Across the Andes / A Tale of Wandering Days Among the Mountains of Bolivia and the Jungles of the Upper Amazon

CHAPTER X THE TOLL GATE AND MAPIRI

Packing the mules in the bitter winter dawn was slow work. The rawhide lashings were frozen stiff; our saddles were covered with sleet, before we could mount and swing into them; two arrieros were drunk together with Agamemnon, but the latter alone was helpless and useless after the tender care he had bestowed on a secreted bottle of alcohol. His usual chocolate grin was lost in the agonies of “de mis’ry in de haid, sar,” and, utterly dejected, he rode along with his wooly skull naked to the sleet and with an ice-coated sock as a bandage to keep it within the normal circumference.

ANDEAN MOUNTAINEER.

Whatever course the trail turned, the blizzard seemed to shift to meet us again square in the teeth. The shale and dÉbris along the narrow ledge of trail was treacherous with an icy glare. The saddle buckles were knots of ice, and every now and then we beat our hats against the mule to break the ice that encrusted them; on my poncho the sleet froze in a thin sheet that would crackle with any movement and rattle off. The particles of ice and snow did not fall as in a self-respecting gale, but were whipped along in the blast in streaks that never seemed to drop. In the high, thin air, the bitter cold of the storm seemed to bite like an acid. Even though the mules were mountain-bred, the rare air of this high pass affected them and as we climbed higher, they began to halt every fifty yards for breath, with their icicled flanks heaving in distress. In a moment they would start on again of their own accord, yet sometimes in the fiercer blasts of the storm only the constant spur would keep them in the trail and headed for the pass above.

At last there was the feel of a level stretch under hoof, and there loomed the big mound of stones, with a twig cross on top and its strips of calico whipped to shreds; the summit of the pass had been reached. The small house-builders’ altars at the base were drifted over with snow; a few twig crosses sticking out of the snow marked the AymarÁ graves of some who had been of mark among their people, for it is a great and desirable honor to be buried high up among the mountain gods. The lesser AymarÁs, dying on the trail, are left, or rolled over a convenient steep slope. In the lee of the stone cairn a solitary AymarÁ was resting; his coarse, woolen trousers rolled above his knees, his feet bare. His eyes grinned at us from out the poncho mufflings, and I recognized him as a little Indian who was picked out to carry for us a long cross-cut saw that was too awkward to be lashed on a mule. He dug the saw out of a drift to show us that it was still safe, and for less than two dollars he delivered the saw after a six-days’ journey across the pass and into Mapiri, his only equipment for the trip being a small bag of parched corn, a chalona rib, and the invariable pouch of coca.

Late in the afternoon we rode into the AymarÁ village of Yngenio. There had been but a slight drop since leaving the summit and the rocky pocket in which the village exists was covered with a light snow. The AymarÁs here are miners and looked with unfavoring eyes on the outfits passing through. There was an empty house of dry-laid stones with a tattered roof of blackened thatch that was used as a public shelter by any passing party, and a walled corral into which the mules were driven.

There Loomed the Big Mound of Stones, with a Twig Cross on Top

In this village the huts were chiefly of stone chinked with mud and grass; some even rose to the dignity of two stories with a rough ladder leading above. Three mountain torrents joined in this gulch to form the Yngenio River. The AymarÁs bed these torrents with flat stones in the dry season and after the next high water has passed, wash the fresh gold brought down in their wooden pans. But all about were the ruins of elaborate ancient gold workings that indicated that this was one of the centers from which the Incas drew their enormous golden treasure. All along the gulch as we rode in there were the broken openings of tunnels and drifts high up on the mountain-sides. Some had been concealed by walling up and this had been torn away by some later Spanish prospector or had tumbled in during the course of time.

There were the remains of a great flume and of the stone-laid troughs where the streams were diverted and laid their nuggets in the crude riffles—even as they still do in other AymarÁ workings. Near the junction of the three torrents there was an immense rectangular pile of carefully laid stones, with carefully constructed ramps leading from one level to the next. Throughout this district there were also many little, low, round stone huts that reminded one forcibly of the Esquimaux igloo; they were of great age, their arches had fallen in, and the stones were black with the centuries of aging.

