Читать книгу White Waters and Black - Gordon MacCreagh - Страница 10

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That camp was an epoch. It was an indication that we had descended at last to the threshold of the land of promise. The citrous grove was proof that we have come down to the five-thousand- or six-thousand-foot levels. In it I slept decently warm for the first time since leaving the Chilean coast at Arica. It was here that, by the advice of the kindly hermit, we first used our patent mosquito-nets over our camp cots. There are no mosquitoes at the six-thousand level in the Yungas; but morning disclosed long streaks of coagulated blood down the sides of quite half of the pack-mules, where the vampire bats had feasted on them. Vampires in their turn were an indication—since they can't find expedition mules all the time to live on—that we might begin to keep a lookout for game as we proceeded from there on.

It was there that the Botanist made his formal demand to the Director that we stay at least a week; for the country was new to science, untouched, and the varieties of plants to be collected and tabulated were legion. But the Director sternly set his face toward Espía. At Espía we should have to halt perforce while we made whatever arrangements we might for our further progress by water. At Espía, then, all—botanists, ichthyologists, entomologists, statisticians, ethnologists, et hoc genus omne—could roam the teeming country-side to their hearts' desire and collect all the specimens known—or, better still, unknown—to science.

It was in that epochal camp that the expedition was served with its first bulletin. I find it difficult to write of the official bulletins without disrespectful comment. Consider in all seriousness what happened. Daylight and a reasonable physical comfort being available for the first time since we set out over the mountain trails, the Director seized the Scribe, his private secretary, purposefully by the arm and withdrew with him into their tent, with a brief injunction to me to set up camp without disturbing them.

It had been my pride and boast that I was perfectly capable of setting up camp without asking assistance from anybody; and it had been, further, a secret thought of my own that the Director usually fussed around and disturbed me frightfully. I mention it en passant, as an instance of the great gulf that lies between a mere lay mind that has nothing to trouble it and a pedagogic mind heavily weighted with the burden of direction.

Incidentally it occurs to me that it is time to make some mention of how a great expedition camps along the "unknown trails." Our routine was simple and invariable. First of all, as a matter of courtesy and deference to greatness, the Director's tent was set up. A simple job; for the tent was small and easy to locate. In it lived the Director, with a pack-trunk full of "documents" and his confidential secretary with two pack-trunks full of printed letterhead stationery and a Remington typewriter. Then came the real labor of the day, an enormous twelve-by-fourteen circus marquee thing which was a permanent cause of dissension. Imprimis, because the requisite floor space was so great that in few camping-places in those up-ended mountains was there room for it. More than once, an otherwise convenient spot would have to be discarded and another three or four miles be negotiated in the dusk. Secundim, because that flapping bulk in the mountain breezes required the combined efforts, muscular and vocal, of all the arrieros to heave and pulley-haul it into lopsided uprightness and drive home its twenty-four pegs before the wind devils should make a Roman holiday with it. Finally, because I, being a mere frail mortal, was unable to resist the insidious devil whose name is I-told-you-so. When we had fought the malignant thing till tempers had gone where the tempers of sailormen go when rounding Cape Horn, I would stand off and inform the cursing crew that I in my wisdom had advised the Director, long before we left New York, to purchase a set of little two-man tents which could be strung out anywhere along the path.

But I am previous with my "finally." The culminating cause of dissension was the fact that this "big top" had to accommodate all the rest of the expedition with as much personal impedimenta as each savant thought he could not possibly do without; and each individual savant had, quite naturally, a fixed conviction that the tools of his personal trade were the most important and necessary to be sheltered from the inclement out-of-doors.

"All the rest of the expedition" means, of course, the intrepid explorers. Common arriero people, who received no ovation from their compatriots about plunging into the dark unknown, slept wrapped up in their ponchos in any old place they could find.

All the rest of us—except the Eminent Statistician. Sunny Jim had insisted from the very first on having a tent to himself. He maintained that the Director had promised him—in writing which he offered to produce as evidence—not only a personal tent but a personal servant. I myself remembered some such vague lure held out to me in the far-away days of organization in New York, as did one or two of the others. So we were not without a certain secret admiration for the bellicose Statistician who, being cheated of his personal servant, clung so tenaciously to his right to a private tent. And since that cantankerous party was speaking now only to the fish-expert and me, we were glad enough to leave him to the privacy which he insisted upon.

