BUT IT IS THOSE PARTS OF THE RIVER THAT THE LECCOS FAIRLY LOVE.
For fifty miles the hills crowded in, and there were only rarely any open, slower reaches of river. Huge masses of rock had broken from above and hurled themselves into the gorges, where the current was choked in masses of high-flung spray. The Leccos know that on one certain side of these rocks there was disaster and with their heavy paddles they pried the raft in the proper currents. At first the water was smooth—smoother than in the broader reaches—but the banks moved past more swiftly, and from out of the water itself came a little rattling, crackling sound—the sound of boulders on the river-bed crashing together as they were swept down-stream. Then the surface of the river broke up in snapping little ripples, while under our feet there was the feel of the raft straining in the eddying thrust of the current. But it is these parts of the river that the Leccos fairly love; their eyes sparkled and they laughed and chattered with excitement.
Ahead there was a roaring smother of foam, which curled back in a crested wave; the paddles, with the callapo snouts as a fulcrum, swung the course to the right, and a second later there came a rush and a crash as a mass of boiling water climbed over the starboard cargo and we careened until the crew on the lower side were breast-deep in the smother. It was only for a second, and the raft drifted out among the eddying whirlpools that formed below. One, a fairly small one, caught us at the stern, and we were drawn under as if caught by a submarine claw; the waters rose to the breasts of the stern crew, while they, braced against their paddles, grinned back at us cheerfully. Then the vortex broke and very slowly the cargo rose dripping into view.
Every rapid, bend, or cataract in this part has its name, an honor denied the distances up the Mapiri of the day before. We passed the Conseli, and entered Kirkana—the spelling is phonetic—a magnified mountain brook that boiled through the tortuous passages for miles. There was not a mile that did not have its channel choked with rock, through which we shot in a smother of foam like a South Sea Islander on his surf-board. Then came a cañon, with walls of gray rock on which were stains or symbols that in a rough way suggested some of the old Inca forms, to which the Leccos have given the name of “Devil-Painted” rapids. Beyond lie the rapids of the “Bad Waters,” and then the Ysipuri Rapids, where there was a large rubber barraca in charge of an English superintendent.
A RUBBER PICKER.
The night’s camp was at Ysipuri, a rubber barraca that was complaining bitterly at the time that it was overstocked with marmalade and snakes. If you have never lived on marmalade for six months hand-running when transportation is practically cut off—and a cheap, tin-can marmalade made mainly for the calloused tongues of a half-breed trade at that—you do not know what real desolation in a rubber jungle is. Also it was the hatching season for snakes and there was never a day, even scarcely an hour, when a few feet or less of snake was not being untangled from the cane walled thatch of the house. Two were fished out of the kettles in the cook-shack as the Lecco lady-cook started to prepare the midday breakfast and even the ordinary security of a hammock was no guarantee against them. Rarely were they big, some were mere babies and others but adolescent boas; one of eight feet in length was killed, but this was an exception, for the general run were juveniles of from a few inches to two or three feet. Also eight feet was not a big snake, not in a country where you can hear tales of thirty and forty foot reptiles.
The chief in this barraca was a white man; he had a well kept place with its out-buildings and little Indian quarters laid out with some system. There was sweet corn, real sweet corn, and not the choclo of the Aymará, an unripe ear of common field corn; melons, yuccas, bananas, and the best attempt at a garden that could be made in a tropical jungle. Also, before dinner that evening a Lecco boy came in with a log of wood which he dumped in the cook house; with a machete he chopped it up—for firewood as I thought. Presently, at dinner there was a most delicious vegetable, hot and looking like cold-slaw or sourkrout. It was my old friend the log of wood, the bud of the cabbage palm chopped by a rubber picker somewhere out in the forest.