The Balsa Boy of Lake Titi-Caca.

“But, hombrote, thou art a mouthful, and the lake is brave. Of me it counts not, but much eye to this box. That is the far-looker that makes the pictures, and if it went to the bogas or were even wet, how couldst thou answer?”

“There is no care, Excellency. More than that I am small, in this lake I was born, and now I am made to it. I will not drown your Excellency, nor more wet ye than must be when the lake is so. Trust me, viracocha, to put you to the island safely. And if not then name me Bobo.”

Well, I had to get across, and that was all there was to it. The island was there, I here, the miles of angry water between, and for bridge, only this twelve-year-old AymarÁ boy with his water-logged balsa. I looked out at the whitecaps, then at the unlikely craft, then in Pablo’s eyes.

“Ba-le, it is well. Thou hast the heart of a man. Hold her level for the box.”

I waded out through the mud and rushes, waist-deep in the icy water, holding the precious camera box on my head, and between us we got it safely stowed abaft the beanpole mast. Then I scrambled aboard as best might be, with Pablo’s helpful hand in my collar, for the mud had a trap-like clutch on my legs. Bidding me squat forward, the boy settled back on his knees and began to ply his pole. The loftiest great lake in the world has no timber on its shores, and with the mighty forests of the Yungas five days off no one is going to think of paddles. Plain contorted poles of the iron cupi are far more easily brought over the Andean passes, and they have to suffice.

Slowly, with Pablo poling into the mud behind, the clumsy balsa slid through the totora, whispering as it went with its brother rushes—for itself was simply a great bundle of totora, totora bound, with totora sail and sheets. There was no other thing about it; no nail nor cord nor wood, save only the cupi mast. The mossy tangle of yachu, which feeds the cattle of Titi-caca that graze all day shoulder deep in the lake, hampered the soggy prow and fastened upon Pablo’s stick. Sometimes, with that and the grasping mud, I looked to see him dragged back overboard. But he wagged the pole sharply and held fast with his knees, and always shook free. Decidedly his eyes were right—the boy was no mouse.

In ten minutes we pushed our nose through the last totoral, and were in the open. The wind butted the harder in our face; the waves—no longer tamed by the rushen breakwater of the inshore—came running at us like a stampede. The slow prow kicked them and stumbled on them and pounded them into a coarse rain that pelted hard and icy. I wriggled out of my coat of oiled horsehide and bound it over the camera box to protect that from the spray—for it had been well strained by a fall of the pack mule in crossing the pass of Sorata, and was no longer so waterproof as might be wished. Pablo could now no more touch bottom; and kneeling a little higher and a little farther astern he kept his pole ish-ishing through the water, paddle fashion.

“Give me,” I said, after watching awhile the play of the round boy-chest. “Thou art too light.”

But Pablo sent down his stick the harder—so forcibly, indeed, that the effort pulled that corner of his mouth awry—and grunted:

“No, viracocha; leave me. Your Excellency knows the paddle—that I can see by the way you sit. But this is different. Only we of the lake know its ways, which are tricky. See, pues!” he sputtered, as a bucketful of water slapped us in the face and left both gasping. “For here all the winds quarrel from every way at once—as if pushed by him who was once alcalde of Paucarcolla.” Pablo crossed himself, thereby “dropping a stitch” in his paddling.

“What? The—er—him that the Inquisition pursued?”

“Si, viracocha, that same. And yonder headland is where he disappeared in the lake, for the which none care to tarry there, since it is well known that he was the devil in person,” and Pablo crossed himself again.

As we cleared the Punta del Diablo the wind smote us with renewed force, and with every dip a fresh deluge drenched us to the bone. But for a few moments I did not think much of that. With the recession of the headland the long line of the Bolivian Andes came marching into view, and I suppose that just so wondrous a sight is nowhere else. Captained by the peak that overhangs Sorata, the giant file stood marshaled seemingly upon the very beach of the vast blue lake, itself white with that unspeakable whiteness such as befalls no other thing on earth than a far peak of eternal snow high up a clear sky. Such a rank of Titans—from incalculable Illampu and his 25,000 feet, off to where his rival, Illimani, seemed soaring out of the lake a hundred miles away! It was enough to make one forget a wet skin—and even the possibility of a wet camera box. How they possessed the firmament, these sublimated presences! And how the cumuli, puffing up from the tropic forests of the Beni, tangled about their feet and wreathed upward and dulled when their snow-whiteness lapped the whiter snow of those proud crests!

