Читать книгу White Waters and Black - Gordon MacCreagh - Страница 9

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Never was chill gray dawn more welcome. Never was I less prone to hug the blankets. We three hardy explorers rose with alacrity, shook ourselves as thoroughly as politeness would permit, and invited our host to breakfast, on sardines out of the saddle-bags. They were ex-army supplies which the thrifty Director had purchased in vast quantity; but the rug-merchant enjoyed them hugely. After challona and yams, which formed the regular diet of that village, they were a treat to him. Anything would be delicatessen after challona and yams.

After breakfast we went out to bask in the thin sun and the adulation of the assembled populace. We were particularly anxious to learn just why was that village. Think of it. It perched on the mean shoulder of an immense ridge that began away up in the blue shadows of snow and swept on down to a far purple-wooded haze. A great raw shoulder-bone standing on edge which afforded the ultimate minimum of shelter and space. A little flattening of the edge gave room for the village square, the inevitable plaza. This one was the Plaza of the Twenty-fifth of May and it was about sixty feet square. On one side was the street of Bolivar, fronted by five adobe houses, and possibly seventy or eighty feet long. On the other side was the Street of Sucre fronted by nine adobe houses and two hundred miles long—possibly three hundred or four hundred, for it led on unbroken, except by landslides, all the way down to the Yungas.

The houses presented to their respective streets a solid gay front of pink and blue and purple calcimine, and their rear verandas, on both sides of the village, literally hung over the steep sides of the ridge, propped upon stilts. Corresponding to the torrent which tumbled a mile or so below the jefe's side of the village, was a torrent which tumbled two miles below the schoolmaster's side.

And that was not so much farther than the good people of the village had to go for their drinking-water. An interminable path led back along the face of the ridge to where a tiny stream went to join the torrent below. There was no explanation of why the village had not been built in the sheltered hollow at the source of its water supply.

But a mere half-hour's walk to carry water was nothing to people whose food supply came from a hundred miles away. That village was too high up for anything to grow successfully, except a few yams and sickly beans. It was too high up for wild game, except an occasional bear. Meat—challona and charque, which latter consists of slabs of beef dried like challona—had to be fetched from the Yungas. There was no explanation of why the village had not been built nearer to its food supply.

There was no explanation of anything. In the mysterious Orient, villages—nay, whole towns—have sprung up because the wandering Buddha once put his foot down there or because Krishna kissed a cow-herd maid. But nothing of any sort at all had ever happened here. Nothing ever will happen in that wind-swept spot so far removed from the madding crowd. What caused the village, then? we wanted to know. Was it a mart of trade for the surrounding emptiness? Was there any industry other than the thriving rug business? Did the people do anything?

No, they said simply, and laughed at our American need for causes of existence. They did nothing. They just lived.

We concluded that the village had been set there, by a beneficent Providence, for the purpose of succoring ill-managed expeditions.

Intrepid Explorers Honoring with their Presence the Village of the Ridge

The 'Street of Sucre,' Right. The Road to the Lost Paradise

The inexplicable village of the ridge—built up and buttressed with adobe brick to keep it from sliding into the ravine

Adobe bricks of clay and tree-cotton and hair, trodden into molds and baked in the sun

And the good people surely did everything in their power to offset, by their eager hospitality to us, the stark inhospitality of their locale. They all made speeches to us all over again in the morning, finishing and rounding off all the complimentary things they had been prevented from putting across on the night before, by reason of our need for rest; and every single man of them had thought up a lot of improvements on his previous impromptu.

They showed us the sights. The schoolmaster, no different from schoolmasters the world over, led us through the school—his back veranda, and made his unfortunate pupils recite their lessons before us. He had nine. Heavens, how that village increased and multiplied! Then he made the pupils stand at attention while he made us a speech on the benefits of education, pointing a neat moral to the effect that if those lazy scoundrels who were directed straight for the penitentiary would but pay more attention to their books they might rise to boundless heights, even to be intrepid explorers like us.

We thanked him, and by distributing largesse among the pupils avoided making a return speech and patting them on the head. Then the schoolmaster assumed his more dignified office of postmaster and showed us the post-office—his back veranda, and gave us indubitable proof that he did have a letter to distribute. I believe he had deliberately held up delivery, saving it for this occasion. It turned out that the mail-carrier who brought it was our arriero. Thus became clear the reason for his early start yesterday.

Then the jefe obtained possession of us again and showed us his sights—his silver badge of office and his pompously sealed commission as guardian of the peace and dispenser of justice.