But though we envied, there were times when we did not love him for his stout maintenance of his rights. Times when a bare, bleak mountainside was the best that presented itself, and space had to be found, somehow, somewhere, for that extra tent. Mutterings were frequent, and we wondered more than once at his hardy tenacity in the face of black looks. We came to the conclusion that the misanthrope insisted upon retiring into privacy in order that he might pray undisturbed to Astarte.

What a labor and a confusion was that daily camp-making with those terrible wall-tents! Tents that were designed by a transport officer during the Crimean War for the use of soldier-men who were available in trained platoons and who pitched camp in a wide plain. I think back on all the carefully tested improvements that have been made in tents since that archaic model, the elimination of weight and poles and pegs and ropes, till I come to a certain modern tent that I know. Eight by eight; may be set up anywhere; one jointed pole, four pegs; full head-room; ground-cloth sewed in; waterproof; bug-proof; sleeps two men; total weight, twenty-four pounds. I visualize this efficient piece of equipment and I find it difficult to forgive that wilful pedagogue for those wall-tents.

How often I have thanked my Maker that He had given me the forethought to stipulate in my mule-arrangement that all responsibility for the animals—unpacking, hobbling, feeding, etc.,—should fall upon the arrieros! Which fact they flung in my teeth when I called upon them to struggle with those accursed wall-tents.

Those of you, who have camped with tents, of whatever pattern or in whatever locality, will give me sympathy. But you will not altogether understand. For I am quite sure that not one of you has ever camped with a wall-tent. You have probably, in these modern times, never seen a wall-tent, except, possibly, as an all-summer habitation.

Those of you who have known the vexation of the water problem will smile at this halozone story. Halozone is a daily ceremony and a recurrent aggravation. Up here in the mountains, where the water is primaeval spring and contaminating human habitation is not, we insist every evening, as soon as we arrive at camp, on filling a water-bucket and meticulously dropping into it a halo-zone tablet and standing thirstily round it for twenty minutes till the last problematical typhoid bug and dysentery amoeba has been slain. And every evening we find that everybody has left the job to everybody else, and everybody growls that if a thing has to be done he must do it himself; and half a dozen halozone tablets are thrown in all together—but we still have to wait twenty full minutes. Those of you who have auto-camped or canoe-camped or hike-camped and thought it hard, may rest assured that this camping with "the best equipped expedition that ever left New York" is not unalloyed luxury.

In Such Mansions do the Hermits of the Lost Paradise Dwell

Sunset Over the Lost Paradise

In this chaotic camp, then, we received the directorial "Bulletin Number One." A formal and impressive document. It was headed: "To all members of the Expedition." And it informed us in meticulous grammar and well-rounded phrase that we had now crossed the Andes. Information which was received without a tremor of surprise from a single man. The fact being satisfactorily established without argument, it went on to tell us that we were about to plunge into the dark and unexplored Yungas. Still no visible astonishment. But ah! the thrills followed fast thereafter! We stood upon the brink, the bulletin said, of a vast and wild country, where fierce animals abounded, where huge serpents lurked above the drinking-pools, and where, more vicious than either, treacherous banditti waited in ambush. Ha! there was startling news for us! We had read so far with blasé boredom. But wild beasts! brigands! That brought the pale to our cheeks. The document now held us spellbound.

Therefore, it went on to admonish us, with warning severity, that we must henceforth cut out this quarreling, we must coöperate,—I bethought me guiltily of the tent squabble,—we must, above all, see to our weapons; we must see to it that they were loaded and that they were within instant reach.

Am I unjust in my lack of appreciation of this portentous screed? Am I merely a disgruntled crank when I wonder at the pedagogic mind that considered it necessary to give us this lecture in writing, a private carbon copy to each member, instead of calling us together and saying, "Boys [or 'Gentlemen'], I want to tell you so-and-so?" I don't know. I cannot judge, myself. But I cannot feel ashamed of my covert smile.