeds permitted, and I was soon climbing the easy slope to Yunguyo. Here and there was much freight to discharge. When I expressed my surprise at the consumptive powers of so small a town, the captain winked an Irish-Peruvian eye and breathed, rather than murmured, “contrabando.” I had come at last to the end of endless Peru, with the unexpected privilege of walking out of it, as I had entered it eight months before. Yunguyo lies on the neck of a little peninsula, part of which, by the arbitrariness of international frontiers, is Bolivian. The steamer had orders to pick me up in the morning, and slipping on kodak and revolver, I struck out for the sacred city of Copacabana. A league from the landing the road mounted a stony ridge, passed through the two arches of an uninhabited rural chapel, and left the historical, if sometimes profanity-provoking, land of Peru forever behind. To that day I had never, to my knowledge, met a Bolivian. Those At the end of a five-mile stroll the stony highway broke forth into a little lake-side town. The church and monastery sacred to Our Lady of Copacabana, roofed with glistening green and yellow tiles, in a square surrounded by heavy walls brilliant with the crimson flor del Inca, nestles in a lap of rocky hills a bit back from the lake and bulks high above the haunts of mere men at its feet. In the days of the Incas this was a holy city, with a certain “idol of vast renown among the Gentiles,” a place of purification whence pilgrims embarked for the ultra-sacred island of Titicaca. The church militant would not have been itself had it lost this opportunity of grafting its own superstitions on those of the aboriginals, and some three centuries ago the present “Virgen de Copacabana” was set up, with the usual marvelous tale of her miraculous appearance in this spot. Her servants have been realizing richly on their foresight ever since. A steady stream of pilgrims pours into the holy city from Peru, as well The priest of Pomata had given me a note to the superior of the monastery. A doorkeeper led me into pillared cloisters opening on a flower-grown patio and softly into the sanctum of Father Basoberri, deep in conversation with a parish priest who had brought a flock of pilgrims from a neighboring town. Being a European, he created a better impression than the average native churchman. To celebrate my arrival he ordered a servant to uncork a bottle of imported beer and, after the first formalities, had him set me down in the monastery dining-room, where an excellent meal stopped abruptly short of dessert and coffee. The superior conducted me in person to the large brick-and-tile room reserved for distinguished guests, opening on the now bitter-cold expanse of Titicaca, and advised me to fasten the padlock and put the key in my pocket, “for though we are here in a monastery, there are people passing back and forth, and it is safer. Now,” he went on, “if you wish to see the customs of the pilgrims, you have only to mount that stairway.” I climbed two stone flights in semi-darkness and found myself in a narrow wooden gallery at the back of a large, high chamber suffused with a “dim religious light.” It was painted blue, with a sprinkling of golden stars, as nearly the painter’s visualization of heaven, no doubt, as the crudity of his workmanship permitted him to express. Confession and a contribution to the attendant priests are requirements for admittance to the floor of the church below. At the further end stood the gaudy altar, in its center a glass-faced alcove containing the far-famed Virgin of Copacabana. The figure, scarcely three feet high, was cumbered with several rich silk gowns, laden with gold and jewels, and with a blazing golden crown many sizes too large. Round-about her were expanses of golden-starred heavens, and half The place was unusually immaculate for the Andes, as becomes a famous shrine where money pours in the year around, and was in striking contrast to the squalor of the surrounding region. The entire floor below was crowded with kneeling pilgrims, weirdly half-lighted by candles, except around the altar, where there was light enough to make priests, acolytes, and the Virgin stand out brilliantly. A week is the customary length of stay for pilgrims, with a ceremony of welcome and one of dismissal, separated by a long series of masses, confessions and purifications—not to mention the ubiquitous fees. It is perfectly well-known throughout the length and breadth of the Andes, as the priest from the neighboring town, having taken me in hand as soon as I appeared in the gallery, whispered above the rumble of the services, that Nuestra SeÑora de Copacabana is an all-round champion in the miracle line. For instance: Hardly a year back she had picked up a ship about to be wrecked on the coast of Chile and set it out a thousand miles or so into the mill-pond Pacific, merely because one of the sailors had had the presence of mind to call upon her at the height of the storm. The newspapers of the time seem to have covered the service poorly. Or there was the case of the Indian in my cicerone’s own parish who, working in his field far up the side of a mountain sloping swiftly toward Titicaca, suddenly fell headlong down the precipice. He would infallibly have been dashed to pieces on the rocks below, had he not suddenly, halfway down, uttered the name of the Virgin—personally I never knew the mind of an Andean Indian to work with such rapidity—and instantly found himself comfortably seated back in his own field again. The fact should not be lost sight of, however, in rating this marvel that the AymarÁ husbandman cheers on his labors with an even stronger chicha than that of his Quichua cousins to the north. The ceremony we were now witnessing was that of dismissing the departing pilgrims. At about two-minute intervals there knelt on the steps of the altar one person, a man and wife, or sometimes a man, wife, and child, always of the same family. An Indian acolyte in red thrust a lighted candle into a hand of each, the chief priest bowed down before the image, while back beside us in the gallery an Indian Then suddenly the cloak was snatched away, the candles were jerked out of the hands of the worshippers, the latter were all but bodily pushed aside, and a priest on the side-lines called out the next name from the list in his hands. This field-manager was startlingly unBolivian in efficiency, keeping things moving with a rush, and calling the next group almost before the acolyte