Across the Andes

by Charles Johnson Post

Early the next morning we started. One more day that was a little easier and for hours we poled upstream against a gentle current along the bank and picked wild guayavas from the overhanging trees. It is a delicious fruit—although never since have I been able to find its kind, even in the cultivated tropics. This wild guayava looked somewhat like a small, gnarled quince on the outside; on the inside it had a most delicate pink pulp beyond a little rind, a delicious pulp that combined the melting flavor of the strawberry with the texture and modifications of a superior watermelon. It was good.

That night we landed in Guanai,—twenty-three days of baffled progress against the same river and the same current that had flicked us down from this same Guanai in two days.

CHAPTER XVIII
BY PACK MULE THROUGH THE JUNGLE

It was useless to attempt to battle with the river further. Above, before Mapiri could be reached, were narrower cañons where there were only handholds and often not that, where the cañons were often nothing more than a polished flume of rock. It had taken the Leccos two failures and over a month of the most gruelling work when they finally reached us before in that village, and then they had been living on berries and roots and palm-nuts for the last two days. So we decided on the overland trail to Mapiri. There we could get our saddles and outfit for the trail over the high passes.

Up to Guanai there was no trail, not even a Lecco foot-path, and it was a relief to give the orders for mules and see the sure-footed, flop-eared brutes come ambling to our doorway. For a saddle there was a wreck, a dried leather cast-off that would go after some piecing with rope. An arriero, dressed in a suit made from old flour sacks with the brand still showing in faded blue, had a pack train that was just going out with some rubber and it was his cargo mules that we hired. His ordinary route lay through the Tipuani country and he charged us some outrageous sum—something like five dollars apiece, silver—for going out via Mapiri over the worst trail in Bolivia and some sixty or eighty miles out of his way.

Officially, both Mapiri and Guanai recognize that they are connected by a land trail yet we had not left Guanai a half hour before the last vestige of a trail was gone and the mules plunged into a wilderness of low scrub and tall ferns. The Andean foothills twisted themselves in a maze of huge convolutions through and up and down whose great gullies and jungled ravines we slipped and scrambled. By intuition or obscure landmarks the Cholo arriero found his way and presently we zigzagged down a slope where once more appeared the overgrown remains of a trail. Then that too disappeared and we followed up the bed of a mountain brook, struck off to one side, again plunged into the brook, climbed a hill, struck another foaming torrent and skirted its banks or followed its windings—the ravine through which it flowed being impassable in any other way—and at last struck a tiny, grass grown, level glade. It was not late, yet overhead the tops of the trees were matted in jungle growths until but scant light filtered through, there was the cool dampness of evening and the perpetual sound of the creaking chirping bugs that, in the open world, only tune up for night concerts.

The rains had left the jungle dripping with water; we ourselves were as wet as though we had been out in a storm, and even the blankets from the tent pack were clammy and damp. By morning they were wringing wet and all hands were soaked to the skin. A night storm and a hasty camp were responsible, although how a camp could be made on a spongy soil up against a mountain that shed its waters like a roof on your camping bed, and for one night in a march, is a matter of engineering and not of travel.

In the morning all the wood was too wet to burn and a cold breakfast of leftover tea from the night before, some soggy galletas, crackers, and chancaca added no zest to the opening day. Like the day before this was spent in climbing through the jungle-matted hills or taking advantage of occasional brooks. Here and there the trail reappeared, generally in a series of steps cut in a slippery clay hill, steps three and four feet high and with their tread banked by a log to keep it from washing away. It was killing work for the mules and generally we dismounted and climbed alongside. They would go up in a series of goat-like jumps, throwing the watery mud in a shower with every plunge. Walking up such places was safer for they were really of about the pitch of a ladder and a single slip on the wet, greasy clay would have sent both mule and rider in a broken mass to the bottom of the gully.

Early in the afternoon—it was not two o’clock—we were blocked by the Mariapa River; it was a creek, broad and shallow and turbulent and swollen with the recent rains. The only ford was impassable, so once more we sat down to wait for a river to go down. It rose instead and that night we camped by the ford, wet from the afternoon rain and caked with mud.

There was no wood dry enough to burn and a cold supper with a tin of Chicago’s most famous clammy beef stew—“roast beef”—purchased in Guanai set forth the camp banquet log. It was already dusk above the tree tops when we made camp and darkness below so that the Cholo arriero had not noticed where we hung the shelter tent from the bushes and lay down together. In the morning we awoke covered with a multitude of scurrying, inquisitive ants of some large red species. They did not bite and were inoffensive so far as that was concerned, but our belts, our holsters, our shoes, our gauntlets, everything of leather, looked as though it had broken out with small-pox. Tiny disks, perfectly round, had been cut out of the surface of the leather; and in some apparently choice spots where the surface leather had become exhausted they had started cutting out disks in deeper layers. One gauntlet was worthless and the upper of one shoe was on the verge of dissolution.