Between ever higher stations the only signs of man were rare casuchas, huts of refuge built of the same dreary material as the hills, tucked away here and there against the mountainsides. Before the building of the railroad these served travelers as shelters for the night or against the dreaded temporales, hurricanes of the winter-bound Cordillera. At the Puente del Inca, a natural rock bridge under which the Mendoza River has worn its way in a chasm, we caught the first clear glimpse of Aconcagua, its summit covered with eternal snow and ice. Yet it seemed small compared with the tropical giants of Chimborazo and Huascarán, with their immense slopes of perpetual blue glaciers, perhaps because there was no contrast of equatorial flora below, and it was hard to believe the scientists who rank it the highest in the western hemisphere. By this time snow lay in patches about us and stretched in streaks up every crevice and sheltered slope, yet the mammoth glacier peaks and striking Alpine beauty one expected was little in evidence.
As we drew near Las Cuevas, the increasing desire for a mountain tramp, coupled with that of seeing the famous “Christ of the Andes” which the traveler by train comes nowhere near, caused me to sound several of my cosmopolitan fellow-travelers on the suggestion of leaving the train and walking over the summit. But the few of them who did not rate me hopelessly mad felt they could not spare the three days between this and the next train, even if they were not seriously infected with the tales of Chilean bandits. Yet I could not sit supinely in a railway coach and be dragged through a dingy, three-mile tunnel, to come out on the other side without having seen a suggestion of the real summit. Besides, there was another excellent reason to drop off the train at Las Cuevas. There, at the mouth of the international tunnel, my Argentine pass ended, and the fare through and over the summit, a mere fifty miles by rail, was almost twenty dollars. Even second-class, with the privilege of sitting on a wooden bench in a sort of disguised box-car, was but little less than that, and it was noticeable that all but the well-dressed had disappeared from this also, the most expensive bit of railroading in the world being too much of a luxury for the rank and file. These high rates make the Andes a doubly strong barrier against immigration from the more crowded and less capacious Pacific slope, which is to the argentino’s liking, for on the eastern side the Chilean is hated and feared, all the talk of international affection notwithstanding, as something between a cruel and piratical Indian and a Prussianized tradesman.
As we drew into Las Cuevas I gathered together the essentials of kodak and note-book and turned the rest of my baggage over to a young Norwegian on his way to Valparaiso, with a request to leave it at Los Andes, where the transandino joins the government railways of Chile.
The train went on. The detachment of Argentine police that had given it their protection up from Mendoza clambered upon the released engine and went back down the mountain, and I found myself stranded and almost alone in something far less than a hamlet at more than ten thousand feet above sea-level. A quick movement instantly reminded one of the height, an altitude doubly impressive at this latitude and at this season. Even near midday it was not particularly warm in the sunshine and it was decidedly cold in the shadows. Yet I must climb more than three thousand feet higher to get over into Chile. The section-gangs of half-Indians, in their heavy knit caps without visors and thick woolen socks reaching to the knees, were a sullen, cruel looking crew, with marks of frequent dissipation on their bronzed faces, men suggesting the Andean Indian stripped of his humility and law-abiding nature and gifted with the trickery that comes to primitive races from contact with the outside world.
With sunset it grew bitter cold, an icy wind howling and moaning incessantly even through the chinks of the dismal, guestless frontier hotel in which a coarse and soggy supper cost me three pesos. When it was finished, the landlord led the way out into the frigid, blustery mountain night and, wading through a snow-drift, let me into the first room of what is in summer-time a crowded wooden hotel, telling me to lock the outer door, as the whole building was mine. What he would have done had a lone lady also stopped here for the night I do not know—wired to Mendoza, perhaps, for a chaperon. I burrowed under a veritable wagon-load of quilts. Two or three times during the night I awoke and peered out the curtainless window upon the bleak, jagged snow-clads piled into the starlight above, each time wondering whether day was near, but there was no way of knowing, for not a sound was to be heard above the howling of the wind and the shivering of the doors and windows of the unsheltered wood structure.
