Across the Andes

by Charles Johnson Post

The streets were wider now, in fact they were nothing but a series of ragged gullies, along whose dry banks straggled the grimy dwellings. Always, in some of them, there is a fiesta of some kind, a birth, a wedding, a death, a special church celebration, or perhaps some pantheistic festival that still lingers in their dulled history and has prudently merged itself with the piously ordained occasions. The orgy of the night is past, yet from here and there come the feeble tootings of a drunken flute, an instrument that every Aymará seems to be able to play as a birthright, whose mournful and monotonous strains drift through the thin air from some less stupefied celebrant.

The Aymará love of their primitive music is very strong; it is universal among them and, while their primitive flute, pandean pipe and crude drum interpret the joy ordinarily, yet they take cheerfully to any new form of musical instrument, and in some miraculous way learn, in time, to produce the same series of ragged, droning sounds. The accordion, concertina and mouth organ are much beloved and once I even heard a self-taught Aymará band of brass horns, cornet, tenor horn, bass, and a slide and key trombone, playing the Aymará airs with their own home-made orchestration. The government bandmaster had drilled a large military band that used to give concerts twice a week in the plaza and there was not an approach to a white man in the outfit, it was composed wholly of Cholos and Aymarás from the little boy drummers to the great horns that curled like a blanket-roll over the shoulder.

Rapidly the first silver of the morning deepened to richer tints and glowed above the purple silhouette of the rim of the great gorge, while Illimani, the perpetually snow-capped mountain that overshadowed La Paz, burst into splendid prismatic bloom as the first direct rays of the sun shimmered over its slopes and ice peaks; below, the gorge and the city slowly lightened and glimmered in detail through the frosty, early morning mists. The thin bitter air of the night was gone; it was cold still, but the thin high air held in some indefinable way the promise of a seductive warmth.

The long line of pack mules climbed steadily upward; the rambling, hovel-lined streets were gone and only now and then we passed a little mud hut with its one door as the sole aperture, the headquarters of the tiny Aymará truck farm. The acrid smoke from their cooking-fire leaked through the blackened roof and rose in little spirals straight up through the still air, while the members of the household squatted in the chill sun, muffled to the eyes in ponchos and with woolen cap and superimposed hat drawn down to meet the mufflings, squatted in the chilly sunlight. They muffle themselves in this way at the slightest suggestion of chill in the air; but from the thighs down they are indifferent to cold or storm. It makes no difference if they are in a blizzard blowing over one of the high Andean passes, they will trudge along with legs bare to above the knees, but with heads and throats muffled deep in woolens. I have seen them make a camp in a driving snow-storm and go peacefully to sleep with their heads carefully enshrouded, and awake at daybreak none the worse for the experience, though their bare legs were drifted over with snow and their sandals stiffened with ice.

Along the road that climbed up the side of the great crack in the high plateau that formed the valley of La Paz, little groups of Aymarás who had camped there during the night were packing their trains of llamas and burros for the last short distance in to the La Paz markets. Often, without taking the trouble to cook, they would gnaw on a piece of raw chalona—the split carcass of a sheep dried in the sun and cold of the high plateaus—which has about as much flavor as an old buggy whip. Sometimes they ate parched corn or chuño—the latter the native potato, shrunken and small after the drying in the high air in the same treatment as the chalona receives—and tasting very much like a cork bottle stopper. But always they chewed coca, the leaf that furnishes cocaine. Leaf by leaf they would stow it away, and add a little ashes and oil scraped out of a pouch with a needle of bone. Among the older Aymarás, the cheek frequently has developed a sagging pouch from the years of distention with coca. Aside from that, it seems to have no effect upon them.

The Aymará pack-trains of burros would pass us with indifference, half hidden in great sheaves of cebada—barley—or with chickens slung in ponchos on either side and with only their heads visible and swaying in time to the gait of the burro. But the llamas would go mincing past, crowding as far as possible against the other side of the road with an obvious assumption of fright. Their slitted nostrils would twitch and their slender ears wiggle in an agony of nervousness, while their eyes, the most beautiful, pleading, liquid eyes in the animal world would be humid with hysterical fear. Yet from their infancy they have seen men and horses, pack-trains, and all the travel of the mountains and plateaus. But the apparent gentleness of the llama is purely superficial; for it can spit with unpleasant accuracy to repel a frontal approach, while its rear and flanks are guarded by padded feet that are vicious in their power and uncertainty. To the Aymará the llama is transportation, food, wool, and fuel. An Aymará child can do anything with a llama, and with nothing more than her shrill little voice; but in the presence of a white man it is a creature of hysterical and timid peevishness.

AYMARÁ DRIVER OF PACK LLAMAS.

MEMBERS OF A GANG OF PRISONERS.