In the dry season it is a fair and delightful country—that on the border of the mountains. In the wet season the traveler is either actually marooned or he must slosh through rivers of mud and water that deluge the trails and break the hearts of his beasts ([Fig. 14]). Here and there a large shallow-rooted tree has come crashing down across the trail and with its four feet of circumference and ten feet of plank buttress it is as difficult to move as a house. A new trail must be cut around it. A little farther on, where the valley wall steepens and one may look down a thousand feet of slope to the bed of a mountain torrent, a patch of trail has become soaked with water and the mules pick their way, trembling, across it. Two days from Yavero one of our mules went over the trail, and though she was finally recovered she died of her injuries the following night. After a month’s work in the forest a mule must run free for two months to recover. The packers count on losing one beast out of five for every journey into the forest. It is not solely a matter of work, though this is terrific; it is quite largely a matter of forage. In spite of its profusion of life ([Fig. 13]) and its really vast wealth of species, the tropical forest is all but barren of grass. Sugar cane is a fair substitute, but there are only a few cultivated spots. The more tender leaves of the trees, the young shoots of cane in the carrizo swamps, and the grass-like foliage of the low bamboo are the chief substitutes for pasture. But they lead to various disorders, besides requiring considerable labor on the part of the dejected peons who must gather them after a day’s heavy work with the packs.
Overcoming these enormous difficulties is expensive and some one must pay the bill. As is usual in a pioneer region, the native laborer pays a large part of it in unrequited toil; the rest is paid by the rubber consumer. For this is one of the cases where a direct road connects the civilized consumer and the barbarous producer. What a story it could tell if a ball of smoke-cured rubber on a New York dock were endowed with speech—of the wet jungle path, of enslaved peons, of vile abuses by immoral agents, of all the toil and sickness that make the tropical lowland a reproach!