CHAPTER VII
OUT OF LA PAZ BY PACK TRAIN
Here in La Paz were completed the final arrangements for reaching the interior; this was the last of the easy traveling, from now on it would be by pack train and saddle, raft and canoe, and to gather them we advanced from one interior town to another as best we might. It was the third and last of the Andean series that was to be crossed, and it was also the highest and hardest. Daily we haggled with arrieros over pack mules or rode to their corrals in the precipitous suburbs of the city and between times there were the odds and ends of a big outfit to be filled in and the commissary to be stocked. It was the last place where the little things of civilization could be procured, for there was but one more real settlement, Sorata over the first pass, that could be counted upon for anything that had been overlooked. And then one day it appeared as though we were complete.
HAGGLED WITH ARRIEROS OVER PACK MULES.
The arriero came around and weighed the cargo and divided it in rawhide nets, equally balanced, according to each individual mule’s capacity and then even before daybreak on the following morning we were off.
It seemed like midnight. The dead, still blackness of the night, with the lighter crevice of gloom that marked the dividing-line between the curtains at the window gave no indication of dawn, and only the echo of the little tin alarm-clock, with its hands irritatingly pointing to the hour of necessity, indicated that at last the time was at hand for the actual entry into the vague interior of South America. A thin tallow candle glimmered in the high-ceilinged room and illumed flickering patches between the areas of cold, uncertain darkness, and by its light I scrambled into breeches, puttees, and spurs, and buckled my gun under my heavy, wool-lined jacket. Down in the patio I could hear an Aymará scuffling about in his rawhide sandals, and as I stepped out on the balcony above the patio, a thin drift of acrid smoke floated up from where he was cooking our tin of coffee over a clay fire-pot with llama dung for fuel.
Below my window, up from the narrow street there came the shuffling noises of the pack-train—the creak of rawhide cinches, the thud and strain of the packs as they came in restless collision and now and again the “Hola! hola!” or “Huish!” of an arriero or more often the long-drawn hiss of a rawhide thong. Then the pack-train lengthened in file, and the noise died away up the crooked, narrow street. The few final necessities of the trail I jammed in my saddle-bag as the last mule was packed; then had a cup of coffee, steaming hot, although only comfortably warm to the taste from the low-boiling point of the high altitude, and we climbed into the saddle and were off.
The city of La Paz was still in darkness, but above the rim of the great crack in the depths of which it rests there was a suggestion of a silver haze that dimmed the stars. The streets were deserted except for an occasional scavenger pig grunting restlessly on its way. Sometimes a little Bolivian policeman, in heavy coat and cape, and muffled to the eyes in a woolen tippet, would peer sleepily from the shelter of a great Spanish doorway, and then, observing our solemn respectability, sink back into the comfortable shadow. By the time we had rejoined the main body of the pack-train we were in the shabbier outskirts of La Paz, where the Aymarás and the Cholos—the latter the half-breed relatives of the former—live in their squalid mud-brick hovels.
Prisoners Along the Trail up from La Paz