A sharp “Umpss!” from Pablo recalled me to shiver and to look back. A sudden flaw in the wind had caught his stroke with the full weight of the balsa, and the ironwood pole had snapped under the cross strain. Pablo looked anxious, but said very evenly:

“Pss! We must break it off, viracocha, and use each an end; for in this wind if we keep not our head, even a balsa will not last. Being angry, the lake pounds as one with his fist.”

Indeed, it was more like that than anything else—and a most reiterant fist, too. Nowhere else is there such a “chop” as on Lake Titi-caca when the winds awake; and I have seen those who have weathered every sea and who laughed at the English channel turned deathly seasick on one of the wallowing little steamers that run from Puno to Chililaya. Now we were kicked about with battering thumps that seemed like to pound our bundle of rushes asunder. Pablo was straining and twisting at the broken pole, to part the wiry fibers. I chopped at it with my heavy, keen bowie, and at last the stubborn strands yielded; and so each had a stick some five feet long. I knelt up and drove mine fiercely down the side while Pablo, astern, kept stroke. We were at it none too soon. At one time I half fancied that we never would get her head to the wind, for the soggy craft answered slowly to our efforts with these pitiful paddles.

For some minutes we tugged in silence. At an altitude of 12,500 feet in Peru one needs all one’s breath for work—even the Serrano lad did. I glanced over my shoulder at him now and then. His lips were shut square, his serious dark eyes seemed to be taking note of everything, and the slender muscles of his arms and chest—clear drawn on the drenched shirt—played smoothly. An athlete myself, and particularly taught in the paddle, I began to feel a respect which was half awe for this manful stripling who toiled so soberly and shrewdly where only the best foreign lungs can endure any exertion whatever. And, at last, little as there was breath to spare, I could not help grunting, “EstÁs lo mas hombrote!”

Pablo’s big white teeth shone for an instant in a sober smile.

“So must we,” he answered calmly. “For here is much to do, nor room for lazies—for small though they be. When I was the half of this, my father had me to help on the balsa; and once, even then, I took it to Puno, he being sick.”

Then silence fell upon us again for a time, and we poled away doggedly. But presently there seemed to me something wrong in Pablo’s quiet, and I twisted my head to look. His stick was going steadily as a machine, but in his face was what made me call out sharply, “What thing?”

He thrust out his chin toward Illampu. I looked thither, and then back at him, uncertain.

“More wind,” he said, concisely. “Either to get to the island before it, or”—and the Spanish shrug said the rest for him.

We did not get to the island before it. Two hundred yards away the gale struck us and flattened the balsa into the waves and the waves into the level, and was like to strip us bodily from our soaked craft. After that nothing was very clear, for the winds and waves washed us fore and aft, and it was hard to say which was the colder and more pitiless; and one saw ill for that bitter pelting in the face, and the heart reeled with overwork to feed the leaping lungs. Bent forward till our heads almost touched the balsa, our knees wedged hard on the tiny roll which served for gunwale, we dug away mechanically with those nightmares of paddles that would carry us nowhere. Once, when my heart would work no more, I turned idly to Pablo. His face was gray with effort, but so sweet and composed that I shouted out, half petulantly:

“Ea! Hast thou not fear, hijito?”

“How not?” he screamed back up the wind. “Am I a fool, not to fear? We shall never come there, perhaps. Only if the saints will! Promise a silver candlestick, seÑor!”

But in my eyes were a blue eyed baby and her mother, five thousand miles away, and for that, my temper was more to fight, with shut teeth, than to be vowing candlesticks. And just then it struck me to think, in that silly maundering of the mind in stress, how peaceful Pablo would look when they should pick us up, and how they would add: “Umpss! But these gringos are of ill temper, no?”