reached for the blue blanket. The attitude of all those professionally connected with the ceremony, was scornful, careless, and hurried—like a New York barber who is convinced there is no “tip” coming. The fifth group to appear, however, was less cavalierly treated. A tall, well-dressed man stepped forward, and an acolyte quickly slipped in front of him a prie-dieu, or prayer-stool with high back, of the style used in church by well-to-do South American women. Then, to my surprise, two young men in riding breeches and leggings, who had been standing near us in the gallery, stumbled over each other in their haste to get down to the floor below and kneel on either side of the older man. “Ese caballero,” whispered the priest beside me, with a distinct tone of pride in his voice, “is a famous lawyer and ex-senator from La Paz, and those are his two sons. They are great devotees of the Blessed Virgin of Copacabana.” Indians plowing on the shores of Titicaca. Those behind break up the clods with wooden mallets Sunrise at Copacabana, the sacred city of Bolivia on the shores of Titicaca When the cloak had been laid away for the night, the chief priest mounted a pulpit projecting from the side-wall, and in the same drawl in which he had chanted at the altar, compared with which the notorious American nasal twang is soft and songful, either preached a sermon, or recited a bit from the Bible, or imparted some stern orders from the Pope—which, neither I nor, I am certain, any other hearer not previously informed ever guessed. For the monotonous drone in which he hurried through the thing, like a man with an appointed I was hurrying into my clothes in the bitter cold Titicaca dawn, when the faint long-drawn whistle of the “Yapura” was borne to my ears. To my astonishment it was barely five, so great is the difference in the hour of sunrise in the few degrees I had moved southward since leaving Cuzco. Copacabana in its lap of terraced hills shrunk into the past as we slipped away around the peninsula of the same name. Before us rose the Island of the Sun, traditional cradle of the Inca race, yellow-brown and mountainous, with terraces far up some of its rugged valleys, one red-roofed village housing the workmen of General Pando, chief owner of the island. It produces potatoes, maize, and quinoa. On the mainland, too, all the shores were terraced and cultivated from the water’s edge to the tops of the ridges and hills, in long, square, rectangular, or such fantastic shapes of fields as the lay of the land required. To the east the great glacier mass of Sorata, by some reputed the highest peak in America, lay piled into the sky, half-hidden and cut off from the solid earth by vast banks of white clouds. Before long we passed, a bit further off, Coati, the Island of the Moon, a low ridge terraced from end to end, constituting a single hacienda noted for its fertility. Mere words give but a faint notion of the beauty of Titicaca on a brilliant morning, with its striking combinations of soft colors,—the dense blue-green of the lake, curtained by tumbled banks of snow-white clouds, the velvety yellow-brown islands and mainland, with the faint-purple cloud-shadows playing across them. The mighty glacier bulk of Sorata piercing the sky seemed to move forward also, as the steamer slipped lazily on, frequently bringing into view new and more delicately beautiful combinations of the same elements. The Bolivian mainland we drew near in the early afternoon was of a reddish soil, with many patches of bright green and pretty little At eight I stumbled into the station building of Tiahuanaco. The telegraph operator was sufficiently impressed by my familiarity with the name of the gringo superintendent to induce the woman across the track to serve me stale bread and native cheese, and tea made of the water of Titicaca, brought here in locomotive tanks. On the table were several of the dailies of La Paz—it was difficult to think of that city as “the capital” after eight months of considering Lima the center of the universe—in which the world’s news all at once jumped up to date. But it was like reading a serial story of which one has lost several chapters and finds it impossible to pick up all the threads again. Tiahuanaco, 12,900 feet above the sea, in a broad, open, unprotected plain, frigid by night, and not over warm by day under the chill blue of its highland sky, is the chief archeological enigma of “Alto-Peru.” The most important ruins lie a few hundred yards north of the station, and an equal distance from the modern adobe town with its bulking stone church. From a slight rise of ground the flat plain, sprinkled with many clusters of mud huts, stretches away to a gouged and broken ridge, here reddish, there green with vegetation, that fences it in. Huge blocks of stone lie tumbled and scattered over a vaster extent than at Luxor and Karnak, in a disarray at once suggesting earthquake; for they seem too immense to have been overthrown by a merely human destroying vengeance. In the region roughly known as Peru there were several detached and separate civilizations, some of which clearly antedated the Incas; and Tiahuanaco As I sat gazing across the disordered mystery of long ago, an Indian woman, the ubiquitous bundle and second generation on her back, a crude sling in one hand, drove her pigs out into what seems once to have been the main square of the ruined city. As the animals fell to rooting about among the ruins, the woman walked across to the inscrutable stone god and bowed down before it with a strange, heathenish courtesy. I attempted to work my way around to leeward in the hope of catching a photograph of the aboriginal rite. But while I was still some distance off, she either spied or scented me, and raced away toward the town at a greater speed than I had ever before witnessed in one of her race. In the modern town dwells an indolent, not to say insolent, population of cholos and Indians, ignorant as the Arabs of the Nile of the motive that brings strange beings from far off to view the disdained remnants of long ago, yet ready to take all possible advantage of that absurd custom. The place bids fair to become as overrun with the pests of tourist centers as the show-places of Europe. Already the stranger is greeted by a rabble of unsoaped urchins, offering for sale as “antigÜedades” all manner of worthless pebbles. Aware that visitors, for some strange reason, are interested only in things of great The train snorted in soon after noon. Across