Across the Andes

by Charles Johnson Post

The tribes of this part of South America are among the most primitive in the world. Though they had no knotted muscular development, each of these savage children already possessed the strength of a man, and in their aimless play could shift boulders that would tax the strength of a Lecco or Tacana. They could scale any one of the branchless trees in the compound like a monkey, and with as little apparent effort. Sometimes when they were not watched too closely, they would use bow and arrow with native skill; like a flash the arrow would be loosed and a lizard would be split as it ran, or a fleeing chicken skewered. I was told that after a savage child is captured, the greatest care must at first be used in feeding it, as it is totally unaccustomed to salt, and even the slight amount used in bread has a poisonous effect upon it. The Maropa had ulcers that were attributed to this fact. The food, platanos, is rubbed in ashes to slowly accustom them, and after about six months there is no further difficulty.

The night before we left Riba Alta an Indian was brought around to tell me an experience. He was a rubber scout who hunted up possible new areas of rubber trees; he corresponded to a “timber cruiser” in our own Northwest. Somewhere, about a couple of hundred miles back in the interior from this settlement, he had come across the trail of an animal unfamiliar to him—and from his savage infancy such forest lore had been his sole academic curriculum; it was a trail “like a snake—but not a snake.” It was approximately three feet in width judged by his gesture of measurement, and there were feet marks on either side of the trail like a turtle’s flippers—but only two. He had not followed it for he was afraid. About a week later in the shallow lagoon of one of the great lakes that are known to exist in that part, although no white man has yet penetrated to them, he saw a long neck raise itself out of the water—a long neck! And it had a head on it. A snake’s neck, he was asked. No, he insisted it was not a snake, he knew snakes, it was a neck with a head on it, something new. Then he fired at it, and it disappeared—and that was all.

He had described, in the combined circumstances, a possible plesiosaur. What he saw I do not know, but when an Indian wants to romance, his animals have the regulation iridescent eyes and spout flames. No combination of two overlapping trails could deceive him, he was adept on animal trails, nor would such a common place incident as an overlapped trail stir his imagination. He had never seen a circus poster, or an illustrated treatise on paleontology, but he indicated the existence of some animal closer, at least, to the plesiosaur than any known and distant descendant.

The crew had been gathered that same night and slept on the beach beside the monteria so that we were able to start with the dawn. Our first day was unlucky. The heavy canoe, with scarce eight inches of freeboard, was swept on a snag that started one of the planks. The inner bark of a tree that is used for calking, and which is always carried for such emergencies, could not keep the water down, and we were forced to beach the canoe for repairs. This delay, with the constant vision of a lost steamer below the falls, kept the German and myself toiling in the blazing sun by the side of the crew emptying cargo, patching and then reloading. The canoe still made water, but we hoped farther down the river to exchange it. That night we had to camp on a sand-bar, and it was not until the next day that we made the first of the falls,—or cachuelas, the Falls of Esperanza.

At this cataract is the headquarters of the largest single rubber {baron} in South America. His batalones and even tiny river steamers ply from Esperanza throughout the enormous watershed gathering the rubber and sending it out over the falls in large expeditions. Here he has little machine shops, a fair sized village of employees all under his control, while off in one corner by the edge of the jungle is a marble shaft surrounded by a little rusted iron railing that he has erected to the memory of his wife. The shaft and its pedestal have been slowly dragged around the portages in a labor that lasted months, and, as it stands, the tender tribute represents somewhere near its weight in silver bullion. A little tramway of his runs around this cataract and by its use we saved many hours of portage; even the monteria was hoisted with borrowed labor on the tiny car and hauled around.

At this Cachuela Esperanza I observed that it was not a falls such as we picture in connection with the word, a veritable Niagara or Victoria where the water drops sheer in a mass of foaming thunder; it is a gorge or a series of little cañons channeled through mountains of buried rock lying at right angles to the course of the river. The series of the Falls of Madeira seem to be all of this character—parallel mountain-chains of rock at irregular distances from one another, which come near enough to the surface to act as dams until the ages of insistent current have worn their narrow channels. In high water the rock is often entirely covered, and nothing shows but the shift and coil of great eddies and whirlpools to mark the choked gorges beneath. Each main cataract is guarded by a smaller one above and a second one below, often quite as dangerous, and making an average of twenty portages necessary.

In three days we reached Villa Bella, a tiny settlement on the peninsula formed by the Mamoré River joining the Madeira. In this little wilderness town, a sort of half-way between Riba Alta and San Antonia, the few streets were already laid out with rectangular primness, each house was compelled to keep a light burning outside until the late hour of 9 P. M., and there was a street-cleaning department of one, whose duty included keeping the weeds out of the streets. There were also rudimentary sidewalks.

The night of our arrival there was a dance given in the cane-walled house that combined the functions of club, café, billiard-room, and hotel. The sole music was by an accordion, and stately, shuffling, swaying dancers simpered and coquetted and performed all the polite maneuvers to its jerky rhythm, while the dust rose from the corrugated floor of split palm-logs, and the smoking kerosene lamps and tallow candles battled and triumphed over the soft evening atmosphere. Every chink and crevice and window held its glittering, enraptured Indian eye, and even the élite caught their breath at the reckless pop of warm imitation champagne at ten dollars a bottle. Truly it was a grand affair. Ice for the champagne had been hoped for, and the gentleman who owned an ice-machine, as he fondly believed, showed it to me and asked my assistance in operating it. Naïvely he had bought an ice-cream freezer, but so far it had proved obdurate to his labor, and had brought forth no ice.

We exchanged our leaking canoe for a sound one, a trifle larger, and pushed on. A few hours below over the Falls of the Madeira proper—a minor one of the series guarding the little rapids at the head we ran, while a short portage brought us into the clear river again. Three batalones were running their cargo of rubber through the gorges at the side of the cataract. The bolachas of rubber were threaded on long ropes, like a string of beads; one of the crew would take the end of the rope in his teeth, and, swimming or wading, guide it through the eddies near shore. Often he would have to let go, and with a rush it would be sucked into the cataract like a long, knotted, water-snake, while others of the crew would swim out and recover it below.