As we filed by these pack-trains, the Aymará driver would remove his native hat of coarse felt, leaving the head still covered by his gay, woolen nightcap with its flapping ear-tabs, and murmur a respectful “Tata!” to which we would politely return a “Buenos dias, tata,” unless the driver happened to be a woman, in which case we would substitute the corresponding “Mama” for the “Tata.” The women would plod along barefooted while they spun yarn from a bundle of dirty, raw wool held under one arm. As the yarn was spun, it was gathered on a top-like distaff dangling at the end of the woolen thread. In some miraculous way it was never permitted to lose its spinning twirl, and at the right moment always absorbed the additional thread, so that it never was permitted to drag along the trail. At her little home somewhere on the inter-Andean plateau, she will afterwards dye the wool and knit one of those night-caps or weave a poncho, according to some rough tribal pattern, so tight that it will shed water as well as a London raincoat. Her loom will be two logs laid on the ground, on which the warp is stretched; the shuttle will be carved from the bone of a sheep, and the threads will be beaten into place with the sharpened shin-bone of a sheep. Weeks may be spent in the patient weaving. Whether she is on the trail or is weaving, she has usually a pudgy, expressionless baby of a tarnished copper color held in the fold of the poncho that is knotted across her shoulders. Sometimes a prosperous Aymará gentleman, with his pack animals, passed us and then he was apt to be accompanied by several Aymará women and their assortment of tarnished copper babies, the women being his wives, who assist in the heavier work of driving and packing with complaisant domestic affection.
This road up from the great, raw gulch of La Paz was full of life; pack-train after pack-train passed, loaded with the daily supplies for that city. All of the trails of the high plateau above converge to feed it and it broadens out into a real road, no longer a trail, under the needs of the heavier traffic. A group of sandaled soldiers was apparently detailed to act as road-masters; and they would stop the Aymarás and enforce a bit of labor in aid of the gang of prisoners under their guard. The instant dull and sullen submission of the Indians at once indicated their position in the Bolivian scale.
THE GUARD FOR THE ROAD MENDERS.
Steadily during the early morning hours we climbed, until the rim of the high plateau itself was only a short distance ahead. Worn through the rim by generations of plodding hoofs was a crooked trail, so narrow that the mules bumped and scrabbled along, and we emerged, as through a trap-door, out on the endless distances of the vast inter-Andean plateau. Below, losing itself in the distant haze, stretched the ragged crack that made the valley of La Paz and miles away, quivering in the slowly warming air, was the city itself, a tiny clutter of gaudy houses and red-tiled roofs, with the brilliant green of the little park making a sharp contrast in color. Elsewhere the slopes of the valley were as destitute of verdure as when they were blown into existence by the terrific forces of primeval nature. Yet in this desert barrenness there was no lack of color; in the cool of the morning the shadows were soft in every delicate variation of purple and amethyst; the bare soil and the jagged slopes blended and shifted in ochers and vermilions, in golden tints and copper hues and, scattered here and there, were little patches of greens where some little, irrigated Aymará truck-farm was breaking into the world against the moist chocolate-colored soil. Beyond—and in their immensity there was no suggestion of their great distance—rose the jagged fangs of the last and most interior range of the Andes, with their black cliffs and scarred flanks disappearing under the everlasting mantles of snow; over all, was the clear, shimmering turquoise heaven of the high altitudes.
WHILE RODRIGUEZ AND HIS CHOLO HELPERS TIGHTENED THE RAWHIDE CINCHES AND REPLACED THE PACKS.
Down in that valley were the little cafés, the little shops with imported trinkets, the plaza Sunday afternoons with the band and the parading élite and all the little functions of civilization, yet this city is fairly balanced on the edge of the frontier, while beyond were the high passes and the vague interior of South America, the last of the great primitive domains, where men still exist by means of bow and arrow or stone club, and where the ethical right and the physical ability to survive are yet indistinguishable.
From this edge of the plateau the narrow trails run in all directions like the sticks of a fan. Trained from many previous trips, the pack-animals halted or wandered aside, nibbling at the tufts of dry bunch-grass, while Rodriguez and his two Cholo helpers tightened the rawhide cinches and replaced the packs that had shifted in the long climb and scramble through the narrow gully. Then, with the bell on the leading pack-animal tinkling monotonously, began the steady plodding in single file along one of the furrowed trails.