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I. — AN AMBITIOUS EXPEDITION

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This is a story of eight white men who propose to bury themselves in the jungles of the Amazon for a period of something between one and two years, depending upon their health, their luck, and their tenacity. It begins in La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. I, the writer of the record, heralded by not very veracious newspapers as an ethnologist and transportation expert, am here to prepare the way for a scientific expedition. Primarily to gather a mule-train to carry the cumbrous impedimenta which must accompany such an expedition over the farther heights of the Andes and to make the thousand arrangements necessary to such travel; and, incidentally, to study and make motion-picture records of all the mysterious doings of all the wild Indians whom the expedition is going to meet.

The object of this expedition is ambitious. It proposes to explore, and to collect biological specimens over, an entirely new territory. It must, therefore, find an unknown route over the mountains, beyond the limits of civilization, down into the foot-hills, and along some mountain river which will connect, it hopes, with the river Beni, which is known to connect at the Brazilian border with the Madeira, the fifth largest tributary flowing from the south into the Father of all Waters, the Amazon. This will be the first lap, through what is known as white water, in contradistinction to the great tributary which flows in from the north just below Manáos, the Rio Negro, the Black River.

This first lap it will take us about a year to accomplish. The expedition proposes to rest and refit at Manáos and then to ascend the black water to beyond the limits of civilization again and try to find some other unknown tributary which will lead up to some possible route over the mountains once more, to Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia. This will be the second lap, and will occupy perhaps another year.

An ambitious proposition, to say the least of it. Two years in the unknown jungles, traversing country which will very certainly offer some hard going. The personnel which has been selected for the undertaking is to consist, as I have said, of eight white men; six of whom are professors of eminent standing in their respective branches of science; five of whom have never seen a jungle nor known anything about travel other than in trains; two of whom are men well past middle age and set in their ways; one of whom is known to be the typical cantankerous professor of fiction and the stage; and another one of whom has a well-established reputation as a college disciplinarian. This last one is to be the leader or, as he prefers to call himself, the director of the expedition.

Such an expedition, it seems to me, will contain all the elements necessary to startling drama. Some of the drama will be comedy; some of it, beyond any manner of doubt, will be tragedy. The doings of these eight white men with their various idiosyncrasies, herded together in the enforced close association of jungle travel, will be worthy of record. How will they react to the hardships of travel? How will they adapt themselves to the astounding unfamiliarities which they will meet?—or won't they adapt? How seriously will they jar upon one another's jangled nerves when feet are sore and blankets are wet and food is scarce and malarial chills are plentiful?—all of which conditions will very surely arise.

So surely, too, will it be an interesting record. At all events, a novel one. For nobody has ever been sacrilegious enough to keep a running record of the intimate doings of a party of eminent professors loose in the wild woods. I, one of the eight white men, propose to keep such a record; and I propose, if possible, not to encumber it with a single item of scientific value. Therefore I trust it may be a document different from most records of travel.

Here I am, then, in La Paz, officially known as the New City of Our Most Blessed Lady of the Peace of Ayacucho. Highest capital city in the world—twelve thousand feet at the statue of the Blessed Lady in the plaza—and probably the coldest, despite its sixteenth degree of latitude close to the equator.

Many gifted persons, including Bryce and Franck, have adequately described La Paz. One of the rigid rules of my record shall be to describe only such things as other people have left out; for is it not the object of this expedition to cover "unknown" ground? I deal lightly, therefore, with La Paz.

Why, I wonder, has nobody with a descriptive pen written a pan about the approach to La Paz? For it is undeniably the most startling piece of gorgeousness ever seen; and the preparation for the spectacle is as cunningly staged as though arranged by a movie-director.

Imagine, first, some four hundred and fifty miles of the most desolate travel in the world. Desert right from the start of the climb up the western slope of the Andes, which at Arica butts up against the sea-beach and rises without any shilly-shally or hesitation, sheer away in sand mountains and slopes so steep that the railway has to be installed with a cog-wheel system. Fourteen thousand feet of absolute desert, "absolute" being a scientific term of desertology meaning that nothing grows. Not a single thing. Not an oasis nor a mirage nor a solitary cactus. Just ridges and peaks and ravines and scarps of endless red-brown shimmery sand through which a broad black ribbon twists and winds as it climbs the desolate miles, the black being a hundred-foot swath of cinders and sizeable lumps of coal coughed up by the engine as it strains over that grade. This "pavement" is an inch or so deep; because it has never been washed off since the road began,—for it never, never, in any circumstances rains on that desert,—which explains, incidentally, how one can climb over a fourteen-thousand-foot pass without coming to a snow-line.

