“Before the railway came I used to transport across the desert from Arica,” he went on, steering his mule around a hollow of broken rock, “and I had a little dog named Bobbie Burns. He was a wise little dog, and as the desert sand burned his feet he got still wiser, and used to run way ahead of me, a mile or so, so far he could just see me, and then dig a hole in the sand and lie in it until I was a mile ahead and almost out of sight again; and then he would race by me with a ‘how-d’-do’ yelp and dig another hole. A chileno greaser killed that little dog,” said “Sandy,” gazing dreamily across the mirage-flowing landscape, “and I never got a chance to do as much for him.”
The Capinota river we had been following, or rather criss-crossing, for two days came to an alfalfa-green village, exceedingly restful to eyes that had been gazing unbrokenly on the sun-flooded desert, and the trail struck off at right angles up a branch of a stream milky with dust. That night we camped again in the sand at the end of the haul, in celebration of which “Sandy” shaved and put on a purple neckcloth to scream at his red hair. There I took leave of him, with seventeen miles still separating me from Cochabamba. It was not the problem of transporting myself, but rather my baggage, that forced me to trot several times into blazing-hot Parotani in quest of a donkey—all in vain. At length—strange chances one takes in South America—I caught a total stranger bound for the city, and he was soon lost in the dust ahead, with all my possessions on the crupper of his mule. The sweating trail with its plaguing brook grew in time into a road on the left bank; huts, then entire villages sprang up beside me; troops of pack-animals increased to an almost steady stream, and at four I overtook my baggage in Vinto, recovered it by payment of a boliviano, and was soon screaming in a little toy train on a 75-centimeter-gage track, at the terrifying speed of an hour and forty minutes for the twelve miles, into the second city of Bolivia.
CHAPTER XIX
ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA
There are three such “railroads” running out of Cochabamba, though none of them venture more than a few miles. All were brought up piecemeal on muleback or on massive two-wheel carts, like the first steamers on Titicaca, for it is what the natives call a “mediterranean” town. One is a steam line with a single toy locomotive, which starts every hour from the central plaza, for the suburb Calacala, “noted” for its baths, splitting the ears with its infantile shriek and spitting hot cinders upon all the bench-holders in the vicinity. A cochabambino assured me that I could not believe it possible this “enormous” locomotive had been brought “from Germany” on muleback; but as he had never been further out of town than its three little lines could carry him, his conception of locomotives was somewhat atrophied. This one was so childlike that once, when it suddenly started up as I was crossing the street, I unconsciously put out a hand to thrust it back until I had passed.
Cochabamba, 60,000 inhabitants by its own count, the majority of whom have never left its suburbs, is conceded to be the second city of Bolivia, and considers itself the first, after the South American fashion. It is constantly quarrelling with La Paz as to which shall furnish the country its president, a truce being usually patched up by alternating the honor. The population of Bolivia is made up of just such heterogeneous groups, among which there exists a profound aversion. The rivalry is particularly tenacious between the Collas, those, chiefly of the Aymará race, inhabiting the Collao, or northern portion of the country bordering on Titicaca, and the south of the republic, containing a large proportion of Quichua blood and partaking of many of the characteristics of that timid, dreamy race. Like the Quichua in general, the cochabambino is wedded to his native soil, with an ineradicable affection for it, partly because isolation keeps its customs largely unchanged. The tongue of the Incas is still the chief one of the lower classes; the town’s name, indeed, is derived from the Quichua words kocha (lake) and pampa (plain)—which the Conquistadores as usual corrupted by pronouncing it as if they had a cold in the head. There is little question but that the surrounding valley was once a lake-bottom. Founded in 1574, the place was christened by a high-sounding Spanish name, which, as so often happened in South America, failed to stick. It has a restful, summer-resort air, with birds singing in its shaded alamedas, reminding one faintly of Granada, with its sand and cactus and half-arid soil requiring irrigation. The little river Cocha wanders by the north and east sides of the town on its way to join the Mamoré; the surrounding hills are less brown than the altiplanicie, half-clothed with trees and with patches of green running up the sides of the range. The showers were no highland drizzles, but perfect sheets of water for an hour or more—fine prospects for my continued travels at the end of wheel-going!