The present day AymarÁs raise a little corn and potatoes for chuÑo, some sheep for chalona, while a few muscular pigs make the razor-back seem fat by comparison. The arrieros foraged among the huts for cebada for the mules and a chicken or some eggs for us, but the AymarÁs either had none or else surlily refused to sell, but there was fuel and with that a fine hot tinned dinner was prepared.

The following day the pack-mules filed from one hog-back mountain ridge to another, crawling up the steep ascents or gingerly picking their way downward over an intricate system of connecting mountain series. Hour after hour the bitter winds blew without rest. At times we would be a long column on some ridge that dropped away on either side in a steep declivity; the great depths, whenever they became visible through a rift in the clouds below, gave the valleys beneath the blue haze of distance, while a glass revealed the heavy vegetation, the palms, and the mellow glow of warm sunlight. Farther on the trail would cling, a mere ledge, to the side of cliffs where the melted snow, dripping from the stirrup, would fall a couple of hundred feet sheer.

On the narrow ledges of the trail there were the most abrupt turns and sharp angles and often a rough series of steps up which the mules would clamber in plunging jumps. There was no danger as long as one put faith in the mule and did not attempt to over-balance him by leaning too far to the cliff; those sure-footed animals have no desire to kill themselves or slip carelessly and they may be implicitly depended upon. In one particularly bad descent known as the “Tornillo” no one rode down. It was a zigzag trail apparently cut in the face of an almost perpendicular cliff, and the arrieros took the pack-train down in sections, so that, in the event of one mule stumbling, it would not bump half the others over the edge.

Just beyond the “Tornillo” we passed a llama train. One of the AymarÁs came toward us, one arm supporting the other at the wrist and his face drawn with pain and fright, chiefly fright, out of all proportion to the simple sprain. He stopped uncertainly, a short distance off, and repeated, “Tata! Tata!” over and over, plaintively pointing to his injured wrist. It was a simple matter to bind it up and throw in a few impressive and magic gestures, and with a distinctly beneficial effect, for he began to grin cheerfully. The pain was nothing; it was the fact that he had fallen that had worried him. The AymarÁ, as sure-footed as a goat or one of his own llamas, a mountaineer by birth, is worried when he stumbles and falls; it is one of the very local gods clutching at him, and every one knows the powerlessness of a mere mortal when a god gets after him.

Months later, in a little interior village in the montaÑa, I met this same AymarÁ. He came forward grinning and beaming and then, about ten feet off, shuffled from one foot to the other in respectful and embarrassed gratitude. Evidently the magic gestures had done their work well and had so far frustrated the peevish god who had been after him. In bandaging him my hand had slipped over the muscles of the arm and, although they lay without tension, they were like bundles of steel cables; in that stubby, squat figure lay the strength of a gorilla. In La Paz I had seen the AymarÁ cargadores walk off with three hundred pounds of flour—sometimes more,—and carry it with ease half a mile in that rarified atmosphere. Another time, at Guaqui, a cargadore picked up with his shoulder rope a piano in its case, and carried it across the tracks of the railroad yard.

That night we camped in a tiny stone hut built by the government on a high, mountain promontory where the clearest weather known is a dull, depressing, drizzling rain. An outfit of AymarÁs were already crowded in and Rodriguez hustled them out again, in fact, they were already packing up their scanty outfit preparing to move when they saw the mules coming. Outside in the mud, there were the remnants of a human skeleton, picked clean by the eagles and tramped carelessly in the mud. The skull hung from a stick jammed into the wall of the hut.

“AymarÁ!” remarked Rodriguez contemptuously, as he pried it out and tossed it over into the caÑon below. That was his delicate tribute to the sensitiveness of the gringoes who, he thinks may not fancy a skull as a wall ornament.

With this camp, the last of the high pass was over and in the gray dawn we began the long descent out of the clouds, the sleet, the snow, and the bitter rains. The bare cliffs and slopes gave way, and stunted shrubs appeared now and then even a gaunt tree reared itself, and, perched on a dead branch, an occasional buzzard or eagle looked with a speculative eye at the mules and the steep descents. We dropped through long distances of sunlight that glowed with a grateful and novel warmth, and once in a while a brilliant little bird flashed past, while gorgeous butterflies began to flutter about the mud-holes. The eastern side of the Andes drop in a succession of forest-clad cliffs; looking up and back, it seemed at times hardly possible that a trail could cling to the steep face. Many of the hardest have names—Amargarani, the “hill of bitterness”—Cayatana-y-huata, the “place where Cayatana fell” are directly suggestive.