Up into the mountaintops the train goes without a break in the monotony of dirty scintillating sand. Though there is a certain measure of relief which serves most effectually to distract the attention: most passengers become deathly sick. Sirroche, or mountain sickness. It starts with a headachy feeling as one gets into the higher altitudes, and may develop from acute pain, through nausea, even to death in the case of people who have poor heart action.

With me has come an assistant to photograph the Indians of the unknown jungles. He has suffered badly. I'm worried. I don't know how he will stand the rest of the trip. He isn't at all strong; and he is a nervous, high-strung young man. I fear for him more than for any of the professors.

But I digress. We're on a ghastly train in a desolate land. Once beyond the pass, one looks for fertile valleys steaming in the distant haze and so forth. But there are none. There's just a short dip, and then miles and more miles of flat, barren plateau. The Altiplano of Bolivia. For the Andes here have split into two great parallel ridges a hundred miles or so apart, known as the Cordillera del Mar and the Cordillera Real. The lofty plain between them was once upon a time the bed of Lake Titicaca, now shrunken to a paltry hundred and fifty miles in length by fifty wide.

"Absolute Desert"—Where it Never Rains and Where Nothing Grows.

The Scenic Railway Down to La Paz.

The train crawls along that cold, dead plain in a straight line till, looking at the tracks, one disproves the axiom that parallel lines never converge. As the dreary miles rattle behind, one comes presently into rain country, and things make a desperate attempt to grow. The Altiplano is a few thousand feet above vegetation level; but Nature struggles amazingly, and a spare, coarse llama grass hides the clayey mud in thin patches.

Presently one sees a few low, straggling mud huts and bare-looking fields. Potatoes and sundry edible roots may be coaxed from the soil, one learns. Presently again, alongside an icy-looking stream, one sees an exhilarating patch of something that is brilliant green, and one is impelled to yelp with delight at the cheerful relief to the eyes. But an old-timer explains that this is the oat crop, which will never ripen in the chill altitude, and which must be cut green and used for mule-fodder in that land where no natural fodder grows.

Sullen-looking, apathetic, dull-featured men and women, Aymará Indians dressed in brilliant ponchos, stand by the tracks and scowl at the train. It happens along once a week and is the only thing of interest in their lives.

This keeps up for miles and more cheerless miles. All day one sees nothing but desolate, cold plateau, frozen crops struggling to grow, and a soulless people. Till presently the vast snow barrier of the farther Cordillera begins to loom high on the horizon, and the traveler wonders where this town is that he is approaching. One can see everything that exists on that flat plain. There's no room for a town of fifty people to hide. Yet no town snuggles anywhere along the base of the mountain range.

Finally one arrives at the least dreary station, and some one says, "Half an hour more to La Paz." And still one sees nothing. Then the train shrieks, and rumbles ahead once more. Two hundred yards, perhaps, from the last barren blankness—and then suddenly it is skirting the edge of a vast precipice. A great jagged gash, hewn by a giant cleaver abruptly into the surface of the plain. And the city is away down there at the bottom of it.

Sheer fifteen hundred feet below, roofs of red tile nestle in the very bottom of the gash, amidst the heavenly blue of trees, tall things that grow and live—Australian blue-gums and willows, carefully transplanted and acclimatized. And the sight is what the sight of an oasis must be after forty days and forty nights a-hungering on the Sahara.

Then the train begins to crawl dizzily over the lip and down the sheer wall of the precipice; and one gasps and thinks what a poor thing is the Grand Cañon by comparison.

Painted cliffs and serrated pinnacles of pink and blue and pearl-gray and chrome orange against the towering snow background of the Cordillera; or, as the train takes a curve, against the bluest sky and the whitest clouds ever seen.