“Now you see vat you do!” cried the German tearfully.
“What who did?” I demanded. “Is it any fault of mine that the sex pursues me through thick and thin?”
But he was already studying out which knot of the diamond-hitch to tackle first in such an emergency.
In a way it would have been easier to carry my own bundle than to work for and humor the German so incessantly. A species of tropical madness, familiar to many travelers in the wilds, frequently came upon him. The simple question of whether or not he wished a block to sit on would bring from him a roar of rage, as if he who did not know his wishes in the matter were the king of fools. It was all but impossible to keep up my notes, to say nothing of lifting myself above the surroundings by an occasional page of Nietzsche. If I dared draw out pen or book during a pause in the shade at noonday, steeling myself against the swarming insects, my companion took to looking askance at such occupation. Like most illiterates—meaning by that those who can, but have not the habit of reading—he subconsciously resented such action. Perhaps it isn’t done in the best circles of the German army. He had not heard of Nietzsche, but admitted during a cheerful mood that it sounded like a German name. In most cases he quickly found some useless topic of conversation, or some chore for me to do, going so far as to fly into an open rage if I ignored these hints. His moods were varied. From the deepest gloom, in which he would not answer yes or no to the simplest question, he would grow suddenly bland and garrulous, almost maudlin in his good humor, from no apparent cause, and a bare half-hour after some fit of rage he would be bellowing songs of the Fatherland in a voice to call down upon us all the savages of the region, had the peril not been neutralized by a lack of tunefulness tending to produce the opposite effect. The German army ration, he took frequent occasion to specify, consists of exactly so many grams of this, that, and the other, and Konanz considered any man who wanted his supplies in any other proportions a pervert, a weakling, and a rascal.
Once we passed a train of ox-cars laden with boxes of merchandise marked “Via Montevideo en transito para Bolivia,” suggesting that the Atlantic was becoming more accessible than the Pacific. Most of them also bore the information “Ausfuhrgut,” denoting their origin; and all were so old and weather-worn that they seemed to have been months on the road. Indeed, goods for Santa Cruz have been known more than once to be two years en route. The government seeks to make this trans-Bolivian route more popular by reducing by 15 percent the duty on imports by way of Puerto Suarez.
Beyond a swamp which we managed only partly to dodge we met a disorganized band of soldiers, each attended by his chola, who might be, but probably in most cases was not, his wife, crawling painfully toward Santa Cruz with strange assortments of odds and ends on their backs, including the indispensable hammock each and several babies. According to them, the next settlement was so far distant that we gave up hope of reaching it that day and camped in the road, where there was barely room to pile our baggage beside a mud-hole for cooking and drinking. Every hint of breeze was cut off by the forest walls high above us, and the night that followed our stew of rice, beans, and charqui was one to be quickly forgotten—if possible. Stripped naked, the sweat ran off me in streams, soaking through the hammock. Into this the iron-jawed insects swarmed in such masses, in spite of the net, that I was forced to abandon it to them entirely. For a time I tramped up and down the road in the moonlight. But every few steps I stumbled half asleep. I built a fire about my hammock and covered it with sand, but the smudge had little effect on the insects and made the heat and sweat all the more unendurable, so that I stumbled back and forth in the roadway most of the night.
We tramped four red-hot hours to Piococa, all but falling on our faces from sleepiness, and dodging the worst sloughs only by many a struggle with the jungle. Here, in a small open green backed by rock-faced, wooded hillocks, was the estancia-house of a cruceño to whom I had a letter. Only an Indian girl, stupid and filthy beyond words, was there, however, and we got a guinea-hen and some boiled yuca at last only by infinite coaxing. At least there was plenty of rich grass for the mule, and a clear running stream in which I bathed and laundered and lay emerged most of the afternoon in protection from the gnats. In our hammocks under the trees the insects were almost as bad as ever. The only possible relief was to walk swiftly up and down. Had I been alone, I should have pushed on without a stop until I reached a place of rest, but the German was so worn out that not even the “pinching” of the mosquitos could stir him up. There was at least a certain curiosity to know how long the human frame could hold up under these unbroken hardships.
