A fine-looking man, who had been colonel under Balivian, and left the country when Belzu came into power, had recently returned to Cochabamba. As he took no particular or active part in politics, and was successfully farming in the valley, his friends persuaded him to go and pay his respects to the President before he left. So he walked in with some other persons. As he dined with us after his visit, we offer the account he gave of it to a number of gentlemen, with the spirit and merriment of a good actor on the stage. "I have come, sir," said the colonel, bowing, "to pay my respects to the President of Bolivia." Belzu in a rage. "You are the scoundrel who raised volunteers and fought against me!" Colonel bowing again respectfully: "Yes, sir; and in doing so I did what every officer is expected to do—obeyed the authorities of my country." Belzu in greater rage. "Get out of my sight, sir; if ever I hear of your taking part against me again, you will be shot in the centre of the plaza." The Bolivians all laughed, and like himself seemed to think it a very amusing visit. I noticed closely the effect produced upon the faces of the party as they listened; not one of them looked grave. They seemed to listen as though they expected some joke of the sort, or with admiration of a noble looking fellow for daring to speak out so freely of what had taken place. He left us after dinner, and in the evening we saw him standing in the plaza telling a number of his friends the same story. Many leading men who belonged to the Balivian party kept very close while the President remained here. The election of president is a fighting affair usually.
At fifteen minutes past twelve, at midnight, we had one heavy shock of an earthquake. I heard the door shake and my bed move as though some person had taken hold of one of the posts and given it a violent jerk. The people in the next room hurried out, and the whole population was up in a moment. The scraping of matches and grasping of candles was terrible. The dogs howled in the most mournful way all over the city; horses rushed round the corral as though frightened half to death. The atmosphere was filled with a strong odor of sulphur. The night was clear and starlight, the thermometer standing at 72°. The population trembled in silence expecting the great Andes would again shake; but the night continued calm.
Throughout our route we have observed a great work of displacement going on. The earth seems to be fashioning itself into shape. The mountains are being carried off to the lowlands by the floods, and the dry lands seem to be growing at the expense of the sea.
In the morning we mounted our horses, and a number of persons prepared to accompany the President entered the street. We were told he had long since gone with the whole army at 4 o'clock.
Many of the Indian girls and boys have followed the army. Families find great difficulty in keeping servants from going off. It is amusing to see troops of women following after the cavalry, sometimes three on one horse, or two on a donkey, with kitchen utensils and bed-room furniture, serving in the place of riding gear, but without any idea that they are going to the frozen peaks of Potosi.
There are a few foreigners in Cochabamba—English, French, German, and Scotch; some of them engaged in mining. All expect to make fortunes very soon; but say they have been thirty and forty years in the country, and are poorer now than when they came. A hard-working, cheerful, honest Scotchman, who had been a number of years in a woollen factory in New York, told me the most unfortunate thing he ever did was to leave the United States.
The wages paid the Indians for mining silver varies according to the value and hardness of the veins—from twelve to sixty dollars the yard. The mines containing water are cleared by the means of llama skin buckets, passed from hand to hand. This required a number of Indians, working day and night. If a man could not make his fortune with a corn-shelling machine in this country, he would very much astonish the natives by the use of such a convenient implement.
The merchants of Cochabamba send off every week a supply of goods to the valley of Clisa, a short distance to the southeast of this city. The Indians from the surrounding country come in on Sunday to buy at what is called the weekly fair. Six hundred dollars worth of chicha have been sold in a day at these fairs. A foreigner once had this liquor prepared by pounding the corn between stones, and offered it to some of the country ladies to drink. An old chicha toper, after tasting it, said, "for her part, she much preferred chicha made of chewed corn, which gave it a different flavor from that made by the stones, and she was fond of good chicha."
The merchants make their remittances to the sea-coast by putting twenty-two hundred dollars in silver in bags well covered with leather, forty-four hundred dollars being a mule load. The arriero signs the bill of lading and arms himself for the robbers. Sixteen dollars per mule load is paid for delivering it at Tacna, in Peru, near Arica. The trip is made in fourteen days. It is strange that these trains are seldom robbed among the uninhabited regions of the Andes and Cordilleras, where the arriero sleeps upon the mountain-top or in the deep gorge by himself.
The trip from Cochabamba to Cobija is made in forty days. The distance is two hundred and nineteen leagues.