Across the Andes

by Charles Johnson Post

The jam of pack animals in the narrow street straightened out under the stimulus of the arrieros’ rawhide thongs and we clattered by the little plaza and on up a narrow, rain-washed gully flanked with the thatched mud huts of the Aymarás, on past the walled cemetery and into the steep trail that led up the mountains. High above us the peaks were still hidden in soft masses of clouds that were already golden under the first rays of the morning sun. The trail wound in and out, following the trace of the steep foothills that buttress Mount Sorata, but always rising, sometimes abruptly, and then again in a series of steadily ascending dips along a succession of narrow ledges.

SCATTERED IN HYSTERICAL FLIGHT UP AND DOWN THE PRECIPITOUS SLOPES.

On one of these narrow ledges we came around a corner suddenly on a large pack-train of llamas and on the instant they scattered in hysterical fright up and down the precipitous slopes with the sure-footedness of mountain-goats. An hour later we could still see their Aymará drivers, far below us, crawling over the slopes with the slings hurling pebbles at the stupid beasts in their efforts to collect them on the trail.

SKIRTED THE BASE OF AN UNBROKEN CLIFF.

Rapidly the semi-tropical vegetation that flourished in the lower altitude of the village of Sorata disappeared; more rugged and hardier shrubs succeeded, and these, too, in their turn disappeared and nothing was left but the storm scarred patches of high pasture. Above these the wet, black rocks of the Andes thrust their jagged masses into the air in sullen cliffs surmounted by snow-capped minarets and pinnacles. Only once I saw a condor, for they are not common, sailing lazily a couple of hundred feet below us. It was a distinct disappointment. The white puff of downy feathers about the neck identified it, but amid these impressive surroundings it seemed no more than a sparrow flitting about in a down-town city street.

For miles we skirted the base of an unbroken cliff that rose three hundred feet sheer from the trail, and then suddenly came upon a ragged break in the wall that accommodatingly opened a passage where the trail climbed to meet it. The narrow passageway was as dim as the dusk of evening; it zigzagged through the cliff in a series of high steps cut or worn in the rock; the high walls on each side and its tortuous turnings shut out all light except such as fell from the illuminated strip of sky above. Here and there tumbled walls of stones suggested the possibility of ancient barricades, and no more weird a setting could be devised to set a fanciful adventure afloat in fiction.

That night we made camp in the open in a little gorge, and sheltered ourselves in the lee of an enormous boulder. The packs were piled in a wall, and over this the tent was thrown and held down by heavy stones. A blinding snow-squall roared through the narrow gorge as through a pipe; later it changed to a stinging blizzard, where the tiny particles of ice stung like a sand-blast. There was no fuel for a fire, and only by carefully barricading the alcohol lamp could a little thin tea be warmed. That, together with cold tinned things and a nip of Salmon’s effective brandy made shift for dinner.

The tough little mules, hobbled and turned out to graze among the shale and thin, snow-covered grass, made no effort to seek a lee shelter and wandered about, indifferent to the gale. An Aymará family, driving a few burros packed with rubber, spent the night in the lee of a small, overhanging rock. There was a baby not two years old in the family, yet, without a fire and with nothing but raw chalona, they made their customary camp. Their heads were heavily muffled as usual, but the dawn found their bare legs drifted over with five inches of snow, and apparently comfortable and indifferent to the fact.