Page images
PDF
EPUB
[graphic][merged small]

are largely of artificial propagation. It is true that she has a larger percentage of Spanish blood than any other Bolivian city; but this is rarely found in its unadulterated form. A mongrel mixture is all but general, thanks largely to a lack of social tautness and to the overstock of one sex, due chiefly to the young men going down into the rubber districts of the Beni and not so frequently returning, that makes

the percentage of Cruceños born out of legal wedlock high even for Bolivia.

HERE Tommy fell victim to that loathsome ailment popularly known as "cold feet." An attack of fever and the nebulous promise of occupation for his trusty trowel may have been among the causes, but the inoculation was chiefly due to the replies to our inquiries about the road ahead. These were not exactly reassuring. There is one of the sand streets of Santa Cruz de la Sierra that does not run out to nothing in the surrounding jungle, but dwindles to what is locally known as the "camino de Chiquitos," and pushes on to the eastward more than four hundred miles to the Paraguay, forming an important, but little known, exit from Bolivia

since she has been cut off from the Pacific. But "road" in this case does not mean anything like a traveled route. For the first week travelers must carry all supplies; stories were legion of the unending pest of insects, of the danger of snakes and "tigers"; the route was said to abound in chest-deep mud-holes and mile-long swamps, and in this rainy season the last twenty leagues or more nearest the Paraguay was commonly completely inundated. Moreover, beyond the Rio Guapay, a day east of the capital, stretched the famous. Monte Grande, the densest of unbroken forest, where roam a tribe of wild Indians that, seated, shoot with their feet a sixfoot arrow of chonta, or black-palm, from a bow of the same material, with such force that it passes entirely through the body of the victim. quite unpleasant. mation be treated as an idle rumor, for we had only to drop in on any one of several men in town, some gringos among them, to see relics of recent attacks in which even horsemen traveling in parties had been lost.

This was said to be Nor could this infor

The first indispensable requirement of preparation was to get a cloth hammock,

with a mosquitero of a material finer than cheese-cloth as a protection against tiny, but powerful, gnats; for the only sleepingplace on most of the journey was that which the traveler carried with him. In addition I must hacer tapeque, as they say in Santa Cruz, or "pack" a bag of rice of ten pounds and a few sheets of charqui, or sun-dried beef. Add to this the indispensable clothing, sealed tins of salt and matches, kitchenette, photographic and writing materials, and various unavoidable odds and ends and it will be readily understood why I staggered heavily across town. on January 8 to begin the longest single leg of my South American journey.

But it was my good fortune to find another traveler bound in the same direction. Heinrich Konanz, born in Karlsruhe, had served the last of his three years of military service in the expedition against the Chinese Boxers, and had since worked as a carpenter in China and California until he had concluded to seek a permanent home as a colonist in some region where population was less numerous. He was largely innocent of geography, spoke habitually a painful cross between his once native tongue and what he fancied was English, with a peppering of Chinese, and knew virtually no Spanish. The mule that had carried him from Cochabamba he found it necessary to turn into a pack-animal for the tools, provisions, and materials purchased in Santa Cruz, and was to continue on foot. He had placidly been making plans to push on alone until suddenly rumors reached him in his own tongue of the Monte Grande and its playful Indians. His first inclination was to return to Cochabamba; but his hotel room was heaped with the supplies sold to him by his wily local fellow-countrymen, who would not take them back at a fourth of the original cost. In the end he made a virtue of necessity, added a new rifle to the revolver and shot-gun he already carried, and found room on his mule for the heavier of my baggage in return for the reassurance of my company.

It was a brilliant day when I shouldered the German's rifle, my own revolver

well oiled and freshly loaded, and led the way out of town. Mud-holes along which we picked our way on rows of whitened cattle skulls soon gave place to a great pampa, with tall, coarse grass and scattered trees, across which lay a silent sand road so utterly dry that we had already suffered considerably from thirst before we reached at noon the first "well," a slimy mud-hole in a clump of trees. In the afternoon the forest closed in tightly about us except for the deep-sand cartroad, with frequent long stretches of watery mud. Twice during the day we met a train of heavy, crude ox-carts roofed with sun-dried hides that recalled the "prairie schooners" of pioneer days, eight oxen to each, creaking slowly westward. Soon all the forest about us was screaming like a dozen suffragette meetings in full session, and fancying the upcame from edible wild fowls, I crept in upon them rifle in hand. To my surprise, I found a band of small monkeys in a huge tree-top shrieking together in at sort of incessant Greek chorus. A monkey steak would have been highly acceptable, and I fired my revolver into the branches. Instantly there fell, not the ingredients of a sumptuous evening repast, but the most absolute silence. The little creatures did not flee, however, but each sprang a limb or two higher, and watched my slightest movement with brilliant, roving eyes.