At last there seemed to be something faintly brighter about the white crest of the range, and I coaxed myself out of bed. The darkness was really fading. I drank the cup of cold tea I had prevailed upon the landlord to leave with me the night before, strapped on my revolver for the first time since leaving Bolivia, and set out as soon as I could see the next step before me. The automobile road that zigzags up the face of the range, accomplishing the journey to the “Cristo” in seven kilometers of comparatively easy gradients in the bright summer days of December and January, was heaped high with snow in this May-day winter season and was plainly impassable. Beyond the last dreary stone refuge hut I took what had been pointed out to me the day before as a short cut and, picking up a faint trail, set out to scramble straight up the barren, rocky slope toward the grim, jagged peaks above.
For hours I clawed my way upward through loose shale and broken rock, all but pulling the mountain down about my ears, slipping back with every step, filling my low shoes of the city with sand, snow, and the molten mixture of both, panting as only he can understand who has struggled up an almost perpendicular slope in the rare atmosphere of high altitudes, my head dizzy and my legs trembling from the exertion. Every now and then I had to cross a patch of hard snow or ice so steep I must clutch with toes, heels, knees, and fingernails to keep from doing a toboggan to perdition hundreds of feet below. Sometimes there was nothing for it but to spring like a chamois from one jagged rock to another, at the imminent peril of losing my balance once for all. In many places the mountain itself was made of such poor material that it came apart at the slightest strain, so that many a time I laid hands upon a rock only to have it come sliding down toward me, threatening to carry my mangled remains with it to the bottom of the valley. I would gladly have gone down again and, after kicking the “short cut” informant, made a new start, but that was next to impossible. It was difficult enough to climb these great toboggan fields of loose shale and ice; it would have been a rare man who could have descended them whole without at least the aid of an Alpine stock. There remained no choice than to keep on picking my way back and forth across the face of the cliff, gradually clawing upward, reviving my spirits now and then by eating a handful of snow, always subconsciously expecting to receive a well-aimed shower of stones or knives from a group of bandits ensconced in one of the many splendid hiding-places about me.
I had lost myself completely and, convinced that I was in for an all-day struggle, could have met with resignation the lesser suffering meted out by bandits, when I suddenly struck what proved to be a gravelly ridge between two peaks and on it an iron caisson marking the international boundary. Far from coming out at the “Christ of the Andes,” I found the famous statue standing in utter solitude in a sandy pocket of the mountains free from snow so far below me that it looked almost miniature. By the time I had climbed down to it, however, the figure itself, erected by the two nations to signalize what they fondly hope will be perpetual peace between them, grew to several times life size and took on an impressiveness much enhanced by its solitary setting.
Not a sign of humanity had I seen or heard when I emptied my shoes and set off down the opposite slope. On the Chilean side the highway was drifted still deeper with snow, in places stone hard, in others so soft that at every step I sank knee-deep into it. The brilliant sun that had cheered me on all the breathless climb here grew so ardent that I was forced to shed my outer clothing. I was present at the birth, nay, the very conception, of the River Juncal, which later joins the Aconcagua and flows into the Pacific, for I had stood even higher than the point where the snow and glaciers begin to melt and trickle down the mountain. It is this foaming blue river which carves out the route down into Chile, leaving highway and railroad the precarious task of following it down the swift and insecure slope.
Near the mouth of the international tunnel the Lago del Inca, beautiful in its setting of haggard mountain faces, reflected the blue of the glaciers and the white of the snow peaks above. From there on all was comparatively easy going, for though the sharp ballasting of the little narrow cogwheel railroad mercilessly gashed and tore my shoes, I had already saved enough in fare to buy several pairs. Now and then I met a work-train straining upward out of the mouth of a sheet-iron snow-shed or one of the many long dark tunnels through which I passed with hand on revolver butt. By the time I had met several section-gangs, however, dismal, piratical looking fellows, with a suggestion of Japanese features, in ragged patched ponchos and wide felt hats, I decided that they were more savage in appearance than in character, and when at last a whole gang of these reputed cut-throats left off work to show me a short cut, I laid away the stories I had heard of them along with the fanciful tales of danger I had gathered in many other parts of the world. They were rotos indeed, “broken” not only in the sartorial Spanish sense in which the word is used in Chile, but in the meaning it has in American slang. Not a suggestion did they have in manner or features of that hopefulness of the Argentine masses, but rather the air of men perpetually ill or saddened by a recent death in the family, who lost no opportunity to drown their sorrows in strong drink.