The going ranged from quebradita to muy quebrada, now along the stony bed of a meandering “river,” yesterday all but impassable, to-day so bone dry there was only a bit of running mud to quench the thirst; now over a sharp knoll bristling with jagged, loose stones. At red-hot noon we reached the Huancabamba river, now grown to man’s estate, where it swings around to join the Marañón and divides the never-to-be-forgotten Province of Jaen from that of Cutervo. A laborious two hours up it brought us to the long-heralded Puerto Sauce, where the government maintains a “ferry,”—five small logs bound together with vines and manned by three balseros housed in two reed-kennels. Here we squatted out the day, watching the coffee-colored stream race by on its long journey to the Atlantic with all the impetuosity of the rainy season. The government chasqui had been sitting here nearly a week, his mail-sacks stacked and his horse tethered close at hand. Only out on the extreme edge of the bank, where an occasional breath of tepid breeze tempered the lead-heavy heat and thinned the swarms of stinging insects, was life endurable. My skin was a patchwork of mementoes of all the minute fauna of the past week, and an itching like the constant prick of myriad red-hot needles was relieved only briefly by each dip in the stream. During one of them I advanced well into the river, and it seemed I could have crossed it; that even the Peruvians might have made the passage, had they male blood in their veins. But then, had they been men they would long since have built a bridge. All through the night there kept running through my head, amid the sweep of the waters, that illuminating remark of “Kim,” “A sahib is always tied to his baggage”; and in my half-conscious condition I resolved when morning broke to cast away all but a loin-cloth and a hat, and travel henceforth in comfort al uso del país. But, alas, the least formal of us cannot rid himself of all the adjuncts of civilization; and there was photography, to say nothing of food and covering for the highlands ahead, to be considered. When dawn turned its matter-of-fact light upon the scene, the dream quickly faded and I settled down to watch another day drag by into the past tense beside the racing brown waters of the Huancabamba. The feeling was rampant that nature had played me a scurvy trick. I had bargained on following the cool and pleasant crest of the Andes, and they had crumbled away beneath me and forced upon me this unsought experience of the tropics.
Not until the morning of the third day did the balseros conclude to attempt to pass over the “government people,”—the mail-man and this impatient gringo with the official order from the alcalde. The raft had been dragged well up-stream, where we waded to it through bristling jungle and knee-deep mud. The chasqui’s horse, long experienced in these matters from years of carrying the mails over this route, was driven in and forced to swim to a sand-bar well out in the stream. For a long time the animal stood like a prisoner at bay against the shouting and stoning and shaking of cudgels of those on the bank, but at length, seeing no other escape, it set out to attempt the main branch. Its brute instinct would have proved a better guide than the opinions of more rational beings. Struggling until its snorting echoed back from the surrounding jungle, it fought the brown, racing waters, gradually nearing the further bank, yet swept even more swiftly along by the inexorable stream, amid foam-caps from the rocky passes above, strained savagely to reach the strip of beach that served as landing-place until, swept past it without gaining a footing, it seemed suddenly to give up in despair, and only its head, swinging slowly round and round with the current, was seen a short minute more, tiny against the race of the yellower waters, before it swept on out of sight down the jungle-walled torrent.
