Читать книгу White Waters and Black - Gordon MacCreagh - Страница 12

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Picture to yourselves, then, this train of intrepid explorers proceeding blithely down the trail,—which is still called the Street of Sucre,—through the rain forests of the lower transandine slopes. I am in the lead most of the time, generally with the Scribe and the Entomologist. Well in advance of the mile-long mule-train, for we are getting into country where there is a chance of a shot, every now and then, at a deer or a bear; and fresh meat is welcome after our long diet of canned goods and charque.

It is good camping along this Street of Sucre, which leads, they tell us, to Espía. The "street" is all as wide as three feet in some parts—room and no more for a mule, walking on the extreme edge, not to scrape his pack on the left-hand cliff and be twisted over the right-hand bank. It winds interminably along the flank of the tremendous lateral ridge that we have been following for some days now. Water is available all the time; for the trail—the road, I should say—maintains a consistently average level of about a hundred feet above the narrow V bottom where a mountain torrent shares our ambition to reach the Father of All the Waters, el Rio Amazonas. Sparkling, limpid mountain water—into which we carefully drop a halozone tablet.

It is good going. The ups and downs are not so steep as they have been, though steep enough to lose us another mule yesterday. Intersecting gullies have formed little silt bottoms wide enough to mitigate much of the offense of those cumbersome tents. Fire-wood at last is plentiful, which makes possible that pleasantest phase of the trail, a camp-fire after a long day's hike. Nights are divinely cool after the terrible cold of the high trail. Mornings are bright and snappy; for we have descended through the mist belt and wake with a clear sun slanting down the gorge. Mornings full of pep and pleasant anticipation of what the day will bring. Even the Eminent Statistician smiles in a vaguely inviting way and would be cordial if he could think of anybody whom he has not insulted. Even the arrieros load up their packs with less than their usual appalling blasphemy about the ancestry of their mules.

An arriero mule-packing is a ceremony worthy to be dwelt upon. It takes two men to load a pack. First a mule has to be caught. Then he is blindfolded with a very dirty scarf; otherwise he will surely seize his opportunity to kick somebody and run away. Then he is kicked in the stomach as an admonition of what he may expect if he becomes obstreperous, and he is reminded with picturesque variation about the unchastity of his mother. Then begins the real business of loading.

Those of you who have taken our own mountain trails and know the simple mystery of the diamond hitch, listen to this. First of all, sheepskins are plastered over the beast's back. I say "plastered" advisedly; for they are the gummiest, wettest, most unsavory sheepskins that were ever used by man. Five or six layers of sheepskins; and there is some concerted program of applying them in rotation—yesterday's lowest and wettest layer on top to-day—which is not so sanitary for our duffle-bags and general gear. Over this semi-porous padding a double loop of rawhide lazo is thrown, a loop left hanging on each side. Then the two men, one on each side of the mule, heave up their loads simultaneously, holding them with chest pressed against the beast; then one man passes his loop over, and the other knots the two together. A sort of loose cradle has been formed containing a load of approximate even weight on each side.

This is the nucleus. On top of this is piled as much as the men think the animal can carry; and there's many a wise old mule who knows enough to groan and to tremble at the knees as the load piles up. Finally, when some sort of compromise between the animal's bluff and the men's judgment has been arrived at, more rawhide lazo, or lasso, as we have adapted the word, is wound round and round load and beast together. Yards and yards of it; the men bracing their feet against the poor beast's ribs and pulling, and the wily beast swelling himself with a cunning as great as Houdini's. The resultant load looks like the parcel-post package that Grandma is sending from Alton, Illinois, to Sonny Boy in the big city. But it holds. That is to say, if the men have kicked the mule often enough in the stomach when he was swelling against the strain, it holds till the end of the day's journey.

An intricate and a cumbersome method of mule-packing; and to us gringos it seems a marvel that these packers have not through the years evolved something more efficient. But the reason is the same that accounts for so much of the slipshod ineffectuality of a certain class of South American. This is costumbre, traditional custom. Their fathers did it that way, and their father's fathers also.

Yet we find this archaic pack not without merit. We used to get up in a fever of hurry and confusion, making up our bed-rolls under the urgent shouts of the arrieros, and snatching a breakfast in all the bad temper that goes with hurried breakfasts. But that is past. We rise leisurely now and wash at our ease and dawdle over our meal and lie back and smoke in the pleasant morning sun. For this comfortable method of mule-packing takes at least seven minutes and two men per mule; and we still have enough mules surviving the vicissitudes of the trail to give us a good hour and a half from the time the cussing wakes us till we must start. It required considerable quarrel to persuade the arrieros that it was not an incontrovertible law of God that they must pack our bed-rolls and breakfast things first of all, for their grandfathers had been used to doing it that way.

