Читать книгу White Waters and Black - Gordon MacCreagh - Страница 13

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We have arrived; and the horror of Espía is heavy upon us all. But before I tell of this despairful place I must try to mitigate the evil of the telling by recounting a story about a bandit which befell upon the road to Espía. It is really a very good story; and it explains how one person may go a-traveling and come back with thrilling adventures to relate, while another may cover the same ground and find perhaps only hardship. The anomaly doesn't necessarily mean that one of the two is a teller of traveler's tales. It may be that he tells the truth; only his temperament has reacted differently from the other man's under the same stimulus. I venture the theory, in short, that adventure lies in the man himself and not in the happening.

Listen, while I expound my thesis. The Eminent Director, as you must have realized by now, is a man of fervid imagination, which is supplemented by an unusual modicum of that strange suspicion that a certain type of American feels for what they call Spiggoties. His attitude is evinced in his anxiety about the mule-packer who contracted to deliver half the equipment at Espía, and in his awe-inspiring bulletin. With this background it is easy to understand how he has been obsessed ever since leaving La Paz with the positive conviction that the expedition is the mark for all the organized banditry of the mountains.

Even in La Paz he was nervous and bemoaned the fact that the newspapers had heralded us as a million-dollar American expedition. Crossing the High Cordillera he had peace. But ever since we passed through that first hospitable village of the bleak ridge he has insisted that we were being followed.

It appears that years ago as a youngster he made the passage from La Paz over the old Sorata-Mapiri route to a place called Rurrenabaque, on the Beni River, which we also shall eventually reach. We have no means of knowing the condition of the country then. But it is difficult to believe that these desolate back-stairs trails are infested by brigands in these days. Yet the Director has regaled us at each consecutive camp-fire with tales of the dangers which we must expect from man as well as from beast.

There was an inoffensive sort of person who appeared at the last little hermit village we passed through. He didn't live there. He, too, was passing through, he said. To our imaginative leader this was proof.

"A spy!" he warned us immediately. "Where would he be going in this wilderness? Why did he carry a serviceable-looking Winchester?"

To the less excitable ones among us it seemed natural that a man might travel from one lost village to another, somewhere in the hills; and natural that a man traveling in a wild country should carry a gun. I never moved without my Savage 25-3000 slung over my shoulder, myself, though I was looking for bear, not brigands. But what argument can one advance against the ominous mutterings of experience which tell one, "I know these Andean trails?"

Do you perceive the elements of comic opera in the situation? Hear the dénouement and reflect how close is comedy to tragedy. We were hiking along a narrow trail that skirted a steep portion of our interminable ridge, the Scribe and I, well in advance of the rest, when round a bend came the model for all comic-opera brigands. Bearded like the pard he was, and fierce mustached and swarthy, and he wore a sombrero almost as disreputable as the Entomologist's hat, and a flaming scarlet poncho with an orange border. He rode a sorry mule and across the saddle-bow he held a Winchester .405. Upon seeing us he held up his hand in a commanding gesture for us to stop.

What did we do? We looked swiftly about us, and we stopped. Why? Because it was clear that where we stood there was room for his mule to pass without pushing us over the edge of the path, while where he was we should have to scramble uncomfortably up the mountainside in order to get by.

The brigand expressed his vast astonishment at meeting two gringos, of all people, on that path which had never seen gringos before. He asked us all about everything and gave vent to the customary compliments about our fortitude in plunging thus into the unknown. (It was always a matter of wonder to me why all these naïve people whom we met should think it was so brave of us to come where they lived all the time, but such is the glamour that attaches to the magic word "Expedition.") The pleasantries done with, the bandit came down to business and held us up. He wanted a match—a whole box of matches, in fact; for he had been without fire for three days.

It was our ill luck that neither of us happened to have a match. So we told the highwayman politely that farther back on the trail he would come upon the rest of the members of the expedition, among whom he would surely find a match. He did not take our lives. He thanked us and passed on, and we breathed freely once more.

Fate so willed it that the next member of the expedition on the trail was the Eminent Director, and that where his mule stood there was room for two mules to pass. It was Fate in her most mischievous mood that caused the brigand to raise the hand in which he held his Winchester, in the customary signal of the road, and to call in his commanding voice, "Stay where you are, señor."

And there it was that Adventure with wide-spread wings swooped down upon both of those men, out of a blue sky.

The Director knew immediately that his worst fears were realized. The expedition was held up for its million dollars. Give him credit for his pluck, if not for his judgment. Without an instant's hesitation he pulled his army Colt from his saddle-bag and took a shot at his stick-up man.

