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.

The tipoy, a single loose gown, constitutes the entire garb of most of the native women of tropical Bolivia