For half an hour, perhaps, we doubled to our sticks, and still the gale smote us, and still our marrow ached with the chill of the spray. There was no complaint of Pablo. He accepted fate, but still worked like a man—poised and steady in the face of death. If we were to end there, he would be found with the little chapped fists still clenching the stick. Once a motion swept on me to spring back and hug him and say:

“Son, it counts not. Let us meet it in peace. Thou’rt fit to die with!”

But then again the blue eyes came up in the mist, and my fingers cracked on the paddle and my teeth grated. And Pablo, as if he understood, gave me a grave, sweet nod. Further I noted that he drew some small object from his pouch and seemed to breathe on it.

It was so near! In a little eddy of the wind I shook the water from my eyes and peered ahead. The northern point of the island was not fifty yards away—and we were drifting past. It slipped and slipped, for all I dug savagely at the paddle and Pablo quickened his stroke with the first groan I had heard from him. Our tired arms forgot their cramps, our lungs their “stitches” in a wild strain—and still that dark shore kept drawing to our right. Ah, for the old paddle that used to spin the birch canoe! These accursed sticks—why, one might as well paddle with a poker!

“Viracocha!” The boy’s shrill voice split the wind like a fife. “The sail!”

I stared at him stupidly an instant. “Thou hast the power,” he cried. “Break it! Break it!”

Then I knew, and leaped upon the ironwood mast as a wolf at the throat of a fawn, and clenched it and wrenched and beat, and shoved and twisted and tugged, and with arms and knees tore it loose from its stepping in the balsa. It well nigh racked the rushen raft in twain, and we noticed that the impact of the waves no longer shook the balsa as a unit, but wabbled and see-sawed it.

I caught the cupi under my left arm and clinched tight the “sheets” of braided totora around the totora sail, till that was bound in shape something like a closed umbrella, and springing forward to my station stood and plied this new paddle with frantic energy. It was unwieldy and floppy, but it had more resistance than the pole, and slowly—so slowly that at first we dared not believe it—the sullen craft began to answer. New hope came in us, and we shouted “Arre! Drive!” and bent till the muscles creaked. Now, even in Pablo’s face, was the fierce light of combat.

And so we made the shore. In the lee of the point the water was so still that it seemed a yard lower than its surrounding level. A lone tuft of totora grew near the shore, and when we came to it I fell on my face along the balsa and clutched the pithy stalks; and there we lay at that frail anchorage till heart and lungs came back in me. Then, poling nearer, I stepped over the side and landed the camera; and came back and gathered in my arms a limp bundle, whose head drooped upon my shoulder, and so waded heavily up the beach of Sicuya.

II.

There was nothing on the island for a good fire—indeed, in all that vast plateau, so lofty and so cold, one learns the art of shivering to perfection, for fuel is enormously scarce. After an hour’s work I had assembled a tiny heap of dry rushes from the beach, and bunch grass and a few straggling bushlets. The tinder, in its oil-cloth pouch, with the flint and steel, was dry, and presently we had a swift, ephemeral blaze. It was nothing to dry us, but served briefly to toast our hands and feet and take off a little of that ghastly chill. The camera was all right, and I resumed the horsehide coat, buttoning it to my chin to pay for the woolen shirt which I had lent Pablo. As the darkness came on our poor little fire died away. We scraped a trough in the gravel and lay down in it spoon fashion, my arms around Pablo’s chest, and so wore out the night.

We were chilled and stiff and half inanimate when the sluggard sun peeped over the far peaks of Apolobamba, and got up like old men. But even the light was cheering; and presently a soft glow began to tame the bitter air and we ran clumsily and danced about and swung our arms till the blood went free again in its forgotten channels. Pablo was all right now—a boy is a hard thing to kill, and particularly an outdoors boy—and chatted leisurely and calmly, as was his way.

“But to eat!” I broke in on one of his stories, when we were fairly limbered up in body and mind. “Is there gente on the island?”

“Nobody. I think the Ancients were here once, for up yonder I have seen a strong wall. But none come here now—not even seeking treasure, which must be here.”

“Bother the treasure! What we want now is food, even if it were only llama meat; for in purity of truth I’m falling with hunger. Let us hunt.”

“There will be ducks, pues, over in the cove. Vamos!”