the bleak Collao spring plowing was at its height, amid much ceremony. Many of the sleek oxen were half-hidden by the red and yellow flags of Bolivia, set upright on the yoke across their horns. Gay streamers and banners decorated animals and plow, while the Indian family that in each case had come in full force to see the propitiation of the spirits that rule over the fields, was garbed in its gayest. For not only must the moon be in a particular phase, but all gods must be won over, all demons exorcised, and all signs promising, before it is worth while to begin the year’s sowing. What a fertile plateau it was, compared to stony Peru, the plowing unchecked over hill and dale of the slightly rolling plain as far as the eye could see! An official passing through the train to examine the bundles for contraband was the only formality that had marked the passing of the frontier. In the second-class car I began to gather the impression that the AymarÁ Indian, if morose and even less given to smiling, was on the whole a more promising type of humanity than the Quichuas. For though he was more inclined to insolence, he was far less obsequious, more manly than the slinking race to the north, less passive and obedient, more bellicose and jealous of his rights; and as long as there is any fight left in a man, there is still hope for him. The day waned. A plowman driving his oxen homeward and carrying the plow on his own shoulder is a touch Gray did not catch. The plain grew less fertile, and was dotted now with countless stone-heaps; Illimani and a long, half-clouded snow-range grew up before us; we climbed somewhat, though the world roundabout seemed level as before. The railroad swung to the left. The scores of mule, donkey, and llama pack-trains, however, kept straight on across the bleak, stone-heaped plain, till suddenly at a white pillar a few miles away they Where the train halted I scorned the electric trolley and, walking a few yards, saw suddenly burst upon me a scene for once superior to the anticipation,—La Paz, America’s most lofty capital, in its hole in the ground. Up there at the “Alto,” 13,600 feet above the sea, all was brown, cold, barren, unenticing; all about, behind, and around me the bleak, uninhabited Andean plateau, stony and drear, cherishing nothing but bunches of tough ichu, stretched away like a faded brown sea to the hazy distance. Then at my very feet this gave way, and all the nearby world pitched headlong down into a gashed and broken chasm 1200 feet down, measuring perhaps two miles across from where I stood to an equal height on the tumbled and ramified foothills opposite. These, breaking and splitting and falling away into unseen valleys, and climbing out again to become more rugged and higher ridges, finally culminated in a vast and jagged mass of snow and ice, cut off from the solid earth by banks of clouds, above which the reflection of the descending sun streamed in brilliant rose color upon the glaciered pinnacle of giant Illimani, 24,500 feet above the sea. Across the broad puna a cold, fitful wind whistled lugubriously; down below, though barely a sound of life except the blood-stirring snort of a regimental band came up this sheer quarter-mile from the city, all seemed pleasantly cozy and warm. The lower flanks of the great cuenca were checkered with little Indian farms, now mostly light-brown from being newly plowed, some still the brownish-green of old crops, and all hanging at a decided angle. Further down, on the floor of the valley itself, were similar irregular patches, chiefly of the brilliant green of alfalfa, of every conceivable shape,—round, triangular, horseshoe, veritable “Gerrymanders” in the strange forms given them by the configurations of the ground; for, once down below it, this proves by no means so floor-flat as it seems from above. In the very bottom of the valley, rather on the further side and stretching a bit up the opposite slope, lay La Paz itself. It was a compact city, so compact that it seemed one conglomerate mass into which the eye broke only once,—at the tree-roofed central plaza, tiny from here as a green paster on a vast wall-painting. From this height one saw little but the roofs, the dull-red of the tiles greatly predominating—almost too much red, as in the garments of an Indian gathering; next came the white and colored house-walls, then the sober gray of old churches, and finally here and All about the city proper, imperceptibly joining it and stretching away on nearly all sides over vastly more space than the town itself, were perhaps half as many buildings, scattered singly or in small clusters, forming an almost unbroken row down the valley to the southeastward. Here and there one of these ostentated itself in brilliant red; most of them were cream-color or the gray of sheet-iron; and everywhere between them were the irregular green of plowed patches, with now and then a grove of blue-green eucalyptus, or a patch of willows, enticing from this treeless height where, once the eye rose a bit from the floor of the valley, there was not the suggestion of a shrub. Not the least striking feature of the scene was the glassy clearness of the atmosphere, with nowhere a puff of smoke, and absolutely nothing to dim the view; if the clock in the all-too-slender tower of the congress building had been larger, it would have been easy to tell the time by it. Brown ribbons of roads, all starting at a pillar on the plateau above, strung like drippings of syrup down all sides of the cuenca, except on the rugged, uninhabited flank opposite; and along all of them on this Saturday afternoon crawled at what seemed a snail’s pace files of Indians with their laden donkeys and llamas, the cargoes generally covered with straw, the drivers chiefly in red ponchos, though so like tiny crawling ants were they from this height that the colors were barely noted. Seldom broken, these strings of pack-trains stretched from the edge of the plateau to where the head of each procession to the morrow’s market was swallowed up in the compact, silent city. I walked on around the yawning chasm, the wind that howled across the puna reaching the very marrow of my bones, a raging hail-storm beating upon me for a brief moment and making the city below seem doubly snug and serene by contrast. The little “Great River” of La Paz one did not see at all, so tiny is it and worn so far down into the clay soil of the valley in a half-seen gorge descending through tumbled ranges of gnarled hills toward