It is a wonderful country here. Pleasantly warm in the soft breezes from the plains; yet high enough still to be not too hot. Everything grows without effort, and since we have not reached the tangle of tropical underbrush, the forest is open enough to be explorable. We are not in jungle as yet. Queer seed-pods hang from huge trees. Cucumber-shaped pods and pipe-shaped pods and flat dollar-shaped pods. They all seem to contain a fluffy cotton of some sort. The Botanist collects them by the hundredweight and carries them for miles—and then throws them away, to collect finer specimens of the same thing.

Fruit of a hundred shapes and sizes dangle above our heads. Giant beans trail from high climbing vines. We gather these and look greedily toward the Botanist. But he shakes his head dubiously. Maybe they are all right. Probably they are. But possibly they are not. He cannot tell us. They are all new. They must be carefully analyzed at some later date. For the present we dare not take a chance. The Respectable Member regretfully discards a delicious-looking custard-apple sort of thing and asks of the wide world of what value in the world is a field botanist.

Narrow, heart-shaped leaves of low-trailing vines advertise yams. We suffer from lack of potato substitutes and we unearth yams of all sizes and colors. The Botanist delivers a standing lecture upon yams. It appears that there are about a hundred varieties of yams or yam-like roots known to science, and of these about a hundred and three are poisonous, although the active principle of some of them may be dissipated by heat.

The Director, the M.D., is a considerable botanist himself; though he specializes on medicinal herbs. He knows an awesome deal about poisonous roots, and he bears out his colleague in a general denunciation of yams; but neither can he without preliminary analysis tell us which of them may be rendered innocuous by cooking. And it appears here that the expedition is not equipped with the necessary outfit for making such an analysis. Whereupon all the rest of us inquire of the wide world of what value in the world are field botanists.

But we do find an eatable root at last. We arrive at the habitation of a group of hermits—we can't call these isolated humans villagers—and they show us a bulbous water-lily root. They call it ualusa. Its flesh is purple and fearsome to contemplate. But it boils like a potato and, except for its color, might be mistaken for one. We carry away a mule-load of ualusa.

Later there are other hermit dwellings. Almost villages, these. Spanish-speaking people who wear white men's clothes live in them; and, since the country and the climate is what it is, they live with a minimum of labor, which means that they live pleasantly and are satisfied with their lot.

But to us effete creatures of civilization it is a matter of amazement to note how little is the ultimate minimum necessary to contentment. The possessions of these good people are almost nil. What they own they make with their own hands. A bed, a table, and a couple of chairs to each family; hand-hewn with the ubiquitous machete and interlaced with rawhide. The machete and a broken knife or two are prized heirlooms. Their plates are plantain leaves, their cups are gourds, and their single cooking-utensil is a clay pot. One rich man has a German enamel saucepan. Clothing consists of trousers or skirt, and a loose shapeless jacket; both home-made, of a thin cotton cloth. A blanket with a hole in the middle does duty for a poncho and completes the outfit. We begin to understand where the Syrian trader finds his market.

Like all isolated folk, these people remain isolated. Distances are so enormous and travel is so difficult that they just don't attempt to go anywhere. There is nowhere to go. Their language is Spanish and their religion is Catholic. They claim to be blancos, white folks, distinctly superior to the mestizos and cholos (admittedly half-breeds) of La Paz city. But they have never seen La Paz; and—this might be in darkest Africa—they have never before seen white men.

Yet their courtesy and their hospitality are pure Bolivian. What their adobe huts contain is ours. What information they have of local conditions and routes is at our service. What help they can render they proffer as though it were a privilege.

They have chickens and eggs and a milk-goat or two, and they are eager to trade their produce, apologizing the while that they are not rich and cannot present us with these things. And our Eminent Director—pitiful Godl—unloads a mule-pack and solemnly opens store; for "the funds of the expedition must be conserved." A woman wants a few needles and some thread, and she brings an egg in payment. Her purchase will cost two eggs. So she resigns herself to wait till next morning, when her hen, she hopes, will have laid another egg. But the look in the eyes of Judy O'Grady is the same look that is in the eyes of the colonel's lady when the latter wants a new squirrel wrap and must wait till the colonel draws his next pay.