Ducks there were, by the hundred; and mudhens, and dippers, and flamingoes, and almost every other aquatic fowl, among the rushes in the eastern cove. With the shotgun we could have mowed down a bushel of them—but the shotgun was lying with my sleeping bag and rawhide muleback trunks over in a hut on the mainland. Well, with the six-shooter we could count on one bird, anyhow; and I drew it and began to rub off last night’s rust.

“But wait me,” said the little balsero. “It is better not to frighten them, for we may need more than one. With this there is no noise.”

As he spoke he unwound the braided sling which bound his long black hair. It was the immemorial weapon of his people—even so I had taken it from the skulls of mummies of his ancestors far antedating the Conquest. Pablo gathered some smooth pebbles from the beach and began creeping toward the cove, sheltering himself whenever a bunch of totora offered. The water-fowl began to edge out, and a few nervous ducks rose. But the boy knew his business and kept on at the same gait. Suddenly straightening up, he whirled his right arm thrice around, and even from where I was I could hear a twang, and then the sh-oo-oo of the hurtling pebble.

There was a commotion among the birds, and a great white swan stretched and half rose from the water and dropped back in a shower of spray. Pablo was already in the water, keeping out of sight all but his head, and in a couple of rods that also disappeared. The swan suddenly redoubled its struggles, beating one wing till the water foamed, but without progress. Then it began to drift shoreward, still fighting; and in a moment I saw a dark object rise just in front of it. The swan saw, too, and aimed a stunning blow with its wing. But the head had already vanished and the screaming bird kept moving shoreward despite his struggles. Then I waited so long that it seemed impossible that one should so endure under water, when the swan’s violent pecking at his breast relieved me. Pablo, to keep out of the way of that heavy wing and beak, was holding the great bird firmly down upon the crown of his head, and when it was needful to take a breath he could thus get his nose out of water without seriously exposing himself. It was when he should come where the water was but a couple of feet deep that trouble would begin, and already I judged that he was lying upon his back and kicking along the mud. Time after time a dark fist came up to grapple that snake-like neck, but the bird was too smart and the captor got only savage bites for his pains. I ran out to help, and the swan met me with a peck that took a morsel off my hand; but a back sweep of the bowie sent the head flying twenty feet, and after a little more flopping the great fowl fell limp. The missile from the sling had shattered his left wing.

Well, when Pablo had warmed himself in the scorching sun, and we had gathered another bunch of dry weeds and more or less plucked the bird and half toasted thin strips of it in the embers, and devoured each a wolf’s share, we felt better. Perhaps we swallowed quite as much ashes as meat, and salt would have helped it—but it was a wonderful banquet, anyhow. We washed it down with drafts from the ill-tasting lake, and I dried a brown-paper cigarette on a sunny rock until it was smokable, and for a while we wallowed in the hot sun and watched the drift of shadows on Illampu, which had snared all the clouds from the sky.

“Pues, the pictures. And then, to get back to shore,” I said at last, getting up reluctantly. Pablo was greatly interested in that wonderful glass in its shining tube, and marveled at the unkinking of the tripod and how the whole artful box opened and swelled at a touch. We carried it to the top of the hill, and I made my pictures and showed him the inverted gem of color on the ground glass and explained it all to him in the formula I learned long ago for Indian friends, to whom one has to adapt one’s own point of view. Then he took me to the ruin—some fallen houses and a strong wall of great rocks wonderfully squared and carved, and we made a picture there, with tattered Pablo standing beside the noble handiwork of his fathers. Unhappily, the plate fell a victim to the abominable dampness of Lima.

“If we had but a spade,” sighed Pablo, who went scuffing his toes in the rubbish of the forgotten rooms. “What says the viracocha? Shall we come back one day and dig here? For surely there will be treasure. Over yonder, toward that island, is where they say the Incas sunk the chain of Huascar, that the Spaniards might not find it. And many have looked for it, and some even talk to drain the lake.”

“I can see them draining Titi-caca! But come, what was this chain of Huascar?” I asked, as seriously as if this were all news to me.

“Mppss! It was of gold, then—pure gold. For when Huascar Inca was born his father, Huayna Capac, ordered made this chain of gold, three hundred paces long and the fatness of my thumb, that the people might dance holding it. Ay, if one might find it! Sometimes, looking over the balsa, I have thought to see that shining on the bottom, but then it was only a boga turning to the sun.”

