Upon our return to Comarapa we met a gentleman representing a mercantile establishment in Cochabamba. He was making his semiannual tour of the region, taking orders for merchandise, and collecting for goods sold on the previous trip. Most of his customers paid with silver and nickel coins, so that he had several mule-loads of money in his possession. One night our Indian boy came to us in a state of great excitement. He had been drinking chicha in an Indian liquor-store together with the peons belonging to the merchant, and one of them, while under the influence of drink, boasted that he expected to murder and rob his patrón. A plan had been carefully formed to suddenly attack the man from behind, while riding along a lonely and precipitous part of the trail. The body was then to be thrown over the precipice into the river below, where no one would ever discover it, and the money taken by the highwayman and his accomplice. Naturally, we lost no time in imparting this information to the traveller, and he at once interviewed the would-be assassin. He first of all questioned the man carefully, and when he had succeeded in obtaining a partial confession, he mauled him back and forth across the room until he was tired out. Thereafter we all travelled together, and the plotter, as further punishment, was deprived of his horse and compelled to walk in advance of the party day after day. He had been in the merchant’s employ six years, and the latter did not care to turn him over to the police, but was certain that the punishment inflicted was sufficient to inspire proper respect in the future.
A brisk canter of eighteen miles took us from Comarapa to Pulcina, also known as San Isidro. A tame condor was standing dolefully in the centre of the open square about which the houses were built; it was a friendly bird and liked to be petted and to romp, but was pretty rough at times, and picked off pieces of skin during the course of its rather too affectionate caresses.
As we unloaded the mules the bells in the tiny box-like church began to tinkle, and all the people rushed out of their houses, bearing lighted candles in their hands. They hurried to one of the huts where a youth lay dying, and crowded into the one dingy room, filling it to overflowing, and raising their voices in wails and lamentations; this continued for half an hour. No priest or physician was present; only the noisy mob of half-wild people, to whom death comes as a divertisement from the daily humdrum of half-lived lives, to speed the parting soul to the great beyond.
Pulcina was swarming with dogs. It seemed as if each family owned at least half a dozen. They were a hungry mongrel lot, that roamed at large, snarling at passers-by and rending the night with howls and fighting. It was impossible to keep them out of the houses, and no matter how often they were driven away they always returned to rummage among the luggage and attempt to tear open the provision-sacks. Toward morning, when the dogs had departed, pigs came to take their place. Each of them wore a long, forked stick over the neck, like an inverted Y; another stick was lashed across the bottom so that the pig’s neck was enclosed in a complete wooden triangle. This arrangement would have kept the pigs from crawling through fences, had there been any. Some of the contrivances were so large that they had apparently been made in the hope that the animals would eventually grow to fit them; but as it was, they touched the ground and made the wearers think they were constantly about to step over something, so they walked along raising their front feet like well-trained circus horses.
A ride of thirty miles next day brought us to Pampa Grande. The town was anything but what the name led us to expect. Instead of a vast, grass-covered pampa, there was but a semiarid plain; near by extended the wide, rocky bed of a river that contained not a drop of water. The inhabitants had dug deep down into the gravel and scooped up the small quantity of thin mud that had collected; it is a place about the size of Mizque but wretched-looking and forsaken. Formerly it had a population of sixty thousand and was noted for the brilliancy and gayety of its annual fairs, that drew crowds even from the Argentine. Epidemics of fever, it is said, killed off many of the people, and others fled from the threatening shadow of the pestilence, until to-day the once thriving city has all but ceased to exist.
At Pampa Grande we had a very good illustration of two extreme types of Bolivian character. When we entered the town, our travelling companion met an acquaintance who owned practically the only house of any size. The Bolivian greeted him in the friendliest and most polite manner possible, and insisted that all of us spend the night at his home; he directed us to the house and then excused himself, saying that he would return presently. We found the place without difficulty, but the wife refused to admit us and told us we might wait—in the street—until the return of her husband. The school-teacher, seeing our predicament, ventured to offer us the use of the classroom; he apologized because it was so small and the roof leaked; and the next day he refused to accept a single centavo for the accommodation. The first man had not returned home when we were leaving the following morning; from my experience with the same type of person, I am certain that had he returned and admitted us to his home, he would have made an exorbitant charge that courtesy demanded our paying.
There now remained but one day’s ride to Samaipata, where the trail divides—one branch leading toward Sucre, and the other to Santa Cruz de la Sierra. The farther eastward one goes the greener the country becomes. Between the five-thousand-foot elevation of Pampa Grande and Samaipata, which is six thousand feet above sea-level, there are two peaks to be crossed, one seven thousand three hundred and twenty-five feet, and the other six thousand seven hundred feet high. The top of the former is known as the Alto de Mairana; it is a cold, dreary little plateau where half a dozen wretched Indians live. The town of Mairana is on the lower plain between the two peaks. Patches of low brush replace the cacti and thorny, arid-region type of vegetation; there is a sufficient water-supply; and the whole country seems to present a transition zone of reviving life between the alternately hot and frigid upland deserts and the green slopes stretching toward Santa Cruz.
CHAPTER XXI
A MULE-BACK JOURNEY ON THE SANTA CRUZ TRAIL TO SUCRE
Samaipata is in no particular different from the towns through which we had passed during the previous two weeks. Perhaps provisions were somewhat more abundant, and a small number of mules and sheep grazed in the nearby pastures; but the general distress and dejection were very much the same, and never failed to give one the impression that the settlements were tottering on the brink of obliteration. Everywhere we heard tales of woe about the prevalence of malarial fever during a part of the year, and that this disease was the cause of the desolation and extermination of the people; but as none of the places was lower than five thousand feet above sea-level, and the country is of a semiarid type, I am unable to understand how malaria could work such havoc, and am inclined to attribute the dreadful inroads to some other little-known underlying cause.