Across the Andes

by Charles Johnson Post

“Look at them!” he said hopelessly. “Talk to the head-man. If they will do it, I shall be glad. Two days have they loafed like this, and it will be two days more.” He swore fluently in Portuguese. “If I beat them or shoot one, they will have me put in jail in San Antonio. I am losing money, but it is better than jail.” Obviously we were nearing civilization; up-river no lazy mutiny was possible.

The head-man refused surlily unless we would stop and loan them our crew.

One of the idling crew—it was not a strike; they were just tired and wanted rest—sauntered over to me. He was a powerful negro, with the smooth, supple muscles rippling under a skin of oiled coal. He was a man without a language, although he could be barely intelligible in three.

“Me ’Melican, bahs, tambien.” He thumped his naked bosom like a war-drum, but he was friendly; to his mind we were two fellow Americans greeting in an out-of-the-way place. He pointed to his companion: “Him B’itish, ho, yaas.” Then, like a chieftain chanting, he recounted their voyage on the river: “Ribber him belly bad. Muchas wark—belly ha’d. Me bahs him belly ha’d; go far topside ribber. Me seeck; you got him li’ly rum, cañassa? Wanee catchem li’ly d’ink.” And his British confrère added also a pleading for a “li’ly d’ink.”

He insisted that he was an American, although born in the Guianas, but he admired America so much he had adopted it; and he would translate the heated gibberish of unknown patois with his friends as his noble defence of our superior America and wind up with a plea for a “li’ly d’ink.”

At this same cataract, in a wretched hut, lived some kind of a broken down, human derelict, blear eyed and worthless and nondescript, whose desolate fortunes were shared by a poor, wretched Frenchwoman and their unkempt, pitiful children. Between them they stood off the savages from time to time and in the intervals squabbled drunkenly with each other. Six weeks before a battle between two crews at this portage had been fought around their shack. One of the crew had stolen a woman belonging to an Indian of the other outfit and when the trouble died down twelve men had been shot, together with the woman who was the cause of the friction. A new crew had to be sent down to help out with the batalones.

But the cataract of Geraos is one of the finest of the whole system. The buried mountain system of rock lies open to the sky; it has been channeled in deep cañons, above which the waves are lifted in angry fangs. Their roar carries through the jungle on each side like the steady thunder of a storm; whole trees that have lazily swept down-stream are caught in the clutch of the great cañon, and are tossed high above the cañon walls as though they were only straws caught in a thresher.

At the Falls of Teotonio we paddled up to the very brink of the cataract and beached snugly in a little eddy at the side. Here a broken-down contractor’s railway made the portage an easy matter, even though it was done in one of the hardest tropical rainstorms that I have ever seen. The lightning and the thunder were continuous, and the rain drove in a steady, blinding sheet, like the deluge from a titanic nozzle.

The little news that came up from San Antonio drove us to greater haste to catch the steamer; the steamer was there, stuck on a mud-bank; it had gone; it was coming. Every uncertain rumor added to our haste and desire. We had not stopped to hunt, and supplies were running low. Coffee was gone, the viscocha can almost empty, platanos and charqui were running low and it was necessary to keep the crew well fed for their hard and steady work. Twice we had scared a capibarra from the bank, each time beyond possible rifle shot, and now we were looking for even a cayman, for a big meal of baked alligator tail would go a long way toward helping out the commissary.

Knowing our need, apparently, the game was perverse in its determination to annoy us by its absence; and then at last, on a playa, far down the river, the crew made out a little group of three capibarra. It was the only time I ever knew of the necessity of stalking that simple animal, and when the capibarra fell, kicking, and the others darted off to seek the bottom of the river, the problem of our larder was solved.