Beyond La Guardia the country was more open, the forest at times giving place to half-meadows, with single trees and grazing cattle, across which drifted a breeze that tempered the midsummer heat. The way lay so straight across the floor-flat country that the line of telegraph poles beside it looked like a single pole standing forth against the horizon. There were many huts now, roofed and sometimes entirely made of palm branches. Warm, muddy water was our only drink, for we had descended so low that the inhabitants were too lazy even to make chicha. Once we got a watermelon, which are small here and far from being on ice. In passing another hut I was startled by a cry of “Se vende pan,” and went in to pay two females, whose faces were a patchwork of gnat-bites, an astounding price for some tiny, soggy biscuits. Ponderous ox-carts with solid wooden wheels crawled by noiselessly in the deep sand behind three and even four pairs of drowsy oxen. Everything, even the breeze, moved now with the leisureliness of the tropics. The jungle ahead was so flat and green, so banked by clouds, that one had the feeling that the sea was soon to open out beyond. We loafed languidly on, certain that our goal was near, yet though there were other evidences that we were approaching a city, there were no more visible signs of it than in approaching Port Saïd from the sea.
At last, so gradually that we were some time in distinguishing it from a tree-top, a dull-colored church-tower grew up in line with the vista of telegraph-poles. We drifted inertly into a sand-paved, silent, tropical city street, past rows of languid stares, and on the last afternoon of the year, with Cochabamba 335 miles behind us, sat down dripping, a week’s lack of shave veiling our sun-toasted features, in the central plaza of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.
Tommy had heard so many stories of the generosity of the cruceños that he was astonished to have reached the center of town without being invited from some doorway to come in and make his home there as long as he chose. This was doubly annoying, since rumor had it that white men were so in favor with the gentler sex that a sandy-haired one as handsome as Tommy fancied himself to be was in danger of being damaged by the feminine rush his appearance was sure to precipitate. After a time he rose to carry his perplexity back to where we had seen the British vice-consular shield covering the front of a house. When I met him again he had told his sad tale so effectively that he had been “put up” at both hotels by as many compatriots and was eating regularly at each, though taking care not to let his right hand know what the left was carrying to his mouth. After dark, in a humid night made barely visible by a few candle street-lamps, I splashed out to the hut of Manuel Abasto in the outskirts, to sleep under the trees in the canvas-roofed hammock of one of the American prospectors, the legitimate occupant being engaged in the rôle of Don Juan in the city. The hut was crowded with peons already half drunk, languidly fingering several guitars and now and then raising mournful voices in some amorous ballad. At midnight church-bells rang, and one distant whistle blew weakly to greet the incoming year, but the music of the tropical rain on the canvas over my head soon lulled me to sleep again.
CHAPTER XX
LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS
Santa Cruz de la Sierra, capital of all the vast department of eastern Bolivia, owes its fame largely to its isolation. Like those eminent men of many secluded corners of South America, it is important only because of the exceeding unimportance of its neighbors. The only tropical city of Bolivia, it stands some 1500 feet above sea-level on the 18th meridian, very near the geographical center of the republic, so far from the outside world that mail deposited on January 7th reached New York on March 11th. Of its 19,000 inhabitants, 11,000 are female. The emporium and distributing point of all this region and of the rubber districts of the Beni, its commerce is chiefly in the hands of Germans, though the two houses that all but monopolize the trade pose as Belgian, with headquarters in Antwerp. There are few Bolivian, and only three cruceño houses of importance, and these for the most part buy of German wholesalers in Cochabamba. Three or four native families have as much as $150,000, a fortune by cruceño standards, won from rubber, or from cattle ranches roundabout the city. Yet there is much primitive barter, even in the town,—an ox for a load of fire-wood, and the like, with no money concerned in the transaction. Santa Cruz is the place of birth of those famous Suarez brothers who are kings of the rubber districts of the Amazon.
It is a city of silence. Spreading over a dead-flat, half-sandy, jungled plain, its right-angled streets are deep in reddish sand in which not only its shod feet—by no means in the majority, though the upper class is almost foppish in dress—but even the solid wooden wheels of its clumsy ox-carts make not a sound. There is no modern industry to lend its strident voice, though the town boasts three “steam establishments” for the making of ice, the grinding of maize, and the sawing of lumber, and every street fades away at either end into the whispering jungle. Narrow sidewalks of porous red bricks, roofed by the wide overhanging eaves of the houses, often upheld by pillars or poles, line most of the streets. But these are by no means continuous, and being commonly high above the street level and often taken up entirely, especially of an evening, by the families, who consider this their veranda rather than the pedestrian’s right of way, the latter generally finds it easier to plod through the sand of the street itself. In the rainy season, which begins with the new year and lasts through April, there are many muddy pools and ponds in the outskirts, along the edges of some of which the streets crawl by on long heaps of the skulls of cattle, bleached snow-white by the sun, and the larger of which, almost lakes, somehow carried the mind back to Kandy, Ceylon. Frequently the streets in the center of town are flooded for an hour or more, until the thirsty sand has drunk up a tropical deluge. For these eventualities Santa Cruz has a system of its own. At each corner four rows of atoquines, weather-blackened piles of a kind of mahogany, protrude a foot or more above the sand; and along these stepping-stones the minority passes dry-shod from one roofed sidewalk to another.
The houses, usually of a single story, their tile roofs bleached yellowish by the tropical sun, present a large room, wide open by day on the porch sidewalk, and rather bare in appearance in spite of a forest of frail cane chairs, black in color. From the once whitewashed adobe walls protrude several pairs of hooks on each of which hangs, except during the hour of siesta, a rolled-up hammock. On or near the floor sits a little hand sewing-machine, the exotic whirr of which sounds now and then; and just inside the door are usually a few shallow tubs, like small dugout canoes, holding tropical fruits, soggy bread cakes, and sugar in all its stages; for many, even of the “best families,” patch out their livelihood with a bit of amateur shopkeeping. Through this main room, parlor, and chief pride of each family, past which one cannot walk without glancing in upon the household, a back door gives a glimpse of the patio, a pretty garden hidden away after the Moorish fashion—strange that the Arab influence should have reached even this far-distant heart of South America—airy and bright and large, for space is not lacking in Santa Cruz, often almost an orchard and blooming with flowers of many colors. On this open several smaller rooms which, being out of sight of the public, are often far less attractive than the parlor.
A street of Santa Cruz de la Sierra after a shower, showing the atoquines, or projecting spiles by which pedestrians cross from one roofed sidewalk to another
