Across the Andes / A Tale of Wandering Days Among the Mountains of Bolivia and the Jungles of the Upper Amazon :: CHAPTER XVIII BY PACK MULE THROUGH THE JUNGLE

CHAPTER XVIII BY PACK MULE THROUGH THE JUNGLE

It was useless to attempt to battle with the river further. Above, before Mapiri could be reached, were narrower caÑons where there were only handholds and often not that, where the caÑons were often nothing more than a polished flume of rock. It had taken the Leccos two failures and over a month of the most gruelling work when they finally reached us before in that village, and then they had been living on berries and roots and palm-nuts for the last two days. So we decided on the overland trail to Mapiri. There we could get our saddles and outfit for the trail over the high passes.

Up to Guanai there was no trail, not even a Lecco foot-path, and it was a relief to give the orders for mules and see the sure-footed, flop-eared brutes come ambling to our doorway. For a saddle there was a wreck, a dried leather cast-off that would go after some piecing with rope. An arriero, dressed in a suit made from old flour sacks with the brand still showing in faded blue, had a pack train that was just going out with some rubber and it was his cargo mules that we hired. His ordinary route lay through the Tipuani country and he charged us some outrageous sum—something like five dollars apiece, silver—for going out via Mapiri over the worst trail in Bolivia and some sixty or eighty miles out of his way.

Officially, both Mapiri and Guanai recognize that they are connected by a land trail yet we had not left Guanai a half hour before the last vestige of a trail was gone and the mules plunged into a wilderness of low scrub and tall ferns. The Andean foothills twisted themselves in a maze of huge convolutions through and up and down whose great gullies and jungled ravines we slipped and scrambled. By intuition or obscure landmarks the Cholo arriero found his way and presently we zigzagged down a slope where once more appeared the overgrown remains of a trail. Then that too disappeared and we followed up the bed of a mountain brook, struck off to one side, again plunged into the brook, climbed a hill, struck another foaming torrent and skirted its banks or followed its windings—the ravine through which it flowed being impassable in any other way—and at last struck a tiny, grass grown, level glade. It was not late, yet overhead the tops of the trees were matted in jungle growths until but scant light filtered through, there was the cool dampness of evening and the perpetual sound of the creaking chirping bugs that, in the open world, only tune up for night concerts.

The rains had left the jungle dripping with water; we ourselves were as wet as though we had been out in a storm, and even the blankets from the tent pack were clammy and damp. By morning they were wringing wet and all hands were soaked to the skin. A night storm and a hasty camp were responsible, although how a camp could be made on a spongy soil up against a mountain that shed its waters like a roof on your camping bed, and for one night in a march, is a matter of engineering and not of travel.

In the morning all the wood was too wet to burn and a cold breakfast of leftover tea from the night before, some soggy galletas, crackers, and chancaca added no zest to the opening day. Like the day before this was spent in climbing through the jungle-matted hills or taking advantage of occasional brooks. Here and there the trail reappeared, generally in a series of steps cut in a slippery clay hill, steps three and four feet high and with their tread banked by a log to keep it from washing away. It was killing work for the mules and generally we dismounted and climbed alongside. They would go up in a series of goat-like jumps, throwing the watery mud in a shower with every plunge. Walking up such places was safer for they were really of about the pitch of a ladder and a single slip on the wet, greasy clay would have sent both mule and rider in a broken mass to the bottom of the gully.

Early in the afternoon—it was not two o’clock—we were blocked by the Mariapa River; it was a creek, broad and shallow and turbulent and swollen with the recent rains. The only ford was impassable, so once more we sat down to wait for a river to go down. It rose instead and that night we camped by the ford, wet from the afternoon rain and caked with mud.

There was no wood dry enough to burn and a cold supper with a tin of Chicago’s most famous clammy beef stew—“roast beef”—purchased in Guanai set forth the camp banquet log. It was already dusk above the tree tops when we made camp and darkness below so that the Cholo arriero had not noticed where we hung the shelter tent from the bushes and lay down together. In the morning we awoke covered with a multitude of scurrying, inquisitive ants of some large red species. They did not bite and were inoffensive so far as that was concerned, but our belts, our holsters, our shoes, our gauntlets, everything of leather, looked as though it had broken out with small-pox. Tiny disks, perfectly round, had been cut out of the surface of the leather; and in some apparently choice spots where the surface leather had become exhausted they had started cutting out disks in deeper layers. One gauntlet was worthless and the upper of one shoe was on the verge of dissolution.

