A shiver of rage seemed to pass over him, while his Castilian pride struggled for expression behind his mask of Indian features. Then he faded away into the night and was heard no more, though I was not so certain of him as not to prop a heavy wooden beam against the door in such a way that an attempt to sneak in upon us during the night would quite likely have been followed in the morning by the intruder’s funeral.
Never-ending spiral descents, so steep we had to set the brakes constantly, making our thighs ache, brought us at last to a hot and stony river-bed across which a luke-warm, knee-deep “river” snaked its way incessantly. We stuffed leggings and Fusslappen into our bundles and walked all the rest of the day barefoot in our unlaced boots, crossing the stream perhaps a hundred times, and envying the hoof-soled natives as often as we paused to pull on our footwear. Tommy found it too much trouble to roll down his trousers after each crossing, and complained of sunburned legs for days to come. But at least the going was level. The stillness and lack of population recalled Jaen in the far north of Peru. For hours we tramped stonily between ever lower cactus-grown hills, only the mournful note of the jungle-dove breaking the silence. The first gnats and giant-jawed insects we were doomed to endure more and more as we advanced to the eastward began to annoy us. As scrub trees thickened, bird life grew more prevalent. Bands of parrakeets screamed by, as always along these dry, tropical river-beds; now and then a parrot or two, forerunners of many to come, passed overhead. The rare huts squatting in scant patches of shade were now of mere open-work poles. To sleep in them was far less inviting than to lie on the ground under a shrub.
“Sandy” leading his train of carts loaded with construction material for the railroad to Cochabamba
The “gringo bench” of Cochabamba,—left to right, “Old Man Simpson;” Tommy Cox; Sampson, the Cockney; Owen, and Scribner
But the Andes did not subside so easily. Next morning the trail shook off the river and climbed wearily to a wind-swept puna, then dropped by a leg-straining bajada into another cañon with a muddy, lukewarm brook, only to pant upward again to another summit. Several times each day we sweated to a hilltop and lay down in a cool breeze we should not often enjoy in the days to come. Range back of blue range spread away into ever-bluer, purple distance. The region recalled the Malay Peninsula—with all its romance rubbed off and even more inhospitable inhabitants tucked away in the undergrowth. Yet surely, if slowly, the Andes were flattening down, and each summit was less lofty than the preceding.
One afternoon passing arrieros told us that three of our paisanos were not far ahead. We increased our pace and strode at five, with thirty miles in our legs, into the miserable mud town of Chilón. In the corral and corredor back through one of the dismal dwellings we found, camped with their four mules, the American prospectors, Scribner, Kimball, and Owen, who had burdened themselves with my developing-tank. We foraged together. These interior villages are less useful to the seeker after supplies than a lone country hut, for in them each native “passes the buck” by sending the inquirer on to someone else. The traveler who has lived for days chiefly on the anticipation of what he will eat in the town he has been assured is “provided with everything,” is fortunate to collect the ingredients of even one real meal, and that only at the expense of wandering from door to door, like a Buddhist priest with his begging-bowl. Chilón was even more anemic and indifferent than usual. It is rated the most fever-stricken region of Bolivia, and the government has striven in vain to drive out the almost universal chucho by planting the eucalyptus and sending doctors to study its cause. The only water to be had was a yellow liquid mud dipped up in the back yard. Kimball prepared to cook in it some of the charqui he had bought at blockade prices, only to bring to light a swarm of maggots. A can of peaches from Chile—some time in the last century—cost two bolivianos; four ounces of tea, a boliviano, a pound of sugar as much, and at that it was a coarse, dirty, stony stuff, so hard an ax was required to break it. One slattern a bit less sullen in aspect than the town in general asked if we “knew how” to eat mote and charol. We assured her we knew how to eat anything we could get our fingers on, and she set before us a single plate of boiled shelled corn and little cubes of fried fat pork, which we ate with the spoons nature had provided us. In the entire town we gleaned two whole eggs. Most of the huts that displayed them answered with that clumsy old Andean lie, “Son ajenos—They belong to some one else.” A woman squatting behind one of the huts admitted she had eggs to sell, but said she did not feel like getting up to sell them. That was the attitude of all Chilón. It may be that the hookworm, as well as the chucho, was prevalent.
When I awoke at dawn, Kimball, in retaliation for the state of the charqui, had already picked a chicken from one of the trees in the corral and managed to stuff it into his alforjas without a squawk. By the time we were off, it began to rain. A half-sand, half-mud road splashed and skated away through semi-tropical scrub woods, caking our feet with glue-like mud, and soaking our garments from both inside and out. In spite of the rain the tropical heat weighed down upon us like water-logged blankets, and nowhere was there water to drink. Rarely among the spiny scrub trees we came upon a miserable hut of poles and sticks, in each of which lounged a dozen or so of the colorless, mongrel natives of the region. Rancho was being cooked in one such hovel, and though the householders showed no joy, or any other species of emotion, at our presence, when the meal was ready, a small wash-basin of rice, charqui, and pepper stew was set on the ground before us, and we were each silently handed a wooden spoon. There was, of course, no bread, but a gourd bowl of mote was added for our competition. This was one contest in which Tommy was easily my superior. The languid, fever-yellow chola would not accept payment for the food, though she did so readily enough for the chica we had drunk, calling up to Tommy far-off memories of the land of “free lunch,” so that several times during the blazing afternoon I heard his sheet-iron voice torturing the wilderness behind me with his own version of a one-time Broadway favorite:
“Stake me back to New York town....”