the yungas, as the Bolivian calls the tropical montaÑa, below. Mere words give but a faint notion of this lower end of the cuenca of La Paz. For so broken and pitched and tumbled, so fantastically gashed by the rains is it, that it would be an indescribably beautiful thing, even if there were not added the wonderful colors and half-tones, a rich dark-red predominating, I descended afoot behind the last pack-train, a stony, thigh-aching half-hour from the pillar to the central plaza. The first information to reach me was that La Paz outdid in cost of living even Lima, which is criminal. The boliviano having but four fifths the value of the sol, I had fancied prices would be correspondingly lower; but here two units were often required where one had sufficed before, and the great majority scorned to do business in smaller coins. The hotels which my sadly mutilated letter of credit permitted me to enter were not only unsavory and atrociously managed, but had the barbarous custom of several beds in a room. Each in turn attempted to thrust me into a rumpled nest, with four or five others of unknown nationality or antecedents close beside it, within a battered door to which there was neither lock nor bolt. Whatever else I may be, I am distinctly not a gregarious being in that sense; whereupon they offered me a room with only one companion, as if there were any particular virtue in numbers! I brought up at last in the “Tambo Quirquincha,” facing the Plaza Alonzo de Mendoza, an inn favored almost entirely by natives arriving on horseback. The constitution of Bolivia asserts that Sucre is the real capital, but permits congress to choose its place of meeting, and “because of the constant danger from our two chief enemies” (Peru and Chile) “at the northern end of the Republic, the Government really resides in La Paz.” How much the choice is governed by the fact that there is no railroad, but only a mule trail, to the “real capital,” is a matter of conjecture. At any rate, the president has not been in Sucre in This “seat of Government,” perhaps the most Indian capital of all South America, has the most purely Spanish name. It should still be called Chuquiyapu, as the aboriginals refer to it to-day, rather than by the trite Castilian designation that is duplicated a score of times throughout Spanish-America. The census of 1909 discovered 76,559 persons in the entire hole in the ground. Of these, 20,007 were rated “white,” but as usual in Latin-America the enumerators got the color sadly mixed with the social position of the enumerated. Indeed, the chief of the census goes on to explain “white” as “descendants, more or less pure, of Spaniards, Europeans, or North Americans”—in other words, anyone with a distinct trace of European blood. There may be a third that many of strictly Caucasian race. Of the 3458 foreign residents, 86 were Americans; of 696 non-Catholics, 562 were foreign men, 40, foreign women, 193, Bolivian men (“chiefly atheists”), and one Bolivian woman. Bold woman, indeed, to admit it! The census rated 30% of the population as Indians; but here again the social status must have played its part, or else there are many non-resident country Indians often in the city. African blood is extremely rare, though slavery was not abolished until 1851. It is no climate for negroes. “The unmarried American women are nearly all teachers,” the report continues, then takes a rap at the country’s chief enemy for stealing her seaport and bottling her up within South America by remarking, “Las chilenas living in La Paz are almost without exception prostitutes.” Most striking of all the data, perhaps, is the fact that of the 60,445 inhabitants over nineteen years of age, only 13,047 are married. But this does not mean that race suicide is imminent; rather that the priests have made the cost of marriage all but prohibitive to the lower classes, and that many others are thereby influenced to consider the ceremony of minor importance. In the entire republic 16% are “alfabÉticos,” that is, “know their letters,” a much more handy expression in Latin-American statistics than “read and write.” Only Honduras, in all America, is so low in this respect. One of the two huge figures facing the grass-grown plaza of modern Tiahuanaco at the entrance to the church The ancient god of Tiahuanaco before which the Indian woman, herding her pigs, bowed down in worship But in any strict census the cholo is the most numerous class of La Paz. A native writer succinctly explains the rise of this mixed race: “As in the beginning the Spaniards had not within reach many women of their own race, they satisfied the physical and moral necessities of the sex with women of the vanquished tribes.... A few of these succeeded in inspiring real passion in the breasts of the hardy Conquistadores, sometimes even to the extent of causing the latter to marry themselves legally and Catholicly with our Indian women.” All hail to the inspiring Indian women! One must not, however, overlook the fact that “real passion” among the old Spanish Conquistadores was not so closely allied to soap and tooth-powder as in our own days. Short and sturdy—especially the women, who do not wear themselves out with dissipation—with quick little eyes, the cholos have much of the independence of the AymarÁ character; they are quite the opposite No country of South America has so large a percentage of pure Indian population as Bolivia. The AymarÁ is by nature silent and aloof, more sullen and cruel than the Quichua, and by no means so obsequious as the aboriginals of Cuzco. He never touches his hat to a passing gringo; unlike the Indian of Quito he crosses the main plaza in any dress he chooses, even carrying bundles and sitting on the benches; in the region roundabout, the race has inner organizations under their own chiefs which are virtually independent of the Government; yet in town he does as he is ordered, though sullenly, and shopkeepers drag him in to perform any low task at whatever reward they choose to give him. As pongo, or house-servant, he is farmed out as a child and becomes virtually a slave,—though that condition worries him little. A frequent “want-ad.” in the papers of La Paz runs: “Se alquila pongo con taquia,” that is, there is for rent an Indian servant with necessity of gathering for his master llama droppings as fuel. Festivals and fire-water are his chief amusements. Sunday he reserves as a day to get drunk, and couples are reputed to take turns at this recreation, so that one may