Happily he was a pedagogue, not a pistol-shot. Happily the brigand was too astonished to shoot back; and he ducked round the bend of the trail like a rabbit. So no harm came of it. But there is the point that I wish to establish. Out of the identical happening which to two of us meant no more than a request for a match, a third man had found a hair-raising adventure. For it is surely the thrillingest kind of adventure to be held up and to shoot at a man with intent to kill.

And to this day, a week after the excitement, the Director insists that the man was a brigand and that his confederates were in ambush on the hillside; and that it was only his own prompt and determined action that saved us from disaster. And as such he has caused the incident to be written into the official "Journal" which he dictates to the Scribe whenever opportunity presents itself, as a day-by-day record of our progress which the sponsors of the expedition, he hopes, will publish.

And so to Espía, the place that was marked on the government maps as a town of considerable size. A guide from the last of the little hermit colonies said that he knew Espía perfectly well; and he brought us here and has left us. Our long train of dear, obstinate, companionable mules has left us. Our grumbling, wilful arrieros have left us. We are alone, thrown upon our own resources, and we are as crawling ants in the great emptiness of Espía.

Desolation vast and impending. Blank barrenness piled high upon craggy destitution. Up-ended slate and striated schist and crumbly sandstone, blue and yellow and hard, burned brown in a thin sun. Through the ragged waste a deep and crooked gash strewn with the rubble that the ages have torn from the angry cliffs. Zigzag through the gash, diagonaling from precipice to opposite precipice, a turbid and foul-smelling river.

Not a habitation, not a hut, not a beast nor a bird nor a track in the sand. This is the "town" of Espía.

In this town, then, we are encamped. Boxes and bales and bundles piled here and strewn there; a chaos in keeping with its surroundings. I am reminded of the opening verses of Genesis. Only, instead of the spirit of God moving over the face of the waters, is the spirit of discontent.

Our coming was an unfortunate coming of circumstance and weariness—and perhaps a little obstinacy. The last day of the trail through the rain-forest paradise had been a long one. We rode, the Director and the Scribe and I—for I, too, was weary—well in advance of the rest, who had fallen behind to hunt each for the specimens peculiar to his study.

The pleasant rain-forest suddenly ceased as though cut off with a knife. Before us lay a bare desert of sand and rubble a mile wide—the playa scoured out by the turbid river which in the rainy season filled it ten feet deep with roaring flood.

Through the middle of the yellow-brown barrenness a darker streak of brown marked the present confines of the river. No more than fifty yards across and fordable though evil-smelling. From away to the right came an other ridge to meet the apex of the ridge we had been following. From its ravine poured another river white and clear, to mingle with the dirty stream in front of us. The two formed the Bopi River, the "head-waters of navigation."

"There," said our guide, "on the other side of this river, where the two rivers meet, is Espía."

Still we did not understand that we were face to face with our expulsion from Eden. We rode through the ford, the three of us, the guide clinging to my stirrup, and continued on across the farther plain, expecting to find some settlement or something round the corner of the beetling cliff which thrust in from that side. But round the corner was only emptiness as vast and as cheerless as all that lay behind. Half a mile farther, the combined streams, swinging off the opposite cliff, slanted across to surge against the face of the cliff on our side and so cut off further progress.

The little plain, then, in which we were, extended from a point behind us, where the river swung away to make its curve, to the barrier in front of us. A barren emptiness a mile long and half a mile wide.

"This playa," said our guide, "is Espía." From here the Indians navigate in balsa rafts.

There was no time to question, no time to stand aghast. Our wits were becoming accustomed to the unexpected on the trail. The Scribe and I in the same breath urged the Director to go back, reford the river, and pitch camp on the farther side, where we should have the shelter of the rain forest and be in touch with the other stream of clear water. But the Director was a man no longer as young as he once had been. That day had been too long for him. He was weary enough physically to be mentally sluggish. He expressed a fear that since this playa was the head of navigation, possibly rafts could not be taken the necessary half-mile farther up. He argued that under the trees there was no room for tents, anyway, and that, as far as open sand-bars went, this side was no worse than that side.

He even feared a possible ambush of Indians from the forest. It was quite clear that he was too exhausted with the day's travel to consider, without shrinking, the thought of fording that river again and riding around looking for a camp site. All that he wanted to do was to dismount from his mule and throw himself flat upon the sand. And then, while he hesitated, the first of the pack-mules began to emerge from the forest wall and straggle out toward the ford. That sealed our fate.

"Well, that settles it," said the Director, with relief. "We camp here for to-night; and to-morrow maybe we can look around and make some other arrangement."

Fifteen minutes later bales and bags were being unloaded in a pile on the sand-bar called Espía and the first night's camp outside of Paradise was in progress.