To reach the head of canoe navigation we made a two weeks’ muleback journey north of Cuzco through the steep-walled granite Canyon of Torontoy, and to the sugar and cacao plantations of the middle Urubamba, or Santa Ana Valley, where we outfitted. At Echarati, thirty miles farther on, where the heat becomes more intense and the first patches of real tropical forest begin, we were obliged to exchange our beasts for ten fresh animals accustomed to forest work and its privations. Three days later we pitched our tent on the river bank at Rosalina, the last outpost of the valley settlements. As we dropped down the steep mountain slope before striking the river flood plain, we passed two half-naked Machiganga Indians perched on the limbs of a tree beside the trail, our first sight of members of a tribe whose territory we had now entered. Later in the day they crossed the river in a dugout, landed on the sand-bar above us, and gathered brush for the nightly fire, around which they lie wrapped in a single shirt woven from the fiber of the wild cotton.
| Fig. 9—The upper entrance to the Pongo de Mainique, where the Urubamba crosses the Front Range of the Andes in a splendid gateway 4,000 feet deep. The river is broken by an almost continuous line of rapids. | Fig. 10—The lower half of a two-thousand-foot cliff, granite Canyon of Torontoy, Urubamba Valley. The wall is developed almost entirely along joint planes. It is here that the Urubamba River crosses the granite axis of the Cordillera Vilcapampa, the easternmost system of the Andes of southern Peru. Compare also Figs. [144] and [145]. |