Across the Andes

by Charles Johnson Post

WE SEEMED TO MOVE WITH INTOLERABLE SLOWNESS.

The next morning, with the first faint trickle of dawn along the rim of purple hills, the camp was astir. A single fire was stirred into activity, and in the dim, gray light there was a hasty cup of tea and a raw platano, and again we waded aboard the callapo and swung out into the current. The cool gray-green of the early morning had faded to a delicate sapphire; the purple hills loomed nearer in the soft haze; above them shimmering waves of amethyst overspread half the skies. A faint glow as of soft coral flickered over the crests of a stray cloud, that, close after, flushed with the bolder brilliancy of the ruby and the topaz. There was no pause; one color after another, exquisite in its gorgeousness or delicacy, as though from the slowly opening door of a prismatic furnace—crimson, violet, deep-sea blues, and old-gold—shifted and coiled above the purple hills. A thread of silver tipped their crests and then, at their center, there was for an instant the gleam of molten gold, and a second more above the low morning mist there floated the glowing mass of the sun. The day had begun.

For hours we drifted down the swift current. Now and then a snake or perhaps an otter glided silently into the eddies as we drifted by. We seemed to move with intolerable slowness and yet when we watched the jungle on each side slipping by, we could see the speed—six, eight, and sometimes ten miles an hour. The sun rose higher; it beat down on the unsheltered callapo like the hot blast from a furnace; the animal sounds in the forests ceased; the faint morning airs died away, and nothing broke the stillness but the occasional shrill flocks of parrots. The muddy surface of the river turned to a heated brazen glare, and the long breakfastless hours of the forenoon crawled past.

Presently as we swung around a bend there appeared a tiny cane-walled hut surrounded by a few platano and yucca trees. Splashing in the river were naked little babies, and as our Leccos set up a shout a woman trotted down to the bank and waved back. We paddled out of the current and made a landing, while the young Lecco who had run the river on the bundle of sticks took on a sack of clean clothes.

The Leccos are very particular in these matters; each morning from out their home-woven cotton sacks they would don clean trousers and shirt, and at every opportunity, going up or down the river, they would stop and turn over to the Lecco wife the soiled ones and take aboard a clean supply. When a trip is too long for a complete outfit, they would get busy at each midday breakfast and wash their own. The sack they carried would hold about as much as a small keg, and it was always crowded to its capacity with their queer, square shirts and tight ankled trousers. Their only other baggage was a plate, a spoon, and a tiny kettle for rice. Clean clothes every day is a peculiar hobby for a primitive tribe.

This Lecco woman, or, rather, girl, who trotted down to the water’s edge was about sixteen, wore only a single long garment, a chula, that came to above the ankles and had no sleeves. Some forest flower was in her black hair, and she was a beauty, not by any of the savage standards alone or by the easy imagination that gives some youthful savages a certain attractiveness as a matter of pure contrast, but she was beautiful by any of those standards that obtain in our home countries. Along with her regular features, delicate nostrils, soft eyes, and regular, curving lips, with a soft, light-coppery, tawny complexion, so soft and light that the color came and went in her cheeks like a fresh-blown débutante, she had the carriage of a queen, though that was nothing to a race of women who carry burdens on their heads from babyhood and who can swim like otters. I saw later very many Lecco women, and while all were superior in type to those of the neighboring tribes, there was but one that could compare with the features of this first Lecco girl and the two might have been sisters, so close was the type of their beauty.

More Lecco homes appeared, and at each some one of the crew received his new stock of clean clothes and packed his pouch with them. Then Guanai appeared, or rather we stopped under the river bank close by, for the straggling collection of huts lies some distance back from the river. A few rubber-traders, half-breeds, and Cholos live here, and control the Leccos. Most of them, when I was there, were refugees from the other side of the Andes, and here are beyond the reach of the Bolivian authorities. Once in a while some one of them is caught and taken out in chains by the soldiers sent in for the special purpose, but as a rule that followed only as the result of internecine difficulty and resulting treachery.

The head man came down to the bank to meet us with his neck stiff and awkward in some home-made bandage. He was still half-drunk, but very hospitable. The night before, it seems, there had been a fight, and when the candles were stamped out in the little hut it became very confusing, he explained, hence the stab in the neck and somewhere a couple of men were nursing bullet-holes. We handed over the few letters from the Cholo at Mapiri, and he was eager to get news of La Paz and the outside world. For years he had lived here, a refugee from the law, and unmolested; some day he will meet with as sudden a death as he had often bestowed, and another head man will fill his uncertain shoes. A torn straw hat, cotton shirt, and Lecco trousers were his sole costume, and he hunts barefoot and runs the river as readily as any of the Lecco tribesmen.

Below Guanai the Rio Mapiri is reinforced by the Rio Coroico and the Rio Tipuani, clear, cold streams. All along little brooks and mountain torrents have also been adding to the volumes of our river, so that it had grown to a goodly size. Below this settlement of Guanai were the worst and most dangerous passages. Any of the rapids are bad, but they are less to be feared than the great whirlpools that form below each one of them. It is these remolinos that are more likely to catch the rafts and tear them apart. The rough water of the rapid can be watched, and the callapo can be kept head on in the current, but below there are no means of judging when a whirling vortex will form that will drag the callapo under and perhaps later throw it out farther down in scattered fragments.