By morning the river had gone down enough to make it possible to attempt it. The cargo mules were packed with their packs high on their backs and driven in. As the pack mules took to the water, our riding mules—who had always carried cargo with the others—came scrambling down the bank and before they could be stopped were out in the ford. Thereupon we undressed, cut long stout poles, hung our clothes about our necks, and started for the farther bank.

The water was from the mountains, cold and icy, and the river bottom was rough with boulders. With the pole we groped along after the cautious fashion of a tripod while the cold current rose and chilled rib and marrow and made the matter of balance one of delicacy. There was no danger of drowning, but to be swept off one’s feet meant broken bones among the white waters below. Not until it was too late to retreat did these phases loom up clearly. Often one stood poised and balanced by the pole with its hold down stream while the current boiled around the up stream armpit, not daring to grope for the next step lest the pressure of water would carry one off. It was different with that tough old arriero; he cut himself a pole, hung his clothes around his neck and came briskly across the water through which I had been teetering uncertainly for twenty minutes.

Another camp, high and, for a wonder, in the open from which we could see the rolling Andean foot-hills stretching like a billowing sea to the horizon. Three months of steady traveling would not bring one to those farther hills that were within vision.

The smoke of a rubber picker’s hut drifted up from a little gully below us and the arriero came back with a chicken, a bunch of platanos and some onions. The grub box was empty and for that day we had been going on a handful of rice for breakfast, and parched corn and Indian cigarettes. Not a sign of game had been encountered since leaving Guanai, not even a bird big enough to eat. The mules were thin and gaunt, for them there had been only what they could forage in the jungle or here and there along the trail.

From here on there was a fairly defined trail. There was also a continuation of small rivers and half the time we seemed to be fording. An occasional rubber picker’s hut was in plain view and the late morning smoke from their curing fires rose from many points in the forest. A sugar-cane finca with its distillery alongside for caÑassa spread beyond a broad, muddy river. The mules forded this river, as did the arriero, but there was a bridge there, a rough tower and platform on either side of the river and a rope stretched across. On the rope a trolley worked back and forth from which was suspended a tiny platform for the passenger to straddle. On the farther platform an Indian ground the windlass that produced the ferriage. It cost four cents, gold, to be hauled across high in the air, over this affair.

On the Rope a Trolley Worked Back and Forth from which was Suspended a Tiny Platform

The old Indian at the distillery sold us some real bananas, some platanos, and three eggs. This latter is one of the rarest of articles in any Indian or Cholo’s shack, for always there is a pet monkey and the monkey is more fond of eggs—quite as much for the delicious thrill of breakage as for their flavor—than the Indian; also he is far more adept at finding them and it is a very vigilant hen indeed that can guard her full original setting of eggs once the monkey’s agile suspicions are aroused. One more camp in the hacienda of Villa Vista, a place very similar to the hacienda of old Violand, where at last we had real beds, or those saw-buck cots of native make. I recalled how clumsy these same cots had looked as we had come into the montaÑa and left civilization behind us. Now they seemed to our sophisticated eyes like the most alluringly Æsthetic devices for inducing and encouraging sleep that were ever invented.

From the comforts of Villa Vista it was but one day into Mapiri, and here we got out our own saddles, rubbed the mould off, saw that bread enough was baked to last us out to Sorata, and started. It had been exactly one month since we stepped on board the balsas at the camp down the river. And that same distance from Mapiri to the camp had been made on rafts on our voyage with the current and shooting the rapids and caÑons, in three days—a day’s travel down the river being equal to ten days’ slow work against the same current.

Again the slow, killing climb over the high pass; the toll gate with its queer little Indian child, the drizzly promontory of Tolopampa, Yngenio, and then the final blizzards and snows at the summit of the pass. From this summit it is less than a half day’s ride into Sorata, a trail that takes the best part of two days’ climbing to make the other way.