be in condition to lead the other home when it is over. His music is melancholy beyond words. As a Bolivian puts it, “He lives without inquietude and without remorse, being dangerous only when he is full of liquor or religion. He is a beast of burden, uncomplaining, desires nothing, is apparently content with his fate, and looks with supreme indifference on all the rest of the world and its people.” The contrasts of life in La Paz are striking. Here an ancient scribe sits before a typewriter agency; there a group of Indian women squat before the crude products of the country, in front of the electric-lighted emporium of a foreign merchant; electric tramways thrust aside trains of llamas even in the principal streets. Speaking of these street-cars, they crawl back and forth across town, sometimes zigzagging whole blocks for every street; and the dishevelled carriages for hire are generally drawn by four horses. For La Paz is broken and steep, often held up in layers by retaining walls, while the sidewalks are often toboggan-steep and always slippery. Houses which from the “Alto” seem on the level are found to be a hundred feet or more one above the other. It is one of the easiest cities to get lost in without being really lost; for one always comes out finally on some corner where a familiar landmark or half the city stands forth to It is difficult for the stranger to get accustomed to seeing droves of llamas, with drivers dressed in the style of Inca days, soft-footing across the main plaza or patiently awaiting their masters, with the modern congress building as a background. Congress, by the way, was in session during my days in La Paz. The visitors’ gallery is high up above the perfectly circular chamber, giving the half-hundred representatives the appearance of being down at the bottom of a deep well. They smoked frequently, spoke sitting, were largely white, though the cholo class was by no means unrepresented, and among them were two priests in full vestments, their tonsures shining up at us like rays from the Middle Ages. There were also several who strangely resembled Tammany politicians of the popular cartoons, and nowhere was there any outward sign of genius, legislative or otherwise. While the man who had the “floor” kept his seat and droned endlessly through something or other, the presiding officer sat motionless and openly bored, and members slept, smoked, read newspapers, wrote letters, and otherwise busied themselves with the vital problems of the nation, after the fashion of legislative bodies the world over. There is a distinct gradation in the costumes of La Paz, especially among the women. The men of the “gente decente” class, the whites and the consider-themselves-whites, ape Paris to the best of their ability, as in all Andean capitals. The higher-class cholo, ranging from shoe-makers to clerks—in both the American and English sense—wears more or less countrified and ill-fitting “European” garb, even to gloves and a cane on Sunday, if he can get them; for social standing depends chiefly on dress. The less ambitious half-caste wears the same leather sandal as the Indian, a coat showing a bit above or below But the men of La Paz lend it little color compared to the women. These may be roughly divided, following the local phraseology, into “seÑoritas,” “cholas,” and “indias”; though these in turn subdivide, until there are six rather distinct costume classes, all shading somewhat into one another. First: The foreign women and a small number of native white ones copy the styles of Paris with more or less success. Second: The moderately well-to-do woman—and all those of the “gente decente” class during the morning hours of mass; it being against the rules to wear a hat in church—wrap themselves from head to foot in the jet black manto that gives them the appearance of stalking crows. These commonly powder their faces with what seems to be cheap flour, and are rarely startling in their beauty, though many are physically attractive between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three. Arequipa, second city of Peru, in its desert oasis, backed by Misti Volcano “Suddenly the bleak pampa falls away at one’s feet, and La Paz in its hole in the ground, 1,200 feet below, spreads out at the foot of Illimani and its sister peaks” Third (to be marked Baedeker-fashion with two stars) comes the most picturesque figure in Bolivia, if not in South America,—la chola de La Paz. Her mate may blossom out in all the atrocities or “European” attire, but la chola clings tenaciously and wisely to the costume of her ancestors. Moreover, in this case the picturesque is not attended by its usual handmaid, uncleanliness. La Paz is not immaculate by modern standards, but at least la chola does her share toward making it seem so. She wears the usual multiplicity of skirts, but of a finer material and better fit than elsewhere, so that while she is still somewhat bulky about the hips, she is not disagreeably so. Her outer skirt is always of a solid color, distinctly gay, but never of But one soon gets used to it, and even to like it, especially as la chola wears it at just the suggestion of a rakish angle, ever so slightly inclined over the right eye, though the near-certainty that she is wholly unconscious of that fact only adds to the attractiveness. When she grows excited, as in arguing the price of a nickel’s-worth of beans in the market-place, she has a way of giving the front rim a flip of the finger that knocks the hat back from her brow, under which circumstances she so vividly recalls a Western “drummer” in a heated but friendly argument in a bar-room, that one sighs with regret that she has not a half-burned cigar protruding at an aggressive angle from the corner of her mouth to complete the picture. There remains but to speak of her footwear. This consists of a high shoe, native-made, on a very Parisian last, with high, slender “French heels,” of every color a shoe could be by any stretch of propriety, but with cream or canary-color the favorite, a bow of the same material—it seems to be kid—down near the toe and a bundle of tassels at the top. Occasionally the shoes are high enough to join company with Astonishment grows that la chola can afford such garments. The shoes alone cost as high as $10, and every stitch in sight is of a grade and workmanship that come high in Bolivia, that would not, indeed, be cheap in a far more productive country. Yet the chief wonder is the specklessness of her entire garb—doubly