There is no more telling strain than leaning back hour upon hour as the mule picks his way downward, but it is forgotten in the relief of basking in the mellow rays of the long afternoon sun, and it was grateful that night to be able to undress in place of turning in “all standing,” except for spurs, and in place of the howling gale and the snow that sifted through the crevices, to hear the soft rustling of the night-blown palms. An open-work hut of split palm and cane was kept here by a Bolivian who was under some kind of vague government subsidy, and under his palm roof we slung our hammocks.

His AymarÁ wife was stolidly indifferent to our presence, but a little daughter—a mere baby she would be considered back in the States—had an unbounded curiosity in the white men—white men especially who wore queer, transparent stones set in glittering frames before their natural eyes. A watch was even more mysterious, “Ah,” she announced, “there is a bug inside!” Following the matter up, she decided that the watch was a bug itself and marveled greatly that a full-grown man should bother to carry a bug about on the end of a little string, unless—aha! it was a magic, and she dropped the watch, nor would she touch it again. Thereat she showed me a scapular and offered to take me up the trail a bit where there were some graves and I could see some ghosts, and perhaps talk with them, as she did. Not among any of the AymarÁs was I ever able to notice any particular interest or fear in regard to their dead. Their trails are scattered with graves and mountain tragedies, they believe in spirits, but the almost universal fear of ghosts, dead spirits, or cemeteries after dark is apparently lacking. In fact, in Sorata, it was no common thing to hear them drinking and celebrating under the cemetery walls far into the late hours.

Pleasantly from here the rest of the trail ran on down into Mapiri. The giant foothills of the Andes surrounded us, but they were covered with forest and jungle, and for miles we would ride in the cool shade where the trees were matted overhead by the interlocking jungle-vines. Little trails opened off now and again from the main road, and often would be seen the cane hut of some pioneer. Down the valleys were patches of sugar-cane, with the smoke of a falca, alcohol-still, rising close by, and as we rode closer, the smell of burned sugar where chancaca, something like maple-sugar in appearance, was being poured into molds gouged out of a dry log.

Occasionally, in the forest, a thin column of blue smoke showed where some rubber-picker was smoking his morning’s collection of rubber milk. On all this the sun beat with its full, tropical strength, and the raw fogs and blizzards of the high pass seemed to be months behind us. Coffee, tea, and tinned things, but now comfortably warmed or gratefully cool, were served alongside the trail at the brief noon-day halt and what was left of a bunch of bananas cut from the patch in the camp of the previous night added the final touch. In the cool of the early evening we rode into the village of Mapiri, and the saddles were taken off and oiled and packed for the last time. From here on the journey would be by raft and batalon on the rivers. The mountain trail was ended.

The village has a long, grass-grown plaza on two sides; toward the muddy Mapiri River the plaza is open, and the entering end is blocked by a mud church with a mud-walled yard, loopholed and battlemented. Once a year a priest makes the trip to Mapiri and down the river, performing his offices as they are needed. He blesses the graves of the dead, christens the living, and performs canonical marriages for those who desire, and can afford, the luxury.

A squat Cholo welcomed us; he was the head man of the settlement and gave us one of his houses for our headquarters. While he talked with us, a monkey climbed up his leg and coiled its tail affectionately about his neck. A pink-faced little marmoset, with a black-tipped tail, overcame his first nervousness and chattered at us from the refuge of the eaves, while a thin, waving spider-monkey cooed with weird, sprawling gestures at the end of his tether, and from the high, peaked roof a dozen parrots shrieked their evening songs to the sunset. The Cholo’s wife, a thin, shrewish AymarÁ, viewed us with disfavor; for days she refused to sell us eggs while we were waiting for the rafts to arrive, and then she threw away five dozen that had spoiled on her hands. When her Cholo husband saw this lost profit he said nothing, but that night sounds that suggested a primitive family discipline arose in his household and pierced the little village.

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