A girl of Santiago de Chiquitos selling a chicken to the cook of “los americanos”
Each cart was drawn by twenty oxen, gaunt, reddish, long-horned animals that seemed Patience done in flesh and bone. Their pace averaged perhaps two miles an hour. Now and then “Hughtie,” like the other drivers, sprang noiselessly into the sand and, racing ahead, lashed each yoke in turn, with insulting words of encouragement, and the entire team crowded into one of the close-set jungle walls until the massive two-wheeled cart was dragged over small trees and head-high bushes at a slight acceleration of pace. A dozen strange cries were used in urging the phlegmatic animals forward. When a halt was ordered, the drivers sprang to the ground and ran alongside them, voicing a long, soothing wail of peculiarly mournful timbre that often lasted a full minute:
“So-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o.”
Once, in the thick black night, the train halted to boil rice and make “tea” of a willow-like jungle leaf, then dragged drowsily on. At daylight we broke out into the pascana of Motococito, where the animals were turned loose to graze for the day, each pair still yoked together by a beam that was almost a log, fastened across the front of their horns with rawhide thongs, while the peons swung their hammocks under an ancient thatched roof on poles. We had made four leagues, or a scant twelve miles, during the night.
I made my way to the home of “Don Cupertino” nearby, for no traveler across Bolivia misses the opportunity of at least one meal with this best-hearted of Bolivians. Outwardly ugly, he was a man of fascinating personality, before whom one could sit for hours listening to well-told anecdotes, frequently emphasized in his excitement by the snapping of his long forefinger, and marveling at the grasp of mind of a man who has never emerged from this inland wilderness. So great was his magnetism that he had imposed on all those about him a degree of human kindness and common decency rare in the region. The education of this corner of the republic, wholly neglected by the government, he had taken upon himself; had turned one of his thatched buildings into a school for the children of whatever cast roundabout, and drafted as school-master a Spanish shoemaker who had drifted in upon him. Motococito is frequently favored with attacks by the wild Indians, and not the least dramatic of “Don Cupertino’s” stories was that of the routing of a band of “los bárbaros” the night before.
The pace of the ox-carts was so slow that I pushed on alone. The sky was incessantly growling off to the southwest, banks of jet-black clouds frequently wiped out the brilliant sun, and many a roaring tropical deluge set me slipping and sliding at every step. Swamps of varying length and depth continued monotonously to intrude, until I became amphibious, with water almost my natural element.
Where the road forked one afternoon I took the fainter, left-hand trail for a side-trip to the town of Santiago de Chiquitos. The rumor was persistent that “americanos” lived there; moreover, it was said to be situated on a ridge unknown to insects. The heights to be surmounted were not piled into the sky ahead, as in the Andes. I knew I was rising only by the changing character of soil and woods, the former increasing in rocky sandstone formations, the latter more open, with diminishing undergrowth. After the first few miles up, the forest opened out now and then on little grassy pampas, with V-shaped gaps in the wooded hills through which one could look back upon tropical Bolivia spreading away sea-flat, humid blue to infinity in every direction, with a vast sense of relief after weeks of never seeing the woods for the trees that had shut me in.
The trail split at last into several branches. The one I took at random led me to a thatched hut, then suddenly broke out upon the grassy plaza of a great, or a tiny town, according to the point of view and the immediate previous experience. A native lolling in a hammock answered my question with a “sí, hay” in the impersonal monotone common to the tropics, languidly nodding toward one of the huts facing the plaza. Jungle-worn and all but shoeless, my reddened knees protruding through the remnant of my breeches, my shirt lacking a sleeve and otherwise mutilated beyond recognition, unkempt and sun-scorched, showing many a patch of my insect-arabesqued hide, my face bristling with four razorless weeks, unquestionably the most disreputable sight in all that disreputable region, a hunger like the Old Man of the Sea riding my shoulders, I strode across to the building indicated and paused in the doorway. Inside, seated about a snow-white table, backed by a butler of African dignity, sat five “gringos” in speckless white, dipping their soup noiselessly and without haste with a calm backward motion.
Santiago was the headquarters and place of recuperation of the employees of the Farquhar Syndicate, engaged in surveying the 1500 square leagues of territory recently conceded the company at a nominal price. There I slept in the first bed since Cochabamba. The chickens that died for us were countless, the inevitable phonograph was in full evidence, there were lamps to read by even at night, and books to read by them. When the sun touched the jungle sea to the west “los americanos” strolled homeward from the office, pausing to play ball until dark, with real gloves, but picking green oranges from the plaza trees as often as they needed a new “ball.” Great bands of deep-green parrakeets flew by high overhead, screaming and gossiping deafeningly, but with no suggestion of stopping in a place so high and cold. From this “mountain” top the sunsets across the humid-blue, flat jungle were indescribable, particularly after a rainy day. The enormous conflagrations blazed for a brief time across all the western world, faded to red, to pink, then into the steel-gray of a tropical evening; the distant hills turned from deep blue to purple, banks of white clouds floating up out of the wilderness below; the sky above faded through all the shades of pink to lilac and to purple, until even the flecks of clouds tinged with the last reflected rays were wiped out entirely. At night, looking south, we could see the fires of the wild Indians of the Gran Chaco.