Once more I was back in Sorata. One of the men, our only mechanic, an Englishman, was quarantined in a little house on the outskirts, down with the smallpox. We had shared the room in the Sorata posada together before I started across the high plain, and he had become sick twenty-four hours after I left. The intendente of Sorata was irritated at him, he was some trouble with his smallpox. They had locked an old Indian woman in the house on the outskirts to which he had been removed and kept a guard at the door so she could not escape. She was cook and nurse.
The queer official government doctor who ran a queer medicine shop and barely kept alive under the government subsidy, shuffled up to the house each day and called inquiries through the window that were answered by the sick man. Fortunately he was not very ill, and he pulled through. While the peeling or shedding process was on we would go up and sit across the alley from his window and smoke some pipes with the patient.
At night he used to be annoyed while he was helpless, by the Aymarás, who would hold little dances and celebrations under his windows, tooting the doleful flutes and beating the drums. While he was sickest he was helpless; one of his first messages was to the intendente to chase off the Indians. It had the usual result—nothing. His first convalescent act was to crawl over to the window one night with his gun and open fire. Two muffled echoes from the night proved that he had punctured two drums and he was left in peace. True, the Aymarás complained but the intendente came back with the information that a crazy smallpox patient was a free agent and they had better keep away. Thereafter no more drums or flutes broke the night’s peace.
CHAPTER XXI
THE MUSIC OF THE AYMARÁS
This Indian music is interesting and I was fortunate in being able to have some preserved in musical form for repetition. In the remains of the vast Indian nation shattered by Pizarro, the Empire of the Incas, every man and boy, almost from the age when he can walk, is an adept on their simple reed flutes and Pandean pipes; the drum he merely thumps. They are a musical race; there are songs and airs for each season, for the planting, for the harvest, for the valorous deeds of the vanished caciques, for their gods of old to whom a new significance has been given by a pious Church, and the long-drawn chants by means of which, at their yearly gatherings, they pass down the history of their race. As there is no written language, there is no written music; it is handed down from generation to generation by the ear alone.
Their national instruments are but three in number: the flute—a reed about eighteen inches in length, with six holes, and a square slit at the end for a mouthpiece, played after the manner of a clarionet; the Pandean pipes—a series of seven reed tubes that, in the large ones, are four feet in length, and in the smaller ones scarcely as many inches; and the drum. The last is the universal instrument of all peoples; there are few races so low in the scale of human society as not to possess it. The Pandean pipes are in a double row, and at the time of preparation for the Indiads, or the intertribal wars, the outer series is filled with cañassa, the native liquor, and the player receives the benefit of the intoxicating fumes without the delay incidental to drinking from the bottle. Only the men play, the women and girls never; their part is in the chanting and in the hand-clapping that measures the weird rhythm, although before marriage the girls are allowed to join in the dances and the drinking that goes with them.
In the cities and villages there are the constant beating of the drums and sound of the flutes. Every community or group has its special festival days. Now it is a wedding or a christening with the hosts of “compadres”—godfathers—or the Church day of some obscure saint celebrated by the mission padre, then a village fiesta or house-raising, and from day to day the sounds of barbaric strains stretch in an endless chain throughout the year. In riding over the high plains in the Indian country one is seldom beyond the sound of the thin flutes. Every llama and sheep herder passes the monotonous hours with his playing. In the still air it carries for miles and softens in the long distances with a weird pleasing effect. The strain is short, but one bar, and for hours it is repeated with unvarying exactness.
Even in the bitter cold and snow of the trails of the high passes the presence of the Indians is announced long before their appearance by the echoing flutes. They plod along in single file, muffled in their ponchos, driving the llamas or burros before them; one of them supplies the music, but as the air is thin in these high altitudes and breath is precious, they relieve each other at frequent intervals. There is no marked cadence to the music; it is a weary minor air unlike the sturdy measures we associate with marching music, but it undoubtedly stimulates its audience in some mysterious way with an inspiring effect.