“Ea, and what wouldst thou, hijito, finding this chain of Huascar?”

“Yo? Mpps, VuesÉncia, I would—mppss—I would buy the balsa of Jeraldo, which is very good; and three pigs and a cow for my mother, and a net; and—and—and—boots like those of your Excellency——”

“Good! And I hope thou’lt find it. I mind me that an Inca, Don Garcilaso de la Vega, who wrote a book two hundred and ninety years ago—sabes book? Well, it is much paper tied together—much spoiled paper, with words on it. And this Inca said that the chain of Huascar was thrown into the little lake in the valley of Orcos, which the Spaniards did indeed try to drain. But Garcilaso said many things—particularly in December when the days are long—and I fancy thou’rt as like to find the chain in this lake as in any other.”

“But the paper, se’or, how can it tell these things?”

“Pues, because we make paper that talks—not out loud, but telling you things without a sound. And sometimes it knows how to lie, just like people.”

“Perhaps it was not Don Garcilaso’s fault, then—it can be that he got that kind of paper. For I know the chain is in this lake here, of Titi-caca, since my grandfather told me, and he knew from very long ago. He was taught in all the stories of our fathers, and he gave me this auqui of old for a charm. Perhaps for that we were not swallowed by the lake.”

So saying, Pablo drew from his left-hand pouch a precious little fetich of silver, ages old, for there is no mistaking the prehistoric handiwork of Peru. It was in rude human form, and not cast, but hollow, beaten out and cupped and soldered so cleverly that one could scarce find the joint.

“Hola! He was an abuelo worth having. Come, I’ll give thee ten soles for it, for I shall need an auqui myself if I am to stay in these lands of ill luck.”

But Pablo shook his head, though I am positive he never had seen so much money in one pile before as the ten silver dollars in my hand.

“Ha-ni-wa!” he said. “For it is ill to sell these things, which are sacred.” He breathed on the image and tucked it carefully back in his chuspa.

The balsa, still nodding at the rushen cable, was soon repaired by Pablo’s apt hands with a few withes of totora. We stepped the mast again, as well as might be, in its torn socket, hoisted the rush sail, and drew slowly out in a light breeze. It was a very different passage from that of yesterday, and we sprawled lazily along the balsa, looking back now to the vast white peaks, and now to the weedy shore ahead. We crept through the outer fringe of totora, passing far to the left of a little stone hut that seemed built upon the very water a mile from shore. A few sad cattle lay about it, only their heads out of water; and nearer us, on a submerged bar, a gristly pig seemed undecided whether he had better root or swim. It was Pablo’s home, he told me—a fair type of the pitiful swamp ranches of the lake dwellers. In the shoals they build their squalid huts and raise the unkempt cattle which know no other pasturage—as their owners no other world.

When we came to the head of the bay and had waded ashore with the camera, we stood a long time in the mud looking back at the blue lake and the dark island. I was sore and hungry, and with much to do; but, somehow, it was hard to turn away. Pablo stood screwing his bare toes into the ooze, in as little haste to be off.

“And will your Excellency come again?” he said at last, catching my eye and then turning away.

“Who knows, hijito? To-morrow I take mule for the Desaguadero. Perhaps some day. But much eye that thou have a new balsa ready against then, for this is too old. And here is wherewith to buy Jeraldo’s, without waiting to find the chain of Huascar. Adios, then, and—un abrazo!”

He reached up to my shoulders and laid his head against me with a little tug, and suddenly broke away and started for the balsa. Midway he stopped and turned and came splashing back.

“Hear, viracocha,” he said, with a little uncertainty in his voice. “I could not sell the auqui, for it is not honest to take money for sacred things. But one who goes so far as your Excellency, and in many dangers, ought indeed to have one to keep harm from him. And for that you—that—that we were brothered in danger and you did not despise me, now I give you.” And flinging the precious figure at my feet, before I could gather my wits he was spattering out to the balsa. Nor would he return. Ten minutes later, when I looked back from the hut where my things were stored, the drab patch of his sail had quite faded in the totoral.