Now, mix all these types; put at least half the male population in gay ponchos, with every known shade of saffron, red, orange, purple, and the like; sprinkle among them youths with long hair tied in queues, wearing gay-striped ponchos that conceal all but their sturdy brown legs, who straggle up out of the tropical coca-country to the east to mingle with the city life; add a distinctive costume for each surrounding village, the noiseless llama-driver in his absurd cap, a number of Germans in Bolivian army uniforms, monks in black, brown, and white, nuns in gray, soldiers in light-gray uniforms, policemen in brown ones, hundreds of personal idiosyncracies in color and style, and it will be more easily understood why La Paz is justly entitled to that overworked word “picturesque,” and why the aboriginal name of Chuquiyapu would still be more fitting than the trite Spanish one by which Bolivia’s unofficial capital is known to the world. Moreover, children dress exactly like father or mother as soon as they can walk. La chola’s little girl is her mother’s exact miniature, glazed hat, gay shawl, fancy little high-heeled shoes and all, as likely as not with a doll in fancy garments on her back; the cholo’s son paddles behind his father in long breeches slit up the back, gay poncho and felt hat; the little Indian girl trots after her mother in the selfsame red, green, or magenta skirts of bayeta, the round felt hat on her head, and always a bundle on her back, though she be barely three years old and the burden only a bundle of yarn—as if to accustom her early to the life she must lead to the day of her funeral.
Llamas of La Paz patiently awaiting the return of their driver
Down the valley below La Paz the pink and yellow soil stands in fantastic, rain-gashed cliffs
There are many fine walks in and about La Paz. On a sunny afternoon, brilliant-clear as an afternoon can be only at this height, it is a joy to follow a muddy little creek, known as the Chuquiyapu, down through the broken and tumbled gorge below the town, where the clay soil, now sandy white, now soft red, is rain-gashed into a hundred fantastic shapes. The slender, always-at-home eucalyptus and a species of weeping-willow line the way. Illimani raises its hoar head higher and higher into the sky above, seeming to calm the spirits with its majestic serenity and promise of perpetual coolness. So imperceptibly does the valley descend that one could drift clear down into the languid tropical yungas that draws one on like a lodestone, like the “spicy garlic smells” of the Far East, until suddenly realizing how far the city has been left behind, one takes oneself figuratively by the neck and turns back to the town.
Or there is the climb out of the cuenca itself, a stiff hour to the pillar above. Once on the bleak puna, I wandered along the edge of the chasm to get a view of the city below from all angles. Near the station my eye was caught by the private car of a railroad superintendent. Fancying it might be that of my host on the journey up from Arequipa, I strolled toward it. A dishevelled fellow, his ragged coat close up around his neck, his long hair protruding like straw from a scarecrow, a two weeks’ black beard bristling, sat on the back platform, peeling potatoes.
“Está aqui el Señor ——?” I asked casually.
A cloud of incomprehension seemed to pass over the scarecrow face. I repeated the question, thinking he might be one of those weak-minded natives so often found at large in South America.
“English! English is all I talks,” came the startling reply out of the depths of the unshaven one, not only the accent but the presence of a few blackened stumps in lieu of teeth betraying both the nationality and the caste of the speaker. As I had never since leaving Panama seen a white man, much less an English-speaking person, doing manual labor my mistake was natural.