Across the Andes

by Charles Johnson Post

The Aymará huts that clung to the steep slopes with their little patches of corn were shrunk to miniature; the single bull plowing with a crooked tree-trunk was a diminutive bug, prodded along the furrow by a microscopic insect. All the air was filled with the low roar of cascades; every slope and valley was scarred with the slender, white threads of torrents from the melting snows above. Far ahead, where the buttress of a mountain projected like a hilly peninsula into the Sorata valley, a toy village of scarlet tile and thatched roofs was compactly lodged on the flattened crest. It was the village of Sorata, clinging like a lichen to a spur of the huge, overhanging mountain from which it takes its name.

Late in the afternoon, although the gorge had long since been cool in the shadows of the inclosing mountains, we crossed the old Spanish stone bridge that still spans the torrent of melted snows, where an ancient mill remains to testify to the enterprise of the early Spanish adventurers. A short climb up the steep promontory to the village, and we clattered over the paved streets and on into the patio of the sole posada, the old bell-mule leader trotting in with the easy familiarity of many previous trips.

The proprietress, a plump Cholo lady, made still plumper by the many skirts of her class, all worn at once, so that she swayed and undulated like an antebellum coquette, fluttered about in welcome. Her pink stockinged legs—the skirts come just below the knees—and fancy slashed satin shoes, with the highest of high French heels, teetered about the patio and over the rough floors, giving orders to a drunken Aymará cook and a small Aymará boy, who proved to be the chambermaid. Gracefully she joined in a bottle of stinging Chilean wine and bawled further orders for our comfort out into the shuffling kitchen. At supper we had soup—chicken soup, with the head and feet floating with the chalona and chuño. There followed a kind of melon, scooped out and loaded with raisins and scraps of pork and whatever other scraps and vegetables were at hand, blistered with aji, the fiercest and most venomous pepper known to man.

A real lamp and some flowers graced the bare table and, after the filthy mud huts and smoke-impregnated tambos, with their acrid smoke ingrained in the walls and thatch, the tinned food warmed by the futile flame of an alcohol lamp, this posada glowed with a gaiety and cheer that could not be duplicated. Damask and cut glass could have added nothing to the table; even the smelly lamp glowed with a seductive radiance in the balmy atmosphere, and reminded us, by contrast, of the tallow candles on the plateau above, where the icy wind blew them to a thin spark of incandescence.

SOLDERING THE FOOD IN TIN CANS.

Here it was necessary to stop and rest the mules for the second and hardest stage of the journey over this Andean pass. Besides, with the more difficult trail ahead the loads of the mules must be lessened. More mules were needed, and more supplies—the staples—corn, chalona, chuño, and rice, and those to be soldered in tin cans where the storms of the mountains and the rapids in the cañons of the interior could not spoil them. Rodriguez pastured the outfit somewhere up the valley until it was again ready; then one day the arrieros were busy weighing the packs, balancing them and lashing them in the nets of rawhide for the easier packing and adjustment.

Again it was in the pitch blackness that precedes the break of day that we climbed into the saddles for the long pull over this highest and hardest pass that leads into the great tropical basin, the heart of South America. Salmon, a huge black who had drifted in from Jamaica and who baked Sorata bread and attracted the Aymará custom in the plaza on fiestas by whirling in a grotesque dance of his own devising, shuffled down the steep street from his oven to see us off. The huge muscles of his half-naked body rippled in massive shadows in the fading darkness; heavy silver rings dangled from his ears against the black, bull neck and matched the brass and silver with which his fingers were loaded.

He spoke no connected language, for his wandering had left him with a scanty and combined vocabulary of English, Spanish, Caribbean French patois, and a sprinkling of Aymará. He was nothing more than a pattering savage, although never for an instant did he forsake the proud dignity of his British citizenship. Once, as a gift, he prepared for us a salad; but as there was no oil to be had in Sorata, with sublime unselfishness he dedicated one of his own bottles of heavily scented hair-oil to the salad dressing!

He stuffed a bottle of atrocious brandy into my saddle-bag, and added a pious “Lord bless ye, sar!” for he was a Methodist, and on Sunday afternoons, in support of his orthodoxy, appeared in the plaza loaded down with massive silver ornament, a frock-coat, a battered silk hat balanced on his shaven, bullet-head, a heavy, silver-studded stick, and a black volume under his arm. As there was no chapel, this illusive church stroll was purely a surviving symbolism.