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!”