When first we had dismounted in this tiny settlement of Mapiri this Aymará woman had borne us a fierce dislike that was kept from literal and open war only by the strong hand of her Cholo lord. A little later, unfortunately, one of our men, in making his offering of candles in the little mud-walled chapel, had ignited a saint. When I saw the saint shortly after, his vestments were charred shreds, he was as bald as a singed chicken, and his waxen features had coagulated into limp benevolence, out of which his sole remaining glass eye stared mildly. He had been placed on a little table up against a mud wall, and the Indian women were weeping and wailing before him in abject apology. They were hastily offering flowers, candles, and libations, but with this last straw the Aymará lady’s dislike had become even a more fixed, fanatical hatred.
Shrewish, unattractive, and savage though she was, she was devoted in her love for her Cholo husband. Some time after the burying of the saint, one night their son developed a difference with his father in which each tried to kill the other. The father had just reached his gun and would have been successful when, being thick-necked, violent, and full-blooded, he toppled over in a stroke of apoplexy. There being no doctor, not even an Aymará yatari within three hundred miles, the old lady turned to us in a panic, and, probably despite our amateur efforts, the Cholo pulled through. In the meantime the poor old woman fluttered about in an agony of helpless fear and love, eagerly hanging on the slow words of translation that came to her, for she spoke nothing but Aymará, and everything had to be translated first into Spanish and then into her own tongue. That very night she burned a box of candles before the charred saint, while in the morning we had for our breakfast a fine chicken apiece. Her gratitude endured, and in the quivering furnace heat she had come to see us depart, and as we waded aboard she followed us and laid on the cargo a pair of live chickens as a final gift.
The Cholo handed us a small sack of mail, asking us to distribute it on our way down the Rio Mapiri, these irregular trips being the sole means of mail communication with the rubber barracas of this far interior; the Leccos cast off the vine ropes that moored us, and a few strokes of their heavy paddles swung us out into the full, swift current of the river. As we struck it there was no feeling of speed or even of motion, but immediately the green walls on each side of the river began flitting past in a shimmering ribbon of confused green jungle. In a moment, far behind, came the crackling of rifle-shots. It was the Cholo and his Winchester in salute; even while we were pulling our guns to reply he and his wife had dwindled to tiny dots that the sound of our guns could have reached only as a faint echo. Then a bend in the river hid them from view, and my river voyage had begun.
The balsas were slender rafts of very buoyant logs spiked together with heavy pins of black palm; they had a rough bow made by the crooked center log, which turned up in a snout-like projection, giving the affair a curiously animal-like and amphibious expression. For the return voyage three of these balsas were lashed side by side with cross-logs and strips of the inner bark of some tree. The callapo, as this combination is called, is entirely submerged and except for the cargo platform and the turned-up snouts, nothing is visible above the muddy river.
As we disappeared around the bend in the swift current, the hills against the background seemed to close in upon us, and as they narrowed, the muddy river snapped and crackled in peevish, little waves. The banks grew steeper, and the air damp and cool, and although directly overhead there was the glaring blue sky of the forenoon, yet we moved swiftly through an atmosphere of evening. Long, trailing creepers drooped from the overhanging trees into the current near the banks and cut the water like the spray from the bow of a trim launch; the soft murmur of rapidly moving water rose, and was broken only now and then by the shrill cries of parrots flying high overhead; sometimes a pair of macaws, with their gaudy plumage flashing in the high sun flitted across the gorge. But though the river doubled and twisted among the hills, there were yet, according to Lecco standards, no “bad places,” and they passed the bottle of cañassa sociably around among themselves, inspecting their passengers with interest and chuckling over their own comments. They had never seen a man with eye-glasses before, and I was a matter of fine interest and guesswork. What were those panes of glass for? Cautiously they would make a little circle with their fingers and thumbs and peer through it to see what effect of improvement might result. I received my name, “the four-eyed patrón,” promptly.
THERE WERE, ACCORDING TO THE LECCO STANDARDS, AS YET NO “BAD PLACES.”
The whole crew of Leccos was amiably drunk; it is the custom of the river, and it seems in no way to impair their efficiency. It has become their right by long custom, and one that it is not prudent to disregard; for a trader, being of a thrifty turn and not caring to buy the cañassa, decided to run the river on a strict prohibition platform. Every one of his callapos was curiously enough wrecked in the same rapids on the day after he announced his thrifty principles. The general allowances is about two quarts a day for three men, and perhaps, if the day has been a hard one, a small teacupful each in the camp. Money to them has no value compared with cañassa. Once, when trying to buy a fine bead neckband from a Lecco, I offered him money up to a dollar, Bolivian, the equivalent of eight bottles of cañassa, and he refused, for his Lecco sweetheart had made it; then I began to barter all over again by offering him a bottle of cañassa, and at once he handed me the neck-band without question.
While the current was swift, from eight to ten miles an hour, we had not come to the bad rapids. Sometimes the river would open out into broad shallows, where the callapo would bump and scrape along over the bottom, and then would close up into another gorge that in its turn would merge into tortuous cañons with bluff walls of rock. Drunk though the Leccos were, yet their river skill did not seem to be affected. When we floated along the quieter reaches, they would play like silly children. Occasionally one would be tumbled into the river, and would swim alongside in sheepish embarrassment until he decided to climb aboard, amid the pleased cackles of the rest.