The chasqui gazed after the lost animal for a long moment, shrugged his shoulders with the resigned “Vaya!” of a confirmed fatalist, and took his seat beside me on our baggage, tied securely near the back of the frail craft. The three brown balseros, naked but for palm-leaf hats and a strip of rag between their legs, each crossed himself elaborately, and took a deep draught at Anastasio’s quart bottle of cañazo. Then they pointed the nose of the raft up-stream, pushed off, snatched up their clumsy paddles with a hoarse imploration to the Virgin, and fought for dear life and the sand-bar. This gained, we disembarked and manoeuvered to the further side, then pushed off into the main stream. It snatched at us like some greedy monster. The sand-bar raced away up-stream at express speed, the further bank sped past like a blurred cinematograph ribbon, the paddlers, urged on by their own and the mail-man’s raucous shouts and imprecations, battled as with some mortal enemy, stabbing their paddles in swift, breathless succession into the brown stream, and following each dig with a savage jerk that tore the wound wide open and brought out the lean muscles beneath their dingy skins like steel cables under leather coverings. The rules of caste are more important than life itself in South America, and both the mail-man and I had been refused paddles. Relentlessly the further shore galloped by. The bit of clearing required for landing approached, beckoned to us tantalizingly, flashed on, and the raft sped swiftly after the lost horse. The balseros, abetted by the chasqui, increased their efforts to a screaming uproar, in which I caught here and there a fragmentary “’nta Virgen . . . ’yuda!” Fortunately they did not put all their trust in superhuman assistance, and their paddles tore at the stream with a viciousness that drenched us with its aftermath. Bit by bit we strained nearer the hurrying wall of verdure. Every lunge seemed to lift the paddlers into the air; the cords on their necks stood out like creepers on a forest tree; their yells, hoarse and savage enough to have frightened off any malignant spirit of the waters, came strained and broken now, from lack of breath. Now we could all but touch the racing forest-wall. I snatched in vain at a sapling bowing its head in the stream. With a last faint gasp and a spent stroke, the balseros dropped their paddles on the raft, and all five of us grasped at the vegetation that tore and lacerated us in its struggle to escape our desperate embrace. When we had each gathered an armful of it, we clung so stoutly to this last hold to earth that the raft was all but swept from under us before we swung it up into a bit of cove, where the balseros, falling at once into their racial apathy, drooped like wilted rags at the bow, while one of them panted weakly, “A little more, señores, and we were gone sin noticias.”
As lazily as they had been energetic in the crossing, the ferrymen coaxed the raft up along the edge of the forest to the little clearing, where I swung my saddle-bags over a shoulder, waded to dry land and plodded on along the blazing hot bank of the Huancabamba. Slowly my shadow crawled from under my feet. In this sweltering desert valley, now staggering through hot sand and a dwarf vegetation savage with thorns, now clambering constantly over steep headlands that broke into cliffs at the river’s edge and stumbling down again through veritable quarries of loose stones, my burden, augmented with chancaca, a sack of rice and a roll of sun-dried beef, as well as the lead-heavy tropical sun that seemed to lean physically on my shoulders, became unbearable. I resolved to pitch camp in the first open space and wait, till doomsday if necessary, for some pack-train susceptible to the glitter of silver coins. Puerto Sauce was probably not more than seven miles behind me when I found, between trail and river, a narrow sand-strip sloping down to the racing brown waters and backed by a barren, stony cliff-face over which the “road” promised to bring out in relief against the turquí sky anyone who might pass my way.
Grass could not find sustenance on this sun-baked spot, but centipedes and a score of other venomous things might exist. Scattered along the bank were many sapling poles, the wreckage, evidently, of some hut that had been swept here by the raging river. I gathered an armful of these and laid their ends on two small logs, covered them with such brush and branches as were without thorns, and had a far more comfortable couch than the wealthiest hacendado of the region. Over me hung a wild lemon-tree, the fruit of which made the yellow Huancabamba more nearly drinkable. About its trunk, within instant reach, I strapped my revolver, and lay down almost in the “royal highway,” fully prepared for anything except a sudden burst of rain. Across the river in dense, half-cultivated, greener jungle were the huts of several natives; but they might as well have been in another world, for I could not have heard a whisper above the roar of the Huancabamba had they stood on the opposite bank screaming across at me. I possessed a maltreated copy of Prescott, and there is great compensation for the hardships of the trail in golden moments snatched like this; for nowhere does the mind grip the printed page so firmly as at the end of a day on the road, after long turning the leaves of no other page than nature’s.
The afternoon passed, faded to a violent sunset, and blackened into night, without a human sight or sound. I took another swim, careful not to lose my grasp on the shore, and turned my lounge into a bed. There had been many rumors of bears and “tigers” in these parts. The real peril was the incitement to suicide caused by the swarming insect life whenever the breeze failed for an instant. In my dreams the roar of the Huancabamba turned to that of New York, and I fancied I had suddenly left off my journey down the Andes to run home for a single day, at the end of which I should take up my task where I had left off.