wonderful to one of long Andean experience. The glazed hat shines like the polished dome of a mosque, the skirts and shawls always look as if they had just that moment come out of a Parisian shop, and the cream-colored shoes have not a fly-speck upon them; yet la chola wears this costume at any hour and under all circumstances—in the street, at least—and carries on her often soiling business in all parts of town. Some assert that she starves herself to dress; but her appearance does not uphold the contention. However she affords it, it is to be hoped that the means will continue, and that she will not some day abandon in favor of the atrocities of foreign fashions the most picturesque costume in South America, and the chief decoration of every outdoor scene and public gathering in La Paz. The chola is not exactly chic; the thick-setness bequeathed her by Indian forebears makes that word fail. But she is as nearly so as the Andean Indian type can become; and as she trips along at a “snappy,” energetic stride up and down the break-neck cobbled streets of La Paz, in her slender-waisted “French heels,” and not only does not break her neck but does not even jar from its angle her “stiff ’at,” the eye is as certain to note her passing as it would that of a meteor in the sky above. She is always full-cheeked and plump, often good to look at in spite of her rather bulky Indian features, and aggressively independent, going anywhere at any time she chooses in complete indifference to the oriental seclusion that still clings about the upper class women. She treats the rest of the world with a manner midway between sauciness and impudence, scorning anything on the plane of reading and writing with the disdain of her Indian forebears. She holds most of the places in the market and the pulperÍas, or little liquor and food shops, and ranges all the way from small shopkeeper to unservile serving-maid to well-to-do women. One gets the impression from a brief acquaintance that she is as superior to her mate, the shifty-eyed But I set out to give a half-dozen female classes. The fourth is the same chola, just a shade lower in the scale. She also wears a little round hat, but of brown or black felt. Her skirts and shawls are less gay and of coarser texture, her stockings are dark, and her footwear a shining-black, low slipper without heel. The fifth is usually a common servant, almost touching on the Indian woman, her garments sometimes descending to the plebeian, crude-colored, made-in-Germany-and-in-a-hurry bayeta in which the higher grade chola would scorn to be seen, though it is almost universal to her class elsewhere in the Andes. She wears also a shiny black slipper, but no stockings, though her brown plump leg looks almost like finely woven silk. There is no suggestion of immodesty in this absence of nether covering, yet when one of this class, for some sojourning-gringo reason, suddenly appears in the bare white legs of what at first glance seems a lady of our own race, the sight brings something of a shock. Of the three types of chola, the third and fourth may blend a bit, sometimes to the extent of coiffing the latter in a glazed hat; but only the first ever falls into the foolishness of the “upper” class in flouring her face a bit, and at worst it is confined to a few sporadic cases. At the bottom of the scale, as everywhere in the Andes, comes the Indian woman, varying a bit in garb, according to the degree of her poverty. She wears the round felt hat and endures the chill highland winds by wrapping several thick bayeta skirts of clashing colors around her waist in bunches, until she looks like—I am at a loss for a comparison that is ugly, awkward, and bulky enough;—may I say, like a very badly packed sack of assorted hardware with the looser and lighter things above the compressed middle? She likes red best, and Now, mix all these types; put at least half the male population in gay ponchos, with every known shade of saffron, red, orange, purple, and the like; sprinkle among them youths with long hair tied in queues, wearing gay-striped ponchos that conceal all but their sturdy brown legs, who straggle up out of the tropical coca-country to the east to mingle with the city life; add a distinctive costume for each surrounding village, the noiseless llama-driver in his absurd cap, a number of Germans in Bolivian army uniforms, monks in black, brown, and white, nuns in gray, soldiers in light-gray uniforms, policemen in brown ones, hundreds of personal idiosyncracies in color and style, and it will be more easily understood why La Paz is justly entitled to that overworked word “picturesque,” and why the aboriginal name of Chuquiyapu would still be more fitting than the trite Spanish one by which Bolivia’s unofficial capital is known to the world. Moreover, children dress exactly like father or mother as soon as they can walk. La chola’s little girl is her mother’s exact miniature, glazed hat, gay shawl, fancy little high-heeled shoes and all, as likely as not with a doll in fancy garments on her back; the cholo’s son paddles behind his father in long breeches slit up the back, gay poncho and felt hat; the little Indian girl trots after her mother in the selfsame red, green, or magenta skirts of bayeta, the round felt hat on her head, and always a bundle on her back, though she be barely three years old and the burden only a bundle of yarn—as if to accustom her early to the life she must lead to the day of her funeral. Llamas of La Paz patiently awaiting the return of their driver Down the valley below La Paz the pink and yellow soil stands in fantastic, rain-gashed cliffs There are many fine walks in and about La Paz. On a sunny afternoon, brilliant-clear as an afternoon can be only at this height, it is a Or there is the climb out of the cuenca itself, a stiff hour to the pillar above. Once on the bleak puna, I wandered along the edge of the chasm to get a view of the city below from all angles. Near the station my eye was caught by the private car of a railroad superintendent. Fancying it might be that of my host on the journey up from Arequipa, I strolled toward it. A dishevelled fellow, his ragged coat close up around his neck, his long hair protruding like straw from a scarecrow, a two weeks’ black beard bristling, sat on the back platform, peeling potatoes. “EstÁ aqui el SeÑor ——?” I asked casually. A cloud of incomprehension seemed to pass over the scarecrow face. I repeated the question, thinking he might be one of those weak-minded