At dusk three youths rode up on saddled steers, the chief means of transportation in these parts. The saddles were not unlike our “Texas,” and the single leather rein passed from the ring in the nose over the forehead of the animal, between the horns. Steers cross deep mud more easily than horses or mules, but are much slower and more easily exhausted, and the width of their flanks makes long riding painful to the hips. The motion is mildly like that of the camel. The natives sat for hours all but motionless, smoking cigarros de chala, cigarettes rolled in corn-husks. Between a few gnat-bitten snatches of sleep I tramped the yard, pausing now and then to squat beside the fire that smudged all night before the native hut, forming a veritable curtain of smoke through which the insects hesitated to pass. The family inside swung in their hammocks all the night through. What secret means the people of this region have to keep their hammocks constantly moving, while to all appearances they are sound asleep, I was never able to learn. More than once I watched them for a long half-hour swinging back and forth with no evident means of propulsion, lying all but on their backs, one bare leg hanging over the edge of the hamaca, as if these children of the wilderness had long since solved the problem of perpetual motion that civilization has so far sought in vain.
In the morning the tendency to fall down asleep in full march remained. The road was wider and the forest more open, so that the sun beat upon us like an open puddling-furnace. We paused to drink from any cart-rut or swamp, and to wash from our eyes the blinding sweat that quickly filled them again. A huge hairy spider now and then ran by underfoot. The natives say they are deadly. We did not halt to investigate. Beyond the breathless corner of the woods where we cooked the last of our beans we met a welcome sight,—a woman with a bundle on her head; not merely the first traveler since passing the soldiers, but a sign that we were approaching a town. An hour further on we waded a small river, climbed a gentle slope heavy in sand, and found ourselves in a silent hamlet of sandy streets and an enormous grass-grown plaza backed by a stone church, as out of proportion to its surroundings as the Escorial in its village. We had reached at last the famous old town of Saint Joseph.
The heels of my boots had worn away until they protruded from my ankles like spurs, and I had been forced to chop them off entirely with the machete. My hat had been trampled by the German and the mule during the thunder-storm until it was no longer recognizable. Torn, smeared, and bewhiskered with twelve days of jungle travel and mud-hole wading, tattooed from hair to soles with insect arabesques, bleached and faded by sweat and the raging sun, we were no fit sights for a ladies’ club as we hobbled out upon the broad plaza. One of the huts facing it was the home and office of the subprefect. He, however, was “out on his farm” a few miles away, recuperating no doubt from the rush and roar of the city. “But all strangers lodge in the monastery.” We hobbled in at a door under the four-story stone tower of that incongruous church, and found ourselves in a former residence of the Jesuits. The traveler asks permission of no one, but goes and takes possession; for the owners are far away and long absent. Now the ancient monastery is in the last stages of dilapidation. Under the arched corredores, backed by noisome ruined pens that were once the vaulted cells of monks, were a score of hammock-posts. A half-dozen soldiers and their females occupied some of these. We swung our hammocks in the long space left and picketed the mule out on the grassy plaza. Here and there on the stone walls were crude, life-size drawings of Bolivian boy-soldiers shooting Indians clad in feather clouts and armed with long bows and arrows. Three arched cells up against the church across the patio had been roughly walled up to serve as the provincial jail, with an earth floor and a log of wood as bed or bench, its one window protected by hoop-iron bars a girl could have pushed off with one hand. In the back arches lived the cura, a little, dried-up, hare-minded cholo, with the half-dozen of his children not yet old enough to shift for themselves, and their two mothers. We learned later that he had twenty-two recognized children, some of them men of importance in the department. Though he went about pleading poverty and begging from the Indians, the padre owned nearly half the carts that ply the road through San José, and no small amount of the surrounding acreage.