Across the Andes

by Charles Johnson Post

At daybreak we left the Ysipuri barraca and emptying our rifles in salute to the Englishman’s Winchester, we started on for the next rapids, the greatest rapids on the river—the Ratama.

Two miles above the Ratama the walls of the gorge began to close in steep cliffs. Here and there shrubs clung on little niches, while from the high edges long vines hung down and were whipped taut in the swift, glassy current below. The air began to cool in the deep shadows, and there was a damp chill in it like the breath from a cavern. The Leccos were not chattering now, for this place may on any trip prove to be serious, and the silence of the smooth drifting was only broken by an occasional kingfisher, which clattered by like a flying watchman’s rattle.

Slowly a dull roaring, echoing from the distance, steadily obtruded itself; the current was still glassy, but as it moved it snapped against the walls of the cañon in angry ripples. Every Lecco in the crew was poised, with his paddle, as tense as a strung bow. Now we knew who was the captain of the crew. It was the forward Lecco on the right; he was the only one who had anything to say. It was no childish joking now; there were commands. Occasionally he grunted his order, and the paddles dipped as they held the raft true, bow on, in the middle of the current. With a grand sweep we swung round a bend between the walls of rock and there far ahead the white waves of the Ratama were snapping like great fangs against the dusk of the cañon, while above them hung a heavy mist that blurred the outlines of the gorge beyond.

The callapo increased its speed; the Ratama seemed to be springing toward us with each leaping wave; the roaring water deepened, and the voices were drowned. The Lecco captain dipped his paddle, and the rest followed the signal, and gently the callapo was held true, with the three upturned snouts headed straight for the foaming center. The cliffs had closed in like the walls of a corridor, and they flew past like the flickering film of a moving-picture; the spray from the trailing vines was whipped in our faces and floated upward to form rainbows in the slanting sunlight high overhead. Then for a second we seemed to pause on the edge of a long slide of polished water, the edge of the cataract.

The Leccos crouched for the shock, and we could fairly feel their toes gripping the submerged callapo logs, while their paddles were poised above their heads. Then came the brief coast down the smooth water and the plunge into the great wave that loomed above our heads, only to break with a drenching roar over us and the lashed freight. The Leccos dropped on their knees, gripping a hold as best they might; their eyes glittered with excitement, and I could see their wide-open mouths in a yell of wild joy, though every sound was drowned in the crash and roar of waters. The paddles swung in powerful circles, and at each dip the paddlers went out of sight, head and shoulders in the smother of foam.

The water was above my waist, and somewhere below the surface I was hanging on to the cargo lashings, with my feet braced against the logs. Under the boiling smother of foam I could feel the callapo writhe and twist in the strain; a keg broke loose, and a Lecco lost his paddle in recovering it. His paddle was of no consequence, for he could whittle another, and he fondly believed the keg held the beloved alcohol—cañassa—though he was wrong, for it held nothing but pickled beef, and worthless, as I later found.

Sometimes a Lecco’s shoulder would rise above the boiling smother, with the brown muscles playing in hard knots; sometimes we would slew side on to the current, and no power could hold us straight until a bursting wave would throw us back; sometimes for an instant the dripping snouts of the callapo would be flung high in the air and fall back with a crash that made itself heard above the roar, and the raft would quiver and strain with the impact. One saw nothing; we might have been standing still. There was nothing but the lashing sting of the whirling spray and the thunder of the cataract. Then, in an instant, the roar and the tumult were behind, the waves calmed, and the callapo shot out into the calmer waters below, where the whirlpools and eddies shifted and coiled.

Vortices into which one might lower a barrel without wetting it whirled lazily past within paddle-reach, and sometimes one would suddenly form ahead and the Leccos would watch them intently as to their possible direction, and then paddle to shift our course. These they can generally avoid. It is when one forms or suddenly comes up from underneath that there is danger. A few did catch us this way and the Leccos would stand with braced feet, reading by the straining logs the possible strength of the vortex, and the callapo would grind and slowly sink, until by sheer mass it broke the force of the whirl. Often we would go down by the stern until the after Leccos kept only their heads above water, and even we, farther forward, would be submerged up to our shoulders. There was nothing to do but wait until the vortex broke of itself.

In the Ratama the roar and excitement drowned any emotion, but this was slowly waiting in uncertainty and speculating on how far one could really swim before being drawn under like a chip. Not far, that was certain, and the Leccos watched this shifting, coiling passage in a silent gravity that they had shown nowhere else on the river. It is the breaking up of the logs and cargo that make the danger, at least to the Lecco—greater than the power of the river itself—and a white man would have no chance.

From the Ratama the river and the country back of it opened out, and the last of the eastern Andean foot-hills were almost passed. A few more rapids were left—the Nube, the Incaguarra, the Beyo, and the Bala—but after the Ratama they dwindled to harmless riffles. The Beyo Cañons resound with a deafening roar, but it is from the thousands of macaws that have their nests in the soft sandstone cliffs, and it is their clatter that carries for miles in the soft evening airs.