natives so often found at large in South America. “English! English is all I talks,” came the startling reply out of the depths of the unshaven one, not only the accent but the presence of a few blackened stumps in lieu of teeth betraying both the nationality and the caste of the speaker. As I had never since leaving Panama seen a white man, much less an English-speaking person, doing manual labor my mistake was natural. Thanks to the pleasure of having a hearer who could understand him, the exile’s sad, not to say jumbled, story was soon forthcoming. “I ’ad a good iducation, d’ ye see,” he began, “sent to collidge an’ all that; but I tykes it into my ’ead t’ go t’ sea. An’ I was first-cabin steward on the ‘Dinkskiver’—I’ve my papers an’ discharge, an’ ready t’ show ’em t’ any man—an’ we runs int’ Australy, an’ I goes t’ the —— Club there, an’ a gentleman he introdjuces me t’ the club, which is where all the best gentlemen belongs, d’ ye see. An’ ’e says, ‘Look ’ere, if you’d like t’ stop ashore we’ll get the captain t’ sign y’ off an’ “So then I gets up t’ this ’ere Arequeepy” (It turned out later that he meant Arica) “an’ I ’ad money on me, d’ y’ understand, but I was lookin’ about an’ seein’ if I couldn’t get work, d’ ye see, an’ messin’ about ’ere an’ there, an’ fin’ly I ’adn’t no money left an’ was on the beach there in Arequeepy. An’ so I tykes on with the boss ’ere as cook—I bein’ a first-class cook an’ steward—an’ the boss ’e likes me all right, too, d’ ye see. Only d’ ye know what ’e’s pying me? Sixty bally paysoze a month! That is, I sye ’e’s pying me that, but not a blightin’ tanner ’as ’e give me yet, an’ s’ elp me, I ayn’t so much as ’ad a shave since I took up with ’im. So finally I says, ‘Well, ’ere, sir, I wants me money.’ An’ the boss says, All right, ’e’d pye me all right, only ’e ’adn’t nothin’ with ’im t’ pye me then, the banks bein’ all closed on a Sunday; an’ ’e says, ‘Well, I’ll tell ye what I’ll do. If you’ll go up t’ Bolivy on this ’ere trip I’ve got t’ make, I’ll pye ye soon as ever we get down again,’ d’ ye see. So I says, ‘That’ll do me,’ an’ we come up ’ere. An’ I ayn’t ’ad my clothes off on th’ ole bolly trip, an’ cookin’ all the time. The boss ’e likes me all right, d’ ye see, but I don’t know ’ow about this ’ere Peruvan in the ki’chen with me, seein’ as ’ow I can’t understand ’is bloomin’ lingo. An’ I only jus’ left a good cookin’ job account o’ a black feller. ’E was always pickin’ up with me, an’ fin’ly one day ’e calls me a —— —— ——, an’ I says, ‘You’re another, ye —— —— black ——,’ an’ so I quit an’ got this But the bitter night air that was beginning to sweep across the plateau was not the only reason I decided to be on my way. As the sun sets gradually down through the cuenca of La Paz, so it rises, gilding first the western precipice far up near the edge of the plateau, plainly seen from my pillow in the “Tambo Quirquincha,” then slowly crawling down into the valley until, long after its first appearance, it finally floods in upon the city itself and lights up its On the “Alto” a brilliant sun somewhat tempered the biting cold of the puna at this early hour. At Viacha a better train awaited us, her engine turned south,—big vestibuled cars, marked “Ferrocarril Á Bolivia” and plying to Antofagasta, a smooth, well-built roadbed that spoke of Chile and more modern countries, a diner ready for those who did not choose to buy boiled goat and frozen potatoes of the skirt-heaped Indian women squatting at the stations. Once off across the sandy, bunch-grass wilderness, flat as a sea, with herds of llamas grazing here and there, and little farms of all shapes hanging on the slopes of far-off and gradually receding hillsides, the train sped on as if it never intended to stop again. In truth there was little reason to do so, for it was as dreary a region as the imagination could picture. The few stations at which we halted briefly, single, wind-swept huts on the edge of salt marshes, bore names fitting to the landscape,—Silencio, Soledad, Eucalyptus—here a lone tree afforded the only feature to which a name could be attached. Now and then mirages across the dismal desert gave the lomitas the appearance of islands, the heat waves seeming to be water lapping their shores. Cholas of La Paz, in their striking costume In mid-afternoon Oruro arose across the brown pampa, as Port SaÏd rises from her muddy sea, and we rumbled into a flat, miserable, if from the miner’s point of view important town, gloomy, bleak, perhaps the most desolate city my eyes had ever fallen upon. The squat adobe buildings, chiefly one-story, were in many cases thatched over tile roofs, giving them the appearance of wearing a weather-worn hat over colored caps, like the Indians of La Paz. Reddish-brown, utterly barren desert hills, with mine openings, formed the background. The wind drove the sand like needles into our faces and seemed bent on cutting our eyes out. Cholas ostentated themselves in somewhat the same costume as those of the seat of government, but dulled and soiled by the all-pervading dust. Siberian, dreary, comfortless, the place seemed, yet its stores were well-stocked, and there were I was only too glad when the train on a newly-constructed branch-line carried us off northeastward late next morning. A long string of mud monuments still marks the centuries’-old route across the trackless desert. Beehive-shaped huts of mud huddled in the sunshine here and there. We climbed in long zigzags over the crest of the Cuesta Colorada, drear hills of broken rock where only a scant brown bunch-grass finds foothold. Below the divide hearty gringo faces, more cheerful in this lower altitude, broke in now and then on the monotony of Latin-American features. Many tents marked with large letters “F. C. A. B.” lined the way, interspersed with the stone kennels of workmen and their women, and the swarming natural consequences. There is something about a railroad construction-gang more suggestive of the world’s progress than almost any other labor of man. The new line petered out in the stony village of Changolla, some sixty-five miles from Oruro and halfway to Cochabamba, which it is in time due to reach. A stage-coach offered accommodations for the rest of the trip; but the joy of jolting all day in the thing was not commensurate with the pleasure of a new experience, even had the fare for both passengers and baggage not been prohibitive to a scantily supplied wanderer. “See Sinclair there,” suggested the gringo chief, pointing