roar

We pushed on through incessant forest, punctuated with mud-holes. On the afternoon of the second day a yellow youth. overtook us and asked if we needed a pelota. We did, and he stopped at a hut some distance on, to reappear carrying on his head an entire ox-hide, sun-dried and still covered with the long red hair of its original owner, folded like a sheet of writing-paper. For a mile or more he plodded noiselessly behind, until suddenly the notorious Rio Grande, or Guapay, opened out before us. It was a yellow-brown stream as wide as the lower Connecticut, flowing swiftly northward to join the Mamoré and Madeira on their way to the Amazon. We splashed half a mile or more up along its edge to offset the dis

[graphic]

tance

we should be carried

down-stream before striking a landing opposite. Here two brown men, completely naked but for a palm-leaf hat securely tied on, relieved the youth of his burden and set to turning it into a boat. These pelotas de cuero (leather balls) are the ferries of all this region, being transportable, whereas a wooden boat, left behind, would be stolen by wild Indians. Around the edge of the hide were a dozen or more loop-holes through which was threaded a cord that drew it up in the form of a rude tub. To obtain firmness, the hat-wearers laid a corduroy of sticks in the bottom, then piled our entire baggage into it, set the German atop, and dragged it down the sloping mud-bank into the water, while the youth coaxed the mule into the stream and swam with it to the opposite shore. This would have seemed load enough and to spare, but when I had fulfilled my duties as official photographer of the expedition, I, too, was lifted in, as they no doubt would have piled in Tommy also, had he been with us, and away we went, easily five hundred pounds, speeding down the hurrying yellow stream, the naked pair first wading, then swimming beside us, clutching the pelota, the gunwales of which were in places by no means an inch above the water. Had the none-too-stout cord broken, the hide must instantly have flattened out and left us for an all-toobrief moment, like passengers on the magic carpet of Oriental fairy-tales.

Jim and "Hughtie" Powell, who immigrated from Texas as children and live as Bolivian peons

Before and high above us, where the craft was coaxed ashore, stretching like an endless green, giant wall farther than the eye could follow in either direction, stood an impenetrable forest, the famous Monte Grande, or "Great Wilderness," of Bolivia. Here was the chief haunt of the wild Indians of the penetrating arrow, a

region otherwise absolutely uninhabited, through which the endless "road" squeezes its way for hundreds of miles without a break and almost without a shift of direction. We swung our hammocks under saplings in the extreme edge of it, for the journey through the Monte Grande is fixed in its itinerary by the sites of the four "garrisons" maintained by the Bolivian Government some five leagues. apart as a theoretical protection against the nomadic Indians.

In the morning we deployed in campaign formation. With our revolvers loose in their holsters, the German marched ahead with his shot-gun, closely followed by his affectionate "mool," while I brought up the rear with the new Winchester. This was the place of honor and most promise, for the Indians do not face their intended victims, but spring from

behind a tree to shoot the traveler in the back, and jump back out of sight again. But this was not our lucky day, for though I glanced not infrequently over my shoulder, I did not once catch even a kodak-shot at one of their feather clouts.

But if the savages failed us, there were other things to make up for them. Every instant of the day we were fighting swarms of gnats and mosquitos, and though the sun rarely got a peep in upon us, the heavy, damp heat that pervaded even the shade of the unbroken forest walls above kept us half blinded with the salt sweat in our eyes. The region being utterly flat, the waters of the rainy season gather in the faintest depression, which passing ox-carts churn into a slough beyond description, while the barest suggestion of a stream inundates to a swamp the entire surrounding region. All day long mud-holes, often waist-deep for long distances, completely occupied the narrow road. In the first miles we sought, in our inexperience, to escape these by attempting to tear our way around them through the forest, but so dense was this that passage was commonly impossible and forced us to turn back and take to wading. Now and then we slipped into unseen cart-ruts and plunged to the shoulders into noisome slime.