At Sorata we changed mules and took the regular trail, not this time that rarely used, but shorter back trail where the sullen, hostile AymarÁs have their homes, and on the third day were once more above the valley of La Paz. We looked down on its warm red roofs and the little green patch of its park with the masses of low dobe houses through which there ran the feeling of rectangular streets with pavements and the lazily drifting throngs with actual stiff, starched collars and shoes with soles and laces instead of the patch of leather with a pucker string around the top, and thick crockery plates instead of enamelled tin, and pastry and roasts, and twice a week a real band in the plaza—all the effete accomplishments of civilization. It is no wonder the Bolivians solemnly assure you that La Paz is the Little Paris of South America. When you approach it from the eastern slopes of the Andes, it is a little Paris, a little London, a little old New York.

Two weeks later I was on my way back into the montaÑa while the chief engineer was on his way to Iquiqui or Callao after machinery. A Mr. and Mrs. Jackson had their headquarters in Sorata where the former represented a rubber company and they, together with Drew, a wiry little Englishman, who had packed into the country with nothing but a blanket and the ragged clothes he walked in, and myself, combined to charter a tiny stage-coach, the “mosquito” as it was known. This, with six horses to haul it to the top of the alto and then with horses in relays at each tambo would bring us to Achicachi on the southern shores of Lake Titicaca in one single day of from before dawn till sunset. From there it would be muleback over the first pass and down the trails into Sorata.

The mosquito was just big enough for four and a tight fit at that. This was fortunate for the little coach—from the outside it looked more like a packing case—with slits of side windows slung above a pair of axles on top of which perched two barefooted AymarÁs, one to drive and the other, a boy, to sling the long thonged whip pitched and tumbled in the steady gallop over the rough trails of the plain like a motor boat in a choppy seaway.

At the mud walled tambo of Cocuta the first change of horses was made. Before we reached Machicomaca, the next tambo for new horses where we ate breakfast in a mud walled, windowless room, the brake broke or fell off and had been lost somewhere on the rough trail. The steady gallop of the tough, rough mountain horses kept time to the steady singing and punctuating crack of the whip. And yet rarely was a horse struck. An AymarÁ will drive a crippled animal or leave it to die of starvation on a lonely trail without a thought, but it is rarely that he will abuse a beast with actual violence.

After the change of horses at Copencara there came a steep descent something under a mile long. The driver stopped just over the crest and pointed to the broken brake. Drew spoke a little AymarÁ, but the sight of the broken brake and the steep hill was enough. We began untangling ourselves to descend. Drew climbed out stiffly and was followed by Jackson, this freed his wife, but she had scarcely put her foot to the step when the mosquito gave a lurch forward and we were off. There had not been even time to jump. It happened in an instant; the door was banging with the plunging coach; Mrs. Jackson was thrown in one corner and above the noise of flying stones and rattling of the coach could be heard the AymarÁ yelling at his horses and the crack of the whip.

Unused to breechings, these mountain horses, half wild—at least as far as harness was concerned—had felt the mosquito press forward against them. They were off in a flash and jumping down this hill with an unbraked coach bouncing at their heels. If the horses could not outrun the coach we stood a certain chance of piling up in a wreck, horses, AymarÁ, coach, and two perfectly good and useful Americans. So it was that the AymarÁ held his horses at their top speed.

Never was there such a ride—not even in the rapids of the Ratama. In one instant of lurching we looked fairly down upon the swift, blurred ground over which we sped, and in the next there flashed past the rim of snow-capped mountains and then the cold, deep blue of the high heavens. The flying stones from the horses banged against the mosquito in a vicious storm. Inside my voice could not be heard above the uproar. I had somehow wadded all the ponchos and blankets and wedged Mrs. Jackson in one corner of the mosquito in very much the same way as one packs china; if we smashed the wadding might help a little. Then I braced myself with my feet against a corner of the roof with all the purchase I could secure and pushed against the bundle I had made. It was the only thing I could think of, and at any rate, it held us both firm against the terrific bouncing.

Never Was There Such a Ride—Not Even in the Rapids of the Ratama

Presently,—though it seemed an hour—we could feel that the bottom of the hill was reached and then came the slow lessening of speed as the AymarÁ brought the horses gradually to a stop. We climbed out, the AymarÁ got down off his perch and looked over the horses curiously, and waved his hands in expressive pantomime at the mosquito and back at the hill, a steep water-worn trail of ruts on either side of which the ground dropped in rough slopes. Luckily it was straight, the lightest curve, at the pace we had gone, would have shot the outfit halfway across the gorges before we struck the ground. One horse was lame and the others sagged until we made the last change at Guarina, another old time AymarÁ village.

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