to a sandy, unshaven Scot of more than six energetic feet, who was superintending the loading of all manner of railroad material into ponderous two-wheeled carts; and the hint was sufficient. Changolla would have been excited that night were it possible for railroad constructors of long experience in many wild regions to become so. A fellow-countryman and predecessor of the New Zealander in charge of the camp had gone on a rampage with an American youth and turned bandits, in dime-novel style. Filled with distilled bravery, they had “held up” a nearby camp under the impression that the paymaster had arrived, and disappointed in this, they had shot a harmless Chilian employee. It took some time and all my papers to calm the suspicions of Changolla before I was offered lodging with the New Zealander. The “bandits” had sworn to shoot him and his assistants on sight, and a cardboard had been fastened over the window to prevent But the highwaying of the pair was amateurish at best. They had made no plans whatever for getting out of town, had even to ask the way, and had as provisions—two bottles of whiskey. Thus it was not strange that they were rounded up before morning, and my hosts showed no surprise when dawn disclosed the prisoners shackled in one of the box-cars. They had been taken, asleep, some ten miles from the scene of the crime, with a bottle in one hand and a gun in the other. The chief looked his fellow-countryman over, expressed his sentiments with a “You’re a hell of a bandit, you are,” lit a cigarette, and went on about his day’s work. Mounted on asses, with a stick through their elbows behind them, the pair set out for Cochabamba guarded by a score of soldiers. The punishment for murder in Bolivia is to be taken back to the scene of the crime and shot, though there is many a slip between the law and its execution, and judges, according to my hosts, must be properly “greased” before they will even indict a criminal, particularly when the complainant is a rich foreign company. Meanwhile nine enormous carts, each drawn by six sleek and mighty mules, laden with all the bulky material required for railroad construction, to say nothing of my baggage, and covered in Forty-niner fashion, got under way. I set off ahead. The trail followed a broad, stony and sandy river-bed across which serpentined a yellow brook of brackish, luke-warm water which it was impossible by just two steps to cross dry-shod. The unfinished railroad flanked the barren, stony hills on the left, the embankment carved out of them being broken by unbuilt bridges and incomplete cuts and tunnels that cost me many a steep scramble. In the river-bed below passed a broken stream of Indians and cholos driving donkeys and mules, heavy-laden, as were most of the drivers themselves, their ponchos, chiefly of red with narrow perpendicular stripes, standing out against the barren brown landscape. Every little green patch on its edge was well-populated; many a hacienda or small village having become a railway construction camp where haughty young Englishmen gazed coldly and suspiciously at one of their race sinking his caste to travel on foot. The Briton who has “knocked about” the world until the corners have been blunted is an agreeable fellow; but in his youthful, fresh-from-London days he is best avoided. The embankment gave out, and we struck a gorge where the carts It was starving mid-afternoon before “Sandy” called a halt for “breakfast,” and the peons prepared a chupe,—a stew of potatoes, charqui, rice, and anything else that it occurred to them to toss into the pot. At sunset we camped like gypsies in the stony, wind-blown, waterless river-bed; the mules were turned loose among several heaps of straw carried in one of the carts, and we rolled up in blankets on the sand. The drivers were a motley gang of Bolivian, Argentine, and Chilian cholos, each with the accent peculiar to his nationality. All had long knives in their belts and were inclined to use them on slight provocation. Several carried their wives, or at least their women, with them in the carts, sometimes with a child or two in addition. Next day as I plodded beside his long-legged mule, “Sandy” whiled away the long, hot hours with reminiscences. “Did they tell you in Juliaca how I cleaned out their damned hotel,” he asked. They had, but I wanted “Sandy’s” own version of the affair. “Well, we were playing billiards, when some greaser said something about gringos, and I told him to shut up. The crowd was too drunk to know better, so I had to take a bunch of billiard-cues and clean out the thirty-two of them. It cost me just a hundred and twelve pounds—twelve for the greasers’ doctor-bills and a hundred to get my friend the subprefect to lie low until I could get over the line. “Before the railway came I used to transport across the desert from Arica,” he went on, steering his mule around a hollow of broken rock, “and I had a little dog named Bobbie Burns. He was a wise little dog, and as the desert sand burned his feet he got still wiser, and used to run way ahead of me, a mile or so, so far he could just see me, and then dig a hole in the sand and lie in it until I was a The Capinota river we had been following, or rather criss-crossing, for two days came to an alfalfa-green village, exceedingly restful to eyes that had been gazing unbrokenly on the sun-flooded desert, and the trail struck off at right angles up a branch of a stream milky with dust. That night we camped again in the sand at the end of the haul, in celebration of which “Sandy” shaved and put on a purple neckcloth to scream at his red hair. There I took leave of him, with seventeen miles still separating me from Cochabamba. It was not the problem of transporting myself, but rather my baggage, that forced me to trot several times into blazing-hot Parotani in quest of a donkey—all in vain. At length—strange chances one takes in South America—I caught a total stranger bound for the city, and he was soon lost in the dust ahead, with all my possessions on the crupper of his mule. The sweating trail with its plaguing brook grew in time into a road on the left bank; huts, then entire villages sprang up beside me; troops of pack-animals increased to an almost steady stream, and at four I overtook my baggage in Vinto, recovered it by payment of a boliviano, and was soon screaming in a little toy train on a 75-centimeter-gage track, at the terrifying speed of an hour and forty minutes for the twelve miles, into the second city of Bolivia. |