I am glad that the responsibilities and economies of directorship do not fall upon my shoulders, and with my assistant I go to make an experiment in the manufacture of candy. A craving for sweets obsesses all of us, and in the victualing of the expedition no provision has been made for such effeminate luxuries. But a bountiful Creator causes cocoa to increase and multiply in these foot-hills with the minimum of attention. Sugar we have in camp stores, so we steal it. And we split the fat cocoa-pods and wash the white surrounding jelly from the beans; and a girl shows us how to roast the beans in an earthen pot and how to grind them between the same kind of stones that Adam used; and we mix the coarse resultant with sugar and cook it up in the pot and add a whole vanilla-bean from a near-by vine; and finally we pour the mess out into the trough of a split cane and set it aside to cool, and keep a vigilant eye open for goats.

We don't know whether or not this is how chocolate is made. But our long irregular bars of brown stuff taste not altogether unlike chocolate; and we all gobble great wads of it; and the unanimous voice of Science proclaims us as geniuses. Encouraged, we make lumps of the unsweetened for drinking-purposes, which is quite simple; though we wish we knew how to extract the surplus cocoa butter, for it floats in greasy globules on the surface of our beverage. None the less, Science votes it the equal of the advertisement, "grateful and comforting."

Coffee is no trouble at all. The same giggling girl shows us how to roast coffee-berries in the same pot and how to grind them in the same adamite stone mill. And what coffee that makes! Here our product is beyond criticism, flawless. That mountain coffee grows sparse; but, like mountain tea, what a flavor it has and what aroma! Such coffee is not available in the marts of New York.

The same is true of the mountain tobacco. But here we can claim no credit. The natives gather it and dry it by hanging it under open rain shelters in heavy shade, where it dries very slowly. And they know all about aging it in the wood, too. For they ram it hard into hollow sections of tree trunks, or they wrap it tightly in twisted vine rope; and then they hang it away under the ridge-pole of their adobe huts, and five years later, or ten years later, they roll it into cheroots and smoke it. In a body we suggest that we jettison three or four mule-loads of camp impedimenta and load up with cheroots. But the Botanist says gravely that he doesn't think the Director would consider such action justifiable. So we have to discard that bright thought. And, anyway, there isn't a very great supply of cheroots made up; and, as the Botanist says again, it wouldn't be doing quite the right thing to hold up the whole expedition for a week or so while we waited for our cheroot supply.

Not that he wouldn't like to linger in these foot-hills indefinitely; for the specimens he wants to collect are legion. The Entomologist agrees with him whole-heartedly; for bugs and crawling things, too, are legion. In fact, he goes so far as to make his formal demand to the Director that we camp there or thereabouts for a definite period of at least a week. The Ichthyologist backs them both up. He has been spending his nights stalking tree-toads with my private acetylene bulls'-eye lamp which I brought for night shooting; for he is keenly set on making a collection of batrachians. He has also found some interesting pollywogs in a puddle. So a week or two more in this prolific paradise would suit him excellently.

For me and my assistant there is nothing to do here. These people, for all their seclusion, are not Indians. They have no queer manners or customs, no tribal ghost-dances or devil-huntings or handicrafts to record. They are Bolivians. Their speech is Bolivian and their traditions are Bolivian. Idleness, therefore, is our portion. But this is a good country to be idle in. The air is languorously warm and the nights are cool. The oranges and the pineapples are beginning to be sweet. There are bush turkeys in the hollows and there are bear in the hills. It is easy to answer our recurring American question as to why these people live here and what on earth they do. The answer is the same that was given to us at the inaccessible village of the ridge: They do nothing; they just live. But here we find that the answer is within our understanding. It is easy to console oneself with the reflection that so was Adam idle in the Garden of Eden. So I throw my weight in with the rest who demand a delay.

But the Director is as uncompromising as the angel with the fiery sword. "Espía," he reiterates with finality. There lies our first objective. The beginning of the Promised Land. There are the head-waters of navigation. There the rest of our goods and gear will be waiting for us—if that rascally contractor has not stolen them. Also, the Director is full of fears for that other half of the expedition material that he was compelled—on account of my ill-advised arrangement—to entrust to a Bolivian pack-mule contractor.

So to Espía we must speed, without wasting time or dallying by the way. At Espía will begin the real work of the expedition. Espía exists, these good people assure us. They have never been there, but the vast slope along whose flanks we travel leads to Espía. Three days' journey farther; or perhaps five; or maybe eight. Quien Babe?