“’Ere! If you’re looking for something new, why don’t you shoot across country by Santa Cruz to the Paraguay river and down to Asunción and B. A.? Least I don’t think it’s never been done by a white man alone and afoot.”
The idea sprouted. I suddenly discovered that I was weary of high altitudes and treeless punas, of the drear sameness of the Andes and the constant repetition of the serranos that inhabit them. To that moment I had, like most of the world, conceived of Bolivia as a lofty plateau, arid and cold; whereas more than half of it is a vast, tropical lowland, spreading away from the slopes of the Andes to the borders of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, making it the third largest country of South America. There was, it seemed, a fourth way of entering or leaving this mediterranean land, and it was neither by way of Mollendo, Arica, nor Antofagasta; but a route all but unknown to the world at large, yet followed by many of its imports and exports. The montaña or yungas promised a new type of people, a new style of life; a knowledge of South America would be only half complete without including in my itinerary the immense hot-lands and river-webbed wilderness stretching eastward from the Andes. I wished some day to visit Paraguay, anyway; the distance to Puerto Suarez was evidently greater than to railhead in the Argentine—by striking an average of varying information, with the assistance of such maps as the local librarian gave me time to glance over, I came to the conclusion that it was roughly 800 miles—but on the other hand much of this new route was floor-flat, and I had had my fill of climbing over such labyrinths of mountain ranges as lay to the south. True, in this season the region to the east would be wet and muddy, but with no bitter cold nights in prospect I could throw away much of my load, and at least there would be brilliant sunshine most of the time, which is half of life. Besides, is not the chief joy of travel the privilege of suddenly and unexpectedly smashing fixed plans, to replace them with something hitherto undreamed?
To all these arguments there was added another still more potent. When I began to make inquiries, I learned that the proposed trip was “impossible.” Several of my informants quoted recently received letters to prove it. The last hundred leagues would be entirely under water; the wild Indians of the Monte Grande would see to it that I should not get so far, to say nothing of miles of chest-deep mud-holes, “tigers,” and swarms of even more savage insects, and many days without food or human habitation. That settled it. In Bogotá the tramp down the Andes had been “impossible,” but had long since lost completely that charming quality. I decided to strike eastward in quest of the Paraguay.
“I wouldn’t mind tackling it myself,” sighed Tommy, when I mentioned my decision to the benchers. “I’m badly needed in B. A. But I’m stony broke. Of course if I could find anyone who would take along a steamer-trunk-size man as excess baggage—”
“If the senator doesn’t make up his wandering Bolivian mind soon, I’ll quit embellishing this plaza myself,” put in the cockney, though there was a glint in his eye that suggested, long afterward, that he had meant the hint as a hoax, and considered the trip as impossible as did the rest of Cochabamba.
Were I to have a companion, I should not have chosen Sampson. He was a man with far too much mind of his own to be good company in an uncivilized wilderness. Tommy, diffident, unresourceful, totally lacking in initiative, without self-confidence, wholly innocent of Spanish, to all appearance tractable and harmless, was much to be preferred. Moreover, he was better looking. Though I was thinly furnished with bolivianos and the nearest possible source of supply was Buenos Aires, I concluded that the code of world-wanderers forbade me to leave Tommy to waste away on the “gringo bench,” and we joined forces. He was to carry his proportionate share of such baggage as I could not throw away, including the tin kitchenette and the bottle of 40 percent. alcohol that went with it—if experience proved I could trust him with that—leaving me, thanks also to the offer of a fellow-countryman to carry the developing-tanks to Santa Cruz on his cargo-mule, only a moderate load. I should have bought a donkey, or another chusco, rather than turn ourselves into pack-animals, but for two reasons: first, such a purchase would have relieved me of most of the billetes I had left; secondly, the fate of “Cleopatra” and “Chusquito” caused me to doubt whether any four-footed animal could endure the journey.
It was two months from the day I had walked into Cuzco that one of Cochabamba’s toy trains carried us past adobe towns and mud fences, with dome-shaped huts that gave the scene an oriental touch, and set us down in Punata in time for dinner in the picantería where Tommy had once before washed down a similar plate of stringy roast pork with a glass of chicha. Then we swung on our packs and struck eastward into the unknown.
Beyond Arani next morning came the real parting of the ways. The trail that swung to the right along the base of the hills went on to Sucre and the silver mountain; that by which we zigzagged up the face of a stony range led across the continent. Here the mountains closed in, and the vast, fertile, yet dreary and desolate plain of Cochabamba, that had seemed to stretch out interminably in the brilliant sunshine, disappeared at length below a swell of land and was lost forever behind us.
For a week the going was not unlike that down the Andes, though it grew gradually lower as the endless ridges of the eastern slope calmed down slowly, like the waves of some tempestuous sea. It was only on the road that I began really to make the acquaintance of Tommy. In spite of his Canadian birth he dressed like a Liverpool dock-laborer, with a heavy cap, a kerchief about his neck, and a heavy winter vest—that is, “w’stc’t”—which he could not be induced to shed, however hot the climate, though he readily enough removed his coat. He spoke with a strong “English accent,” and a man following behind with a basket could have picked up enough H’s to have started a supply-store of those scarce articles in Whitechapel itself. He had given Cochabamba ample opportunity to show its gratitude at his departure, but the fourteen bolivianos of his last eleemosynary gleanings turned out to be barely sufficient to keep him in cigarettes on the journey. His share of the load he carried in the half of a hectic tablecloth, of mysterious origin, tied across his chest, as an Indian woman carries her latest offspring. His own possessions consisted wholly and exclusively of a large, sharp-pointed, proudly-scoured trowel; for Tommy was by profession a bricklayer and mason. This general convenience, weapon, sign of caste, and hope of better days to come, he wore through the band of his trousers, as the Bolivian peon carries his long knife, and the services it performed were unlimited. I was never nearer throwing my kodak into a mud-hole than when it failed to catch Tommy solemnly eating soft-boiled eggs with the point of his faithful trowel.
The hospitality of the Bolivian soon proved low, even in comparison with the rest of the Andes, and every meal and lodging cost us a struggle. At Pocona, for example, I ended a 36-mile walk down the nose of a range on which a coach road descended by never-ending S’s to a narrow valley bottom below. Tommy had fallen behind, and I had begun to wonder whether he could endure the pace our scantiness of funds made necessary. As I debouched into the grass-grown plaza, I paused to ask a dim-minded person drowsing before one of the doors where one could find a night’s lodging. He silently projected his lips toward a building before which stood the empty stage-coach. There a group of supercilious, unwashed cholos of varying stages of insobriety informed me, with an air that plainly said “We are purposely deceiving you,” first, that there was no tambo in town, then that there was accommodation only for travelers “á bestia.”