Yet it is a colorless place compared to La Paz. Adobe is the chief building material; there is no structure of great importance, though “La Compañía” of the early Jesuits has the usual ornate façade. Its houses are of the light yellow mud of the surrounding plain, less painted than those of the capital, and even the tile roofs are of so dull and dusty a red as scarcely to excite the eye. On a barren knoll at the back of the town is a ruined adobe bull-ring, once large and ornate, and still higher up, before the monument to the “Heroes of Cochabamba,” the gaze stretches away across a yellowish land, flat as a sea, baking in the blazing sunshine. Costumes, too, show far less color than those of La Paz. La chola wears a similar hat, but it is flatter and therefore uglier, and she has neither the immaculateness, instinct for pleasing color combinations, nor the sprightliness of her Aymará cousin. Natives of pure Caucasian blood are so rare as to be almost conspicuous. Important commerce is largely in the hands of Germans; even the English vice-consul was a Teuton. The municipal library bore a large sign announcing that it was open from 9 to 11, 1 to 4, and 7 to 9. At nine-thirty the doddering old librarian appeared, and at 10:05, when he had finished reading the morning paper and smoking his cigarette, he put on his hat and remarked, “Nos vamos, señores,” and go we did, sure enough. In the afternoon and evening he did not appear. Cochabamba has been called the paradise of priests. Fat, coarse-featured men of the cloth swarm, and the town is rated the most fanatical in Bolivia. As late as ten years ago a hogüera was lighted in the central plaza to carry out an auto de fé against a Protestant who had dared to preach his doctrines in a private house, the materials, for the inquisitorial bonfire being the holy books and furniture of the evangelist. The troops were called upon to interfere and prevented the consummation of the act, but they were not able to keep the “heretics” from being cruelly stoned by the populace. The approach of the railway, however, the arrival of many gringos, and a now firmly established mission-school with a government subsidy is wearing down somewhat this medieval point of view.
In a corner of the main plaza of Cochabamba, where the sunshine streaks upon it through the trees, was the “gringo bench,” a rendezvous at which there was always to be found at least an American and an odd Englishman or two, generally miners and even more generally penniless. For Bolivia had proved less golden than the rumors that had oozed forth from her interior, and there is no better climate than that of Cochabamba in which to sit waiting for whatever chooses to turn up next. At the time of my arrival the bench had three principal occupants. The most permanent fixture was “Old Man Simpson,” over eighty, not merely a fellow-countryman, but originally from the same town in which I had spent my youth; indeed, he was still a subscriber to the weekly newspaper I had earned more than one school-day dollar folding and “carrying.” A “Forty-niner” who had drifted from California to Chile, he had been in South America unbrokenly—though frequently “broke”—many more years than I had been on earth, his fortunes rising and falling with miner’s luck and open-handedness, his “Spanish” still atrocious. Now he was so nearly blind that he could recognize us one from another only by our voices; and every day he sat from sunrise to dusk, except for his “breakfast” and siesta from eleven to one, in the shaded corner of the plaza, a cud of coca-leaves in one cheek, his gnarled and leathery hands folded on the head of his chonta cane. All day long he would weave endless tales of the prospector’s life, wandering disconnectedly over all the western side of the continent, as long as he could get a single gringo to sit and listen. When he could not, and was, or fancied himself, alone, he sat hour after hour motionless, murmuring each time the clock in the tower above struck, “Well, it’s —— o’clock,” and relapsing again into silence.
After Simpson came Sampson, an extraordinary cockney, resourceful, quick-witted, full of quaint sayings, of a strikingly personal philosophy of life, so much of a “hustler” that his initiative often boiled over into audacity. He spoke fluently a colloquial Spanish and considerable Quichua, chewed coca incessantly, and came close to being the ugliest man I had ever set eyes upon. This last mentioned quality was enhanced by the slap-stick clown garb he wore,—faded overalls with a bib, some remnants of shoes here and there about his ham-like feet, a woolen neckcloth à la Whitechapel, and an Indian felt hat on the back of his bullet head. His view of life he summed up—among friends—briefly with, “I am strictly honest; I never tyke anything I can’t reach.” As to his resourcefulness: in this identical garb he had gained the entrée to the haughtiest class of natives, with whom outward appearances constitute some 99 percent., and had talked his hypnotic way into the confidence of a lawyer and ex-senator of Cochabamba to such an extent that the latter contemplated giving him charge of a large tract of land to plant with cotton.
The third bencher, Tommy Cox, had been “down inside” with Sampson on some prospecting scheme that had failed. Originally from Toronto, he was in appearance and speech a “typical Englishman,” a little sandy-haired fellow of twenty-five, the antithesis of his companion in initiative, of so dim a personality compared to Sampson that one barely noted his existence when the two were together.
When I arrived in Cochabamba nothing was more certain than that I should continue my tramp down the Andes, through Sucre and Potosí, into the Argentine. But plans do not keep well in so warm a climate. I sat one day musing on the trip ahead of me, when Sampson cut in: