The main street of the great provincial capital of Jaen, with the flagpole to which I tied “Cleopatra” before the official residence of the local governor
The government “ferry” across the Huancabamba, with the balseros imbibing the last Dutch courage before attempting to set the chasqui, or mail-man, and me, with our baggage, across the flood-swollen stream
The hacendados of this region, owning whole ranges of mountains and valleys, live scarcely better than the Indians in their hovels. Both father and son in this case wore shoes and read the Lima newspapers—from a month to six weeks old—yet their earth-floored and walled dining-room swarmed with unspeakably dirty peon children, and pigs all but uprooted the table as we ate. The slatternly female cooking over three stones in an adjoining sty served us boiled rice mixed with cubes of pork in a single bowl from which we all helped ourselves indifferently with spoon or fingers. Father and son slept on a sort of home-made table covered with a pair of ragged blankets in a mud den overrun by domestic animals and littered with all the noisome odds and ends of a South American harness-room. Yet their speech was as redundant with formalities as that of a Spanish cavalier in the king’s court.
Though I knew there was a long, foodless, and uninhabited region ahead, I could add but little to “Cleopatra’s” nominal load in preparation for it, for to offer to buy supplies would have been considered an insult to my hosts equal to an attempt to pay for my accommodation. Costumbre, inbred for long generations, forces these rural hacendados of Peru to consider it beneath their dignity to sell anything, except the rapadura and home-made fire-water they look upon as their legitimate source of income, yet they are too miserly to give much. The best I could do was to accept, with signs of deep gratitude, two small cotton sackfuls of chifles and charol; the former, bone-hard slices of plantains warranted to keep forever in any climate and taste like oak chips to any appetite; the latter, hard squares of fried fat pork of the size of small dice. Then, of course, there was the inevitable slab of crude sugar wrapped in banana leaves.
The “road” was worse than that of the day before. Times without number I concluded the end of the journey had come for one of us, yet somehow the maltreated little brute sprawled forward through the pouring rain. Dense, dripping, unbroken forests, abounding with the red berries of wild coffee, crowded close on either hand. Below, the swollen Tamborapo roared incessantly close alongside, adding to the constant fear of losing all my possessions the continual dread of reaching some impassable stream. Toward the end of a day during which we had forded a dozen difficult tributaries, we were halted by a raging branch, plainly foolhardy to attempt. I chased “Cleopatra” up through the jungle alongside it, until darkness came on and forced us to camp in a tiny open space, my perishable possessions hung in the trees against destruction by ants, and the donkey tied to the trunk that formed my bed-post. All night long the animal walked round and round over me, though without once stepping on my prostrate form or the heaped-up baggage. In the morning we tore our way far on up the tributary before we came in sight of a “bridge,” that is, two poles tied with vines to a tree on either bank. I had piled my garments on top of the load and was just dragging my reluctant baggage-car into the stream, when a half-naked youth appeared on the opposite bank, making wild signs to me across the uproar of waters. By the time I had regained the shore, he arrived in abbreviated shirt by way of the “bridge,” carrying a stout staff and a rope. With these he dragged the donkey, stripped stark naked, into the stream and, fervently crossing himself twice, fought his way with it into the torrent; while I made three trips monkey-fashion along the tree-lashed poles with the baggage that would infallibly have been washed away but for this experienced jungle-dweller. His particular saint did not fail him and, having delivered the drenched and disgusted animal to me on the further bank, he accepted a real with a gratitude that suggested he considered himself well-paid for risking his life.
Slowly, monotonously, day after day, we pushed on through the Amazonian jungle—Amazonian not only in appearance, but because the Tamborapo, soon to join the Marañón, forms a part of the great network of the Father of Waters. The unpeopled forest, draped with vines that here and there, like broken cables, dipped their ends in the stream, seemed to have no end. The absolute solitude of the region, ever shut in by impenetrable jungle, with never a view of the horizon, with no sign of the existence of humanity and no other sounds than the occasional scream of a bird and the constant roar of the stream, had a peculiar effect on the moods. One felt abandoned by the world, and came to look upon all nature as a cruel prison-warden determined that his prisoner should never again be permitted to pick up the threads of his existence, nor even communicate with the world that had abandoned him. The very silence added to the gloom, until I felt like screaming, “Well, speak, burro!” It was a relief not to sweat under my own load, but it was distinctly more laborious to drive it before me. Day after day I beat up “Cleopatra’s” rear from dawn to dusk without a pause, yet covered scarcely half the distance I might have plodded alone. Even where the trail was level and dry, the docile, yet headstrong brute could not exceed two miles an hour; wherever a bit of slope, or stones and mud intervened, she picked her way with the cautious deliberation of an old lady entering a street-car. Insects swarmed. My unshaven face and all the expanse of skin from crown to toes were blotched and swollen with their visitations. The chifles and charol gave out and left only the lead-heavy rapadura and river-water as hunger antidotes. On the third day even the last chunk of crude sugar disappeared, and still the two of us plodded on, equally gaunt and lacking in ambition and energy.
I had lived on river-water for more than twenty-four hours, and lost my way several times on forking trails that climbed to nowhere far above, or were swallowed up in the jungle, when I guessed again at a path that climbed up out of the valley of the river. By and by it sweated up to a hut of open-work poles, where lived a vaquero in charge of the stock of a vast hacienda of the wilderness. Only a little girl of eight was at home, and she did not know that roads were meant to lead anywhere. Tying “Cleopatra” in the shade of the eaves, I sat down to await adult information. Starvation seemed to have danced its orgy for weeks before my weary eyes when the child came out with a fat, ripe chirimoya, to lisp in a shaky voice, “Le gu’ta e’ta fruta?” Hours later a gaunt, tropic-scarred man appeared, and at sight of me shouted the stereotyped greeting of all his class to any visitor ahorse or afoot:
“Apéase—dismount, señor.”