CHAPTER IV
A FORCED MARCH ACROSS THE DESERT OF ATACAMA
The stand-by bell of the Limari tinkled from her engine-room, our baggage and freight were safely stowed in the wallowing Peruvian lanchas alongside, and the Bolivian mail followed. The Captain of the Port and the Inspector of Customs balanced down the swaying gangway and dropped into the gig alongside. We followed.
Before us stretched the long, barren line of rocky coast, fading away in the soft mist of a Peruvian winter. For it is winter here, damp and chill, in September. Directly ahead is a narrow, ragged break in the cliffs. Inside is Quilca, the side door to La Paz in days of quarantine.
We cross the barrier of half-concealed rock before us, and soon we are in the smooth waters of the cañon beyond. On either side the red volcanic bluffs rise for perhaps two hundred feet, their faces scarred and seamed or beaten into grotesque forms by the Pacific of ages past. Up this defile we rowed for several hundred yards, then we rounded a ragged promontory, and the full glories of the metropolis of Quilca burst upon us. A broken flight of steps led from the water, and, back of it all, two thin straggling lines of woven-cane huts bounded the solitary street. Two houses, more dismally pretentious than the rest, with mud walls and corrugated-iron roofs, marked the local seat of government. In the distance rose the red volcanic hills, dull, flat, and shadowless under the clouded sky of the tropical winter. This was all of Quilca.
We had cabled from Lima for horses and a pack-train to meet us and bring us over the desert of San José, where we could get the train to the interior.
The morning after our arrival we were awakened by the clatter of the pack-mules as they passed our quarters, and the “Hola, hola! Huish, huish!” of their arrieros. It was our train.
In the middle of the lone street the arrieros were busy lashing our smaller packages in rawhide nets. Scattered about in the sand were the larger cases of freight—prospecting machinery and mining hardware—amounting to a little over a ton in weight; and still under the guard of Agamemnon in our quarters of the night was the personal equipment—trunks, instruments, rifles, shotguns, cartridges and powder and shot—making nineteen hundred pounds more. And blocking the only thoroughfare of Quilca were the twelve pack-mules—long-haired, disconsolate animals, with pepper-and-salt complexions, save where patches of bare hide showed the chafing of the pack-ropes. They looked as though our own regulation army load of two hundred pounds per mule would be far too great. And they were to divide four thousand pounds among them.
It was eleven o’clock in the forenoon when the last diamond-hitch was thrown and the last pack lashed in place. The arrieros swung their long, knotted rawhide thongs, the saddle-galled bell-mare clanged as she led the way, and we climbed into our saddles and fell in behind the straggling mules as they led the way up the dismal street and out into the desert.
The trail rose sharply as it left Quilca, and then wound around to the right, where it joined the old desert road used by the Spaniards after their conquest, and for centuries before that by the Incas in their barter with the coast. On each side rose white walls of rotten rock, higher than our heads as we rode by, the path between them worn down by plodding hoofs for untold ages. Upon this path the rock was ground to a fine white powder that rose in clouds and covered us until we looked ahead as through the mists of a fog. Vaguely, over the walls, the ragged volcanic hills silhouetted against the sky.
We kept on ascending between these winding walls, at length emerging on a narrow table-land—the top of the cliffs we had seen from the decks of the Limari. A short distance over the level ground, and then from the farther edge we looked down on the flat, stony bottom of the Vitor Valley—a ragged gorge that wound a tortuous course through the desert. A narrow trail with short, sharp angles zigzagged down a steep gully to the bottom. The mules carefully picked their way down among the loose stones, halting inquiringly at times to choose perhaps a shorter cut. If it seemed to their instinct feasible, they gathered their hind legs under them, their front hoofs sticking stiffly out in front, and slid down on their bellies, in a cloud of dust, carrying with them a small avalanche of loose shale as they landed in a section of the trail below.