At sunset we waded through a barred gate into the pascana, or tiny natural clearing, of Cañada Larga, the first of the fortines with which Bolivia garrisons the Monte Grande. Five miserable thatched huts, some without walls and the others of open-work poles set upright, were occupied by half a dozen boyish conscripts in faded rags of khaki and one slattern female. Our government order called upon the commander to "give us all facilities, wood and water, and sell us supplies provided they had any." But the Government had so long forgotten their existence that the soldiers themselves had barely a scant ration of rice, which each cooked in his own tin pot lest a fellow rob him of a grain or two. They were too apathetic to dig a well or plant anything, however heavily time hung on their hands,

preferring to starve on half-rations and to choke in the dry season and to drink liquid mud in the wet.

The gnats quickly got wind of the arrival of fresh supplies and attacked us in veritable platoons. Known to the natives as jejenes, they are almost invisible, yet can bite through a woolen garment so effectively that the mosquito's puny efforts pass entirely unnoticed in comparison, and leave a tiny red spot that itches cruelly for days to come. In no circumstances did they give a moment of respite. We could not leave off fighting them long enough to lift a kettle off the fire without a hundred instantly stinging us in as many spots, and to lie in a hammock was next to impossible, as they soon found their way through the mosquitero even when they did not bite up through the bottom of our swinging beds. Born though they were in this. region, or at least accustomed to the pests for a year or more of military service, the soldiers one and all ate their food marching constantly up and down the "paradeground," striking viciously at themselves. with the free hand.

Day after day we slushed on through endless forest and mud swamps, halting every night at one of the "fortresses," each of which grew worse, if possible, as the distance from the capital increased. Frequently after walking all day we paced back and forth half the night in vain attempts to escape the torturing jejenes, and continued in the morning with an all but unconquerable tendency to fall on our faces from sleepiness while in full march. On the afternoon of the fifth day beyond the Guapay, we sighted a little wooded hill bulging slightly above the forest ahead, and at nightfall took possession of a galpón, or roof on legs, in the hamlet of El Cerro, the first suggestion of civil habitation. But the long-anticipated feast was scanty. El Cerro had little to sell and less desire to sell it. Konanz was so worn out that he threw himself down supperless without even swinging his hammock, and only after a long hut-to-hut canvass did I coax a native to sell a pound of freshly killed beef and an empanisado, or huge

[graphic]

block of crude, dark-brown unpurified sugar. It was the second day thereafter that I got Konanz started eastward again.

From El Cerro the landscape changed, leaving the dense Monte Grande, with its glue-like loam, behind, and showing the first palm-trees and frondous vegetation characteristic of Chiquitos. The forest thinned somewhat, and birds large and small, from herons to parrakeets, enlivened the often-flooded wilderness. The road was wider, so that the sun beat in upon us incessantly, and though we paused to drink from any cart-rut or stagnant swamp pool and to wash the sweat out of our eyes, these quickly filled again. Twice we halted at collections of huts for the night, but commonly reached only some gnat-inhabited pascana, these small natural clearings being so important on the trans-Bolivia route that each has a name solemnly engraved on the map of the republic. The natives built all-night smudge-fires before the small open doors of their mud huts, forming a curtain of smoke through which few gnats passed. All the night through they swung incessantly in their hammocks. What secret process the people of this region have to keep swinging while to all appearances they are sleeping soundly I was never able to learn; but more than once I watched a full hour their constant movement, lying all but on their backs, one bare leg hanging over the leg of the hamaca, as if these children of the wilderness had long since solved the problem of perpetual motion that civilization has so far sought in vain. The early Spaniards named the region Chiquitos because the low doors as a protection against insects and other pests forced the inhabitants to make themselves chiquitos (tiny) to crawl through them.

ONE day late in January we left the main road and struck off by a trail through a half-open country to visit the ranch of Henry Halsey, an American dwelling in complete isolation in almost the exact geographic center of South America. The day was brilliant, and I let the German and his mule draw on

Manuel Abasto, a native of Santa Cruz de la Sierra

ahead until they were lost to view. That morning we had hung on the pack a whole bunch of the fat, silky little bananas of the region. Gradually hunger intruded itself through my dreams, and almost at the instant it grew tangible a fresh banana appeared in the, trail before me. For an hour or two I came upon one of them as often as hunger returned, as nicely proportioned to my requirements as manna to the Israelites. But hour after hour passed without a sight of Konanz. He was not accustomed to lead the way for so prolonged a period, and I pushed on more rapidly, not entirely free from visions of savages falling upon him. The sun stood high overhead, casting down its rays like the contents of an overturned melting-pot, when I at last sighted him some distance ahead. He lay, running with sweat and panting, in the scant shade of a bush, to another of which the mule stood tied, eying him suspiciously. It was

« PreviousContinue »