When dawn awoke me I refused to rise. But hour after hour passed without a break in the drear monotony of the arid landscape. In mid-morning patience exploded and, throwing my load over a shoulder, I toiled on. When, at the end of some fifteen miles, my legs refused to push me further, I struggled through the jungle to the river-bank; but there was not a cleared space sufficient to sit on, much less to lie down in. By wading chest-deep I reached the breezy nose of an island in the Huancabamba, and made my bed on the damp beach-sand. But I had chosen poorly, if choice it might be called. Without even leaves to spread under me, the night was one of unmitigated torture. Myriads of crawling, stinging tropical life made my entire frame a pasture and playground, and at best I got only a few half-conscious snatches of sleep, troubled with the threatening rumble of the river. For safety’s sake I had hung many of my belongings in the branches of trees; but not enough of them. Daylight showed a populous colony of enormous black ants in possession of all that lay on the ground. They had not only eaten to the last crumb the chancaca I had lugged for two blazing days, and left me barely a spoonful of rice for breakfast, but they had all but destroyed the home-made cover of my kodak, had decorated my hat with a fringe, and had bitten into a dozen pieces my auto-photographic bulb, scattering all the vicinity with crumbs of red rubber.
Another lone day we struggled up-stream. I say we,—that is, myself and I; for—a point for psychologists—since taking up my own load again I could not rid myself of the fancy that I was two distinct persons, one of whom was forcing the other to make the journey. In the night I often started up fancying the other fellow—the one who did the walking and carried the load—had escaped. Could he know the truth beforehand, no sane man would sentence himself to tramp this route of the Andes, to suffer almost incessant hardships, the monotony of the same experiences over and over again, the dreary intercourse with a people so stupid, so low of intelligence that long contact with their childish minds brings with it the danger of one’s own faculties turning childish, like that of a lifetime of school-teaching. Only the American habit of carrying out to the bitter end a plan once made could force him on.
Late the next morning the most exciting event of several days happened,—I met a human being. He was lolling before a slatternly hut of reeds, inside which a half-caste woman squatted on the earth peeling camotes. On such a journey the civilized traveler unconsciously builds up a certain pity for himself which he feels should be shared by others. But he is sure of a rude awakening among these clod-like inhabitants of the wilderness. Should a living skeleton crawl into an Andean hut announcing he had not tasted food for a fortnight, had seven species of tropical fever, and had been bitten by a baker’s dozen of venomous serpents, the greeting would be the same motionless, indifferent grunt and drowsily mumbled “Vaya!” with which this female acknowledged my presence. No offer of money would have brought her to her feet, much less have induced her to cook one of the chickens—or even yellow curs—that overran the place. As I picked up my burden in disgust, however, she murmured through her half-closed lips, “Se irá usté’ almorzando?”—in other words that I might wait, if I chose, to partake of the camote stew she was lazily concocting over the stick fire in the center of the floor. On the surface this stereotyped invitation looks like genuine hospitality. At bottom it is less so than a habit, tinged with superstition and fear of malignant spirits, and above all the impossibility of an uninitiative race daring to, or even thinking of varying a custom of all their known world. It was no time to stand on my dignity, however, even had the foodless days behind left me any such support, and I sat down again. A ravenous two hours dragged by before the mess of native roots and herbs met the approval of the expressionless female, who tasted a wooden spoonful of it now and then and tossed the residue back into the kettle. Several peons had drifted in, genuine human clods, apparently as devoid of intelligence as the hogs rooting about under their hoofed feet, and gathered about a flat log raised a bit above the earth. With a steaming calabash of the tasteless, red-hot stew before each of us, and a single bowl of mote mixed with bits of pork rind into which all shovelled at once, we finished the meal in utter silence. Then the first peon, wiping his horny hand across his mouth with a disgusting sucking sound, mumbled “Diós se lo pagará,” a formula repeated by each as we rose to our feet. However much he may prefer to liquidate the matter himself, rather than to leave it to so uncertain and unindebted a source, this “God will pay you for it,” is the only return the traveler who sits in at their tasteless repasts can force upon these mongrel people of the Andean wilderness.
How far out of my course I had mounted the Huancabamba when I picked up a rock-strewn tributary along the cliff-face, only a professional geographer could say. Through the hot-lands of northern Peru direction yields to the accidents of nature, and Jaen had been as far east of a line due southward as Ayavaca had been to the west. When early sunset fell in the bottom of the deep valley, I had mounted several hundred feet above the level of the Huancabamba, and with a welcome coolness came more human manners, heralding the highlands again. Both Fructuoso Carrera and his far younger, though no less cheery wife, treated me more like a prodigal son than as an importunate guest who had fallen upon them out of the unknown. Amid the culinary operations suited to my case they gave me in detail the recipe of the choclo tandas—Quichua bread, probably used before the Conquest—that finally rounded off our repast late in the evening. For the benefit of housewives permit me to pass on the information: