“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.