Nobody showed us the view, which was stupendous and grand beyond words. Our good-by view of the snow country; for which I have no regret as yet. The Andean snow country is wonderfully beautiful, in retrospect. The hard, clear light of the dry season reveals tremendous distances and paints the far peaks pink and blue and amber. But the effect is that of pitiless photography with an anastigmatic lens stopped well down, rather than that of the softer, hazier, and more artistic landscapes of our own moister mountain atmosphere. Somehow one can't imagine an artist trying to paint the hard massiveness of the High Cordillera. Its beauty is its own; and some day I shall properly appreciate it. Just now I am prejudiced. The pale pink and blue snows look cold to me; terribly cold. The vast amber and lilac slopes are steep and precipitous and desperately bad for a hundred-odd pack-mules.

I look, rather, in the opposite direction, where in the valley on the one side of our ridge a white mist rolls and eddies and spouts high in the little gorges, exactly like ocean breakers in slow motion; while the valley on the other side stretches away, green and shadowy black, for miles beyond miles, till it loses itself in purple haze. A valley which to us is full of allure and promise. For the vast jungles of the Yungas lie at our feet and the fleeting airs that drift up from the jungles are wet and warm and smell of adventure.

Once again I am prejudiced. I have become very fond of this isolated village planted on the bare shoulder of nowhere, and of its simple folk. Altogether a delightful, restful forenoon, till the remainder of the expedition straggled in, having camped some ten miles back, but having by no means slept off its wrath. The bickering of the white folks seemed to have communicated itself to the arrieros and even to the mules; for they swept through the village grimly, with never a halt for a rest and an exchange of gossip. It was a great blow to the populace that they could not make their speeches all over again to the rest of the heroic explorers who were plunging into unknown dangers for the greater glory of the patria.

The Eminent Director did dismount and shake hands with the jefe and the rest of them. But his disagreement with the Eminent Statistician was evidently weighing on his mind. He was in no mood either to receive or to give compliments; and, besides, he was eager to tell us three what dastardly deserters we had been.

I swung away down the Street of Sucre, with a warm place in my memory for that inexplicable village perched up there on the most inaccessibly isolated ridge of all Bolivia.

I wasn't going to be wearisome with any description of climbing down mountains, for everybody must have read more than enough of such descriptions. But here we are, after all, on the "unknown route," and many things are different from the only other two mountain ranges in the world which can compare.

Our own Rockies are in a more northern, a colder climate; and our timber-line, when it begins, has its own beauty of pine and balsam and fir. The Himalayas are in monsoon country; and there, below the line where everything is eternally frozen, everything is eternally wet. Ferns and mosses are the predominant characteristics. Tree limbs are thickly draped with lichens and aeroids; and moisture-loving orchids appear early in the descent.

Here within fifteen degrees of the equator, it is drier. The cold through which we have passed—thank Heaven!—is the cold of altitude. So when things begin to grow they grow suddenly in all the profusion of the tropical belt. We are still too high up for tropical jungle; but there is an overwhelming confusion of everything else. And everything is strange and new.

The Eminent Botanist, a heavily built gentleman whose normal demeanor is one of appalling dignity and seriousness, and of ponderous self-esteem, goes galumphing about from one treasure to another and croons endearments to Bignoniaceae and Leguminosae and Moraeeae and such. But to me, a mere layman, the most surprising anomaly is cactus growing on trees, along with spiky-leaved plants that look like aloes.

Yes, cacti on trees—queer long things that shoot up in a single spiky hexagonal stalk, stiff and straight, seven feet or ten feet high, and balanced, apparently rootless, on a horizontal limb. What an astounding variety of cacti! Long thin cacti. Short pudgy cacti. Square cacti. Star-shaped cacti. Seven-branched-candlestick cacti. And one, a monster, a cactus-tree, eighty feet high and spreading like a spiny poplar. This is something new; unknown to botany and unnamed as yet.

The Eminent Botanist cavorts, beside himself. As I have said, he is a large man, but he prances around this treasure-trove and loves it and moans heartbrokenly for that he cannot root it up bodily and take it home with him. But he does the next best thing. His boast is that he has never taken any sort of exercise in his life; that he has had no time for games and useless sports. But now he holds up the whole pack-train; insists that a mule be unloaded, and into his own hands he takes an ax and hews down an acre of forest, laying waste a long lane in order that I may be able to retire far enough away with a camera to photograph the thing whole and alone in its exclusiveness.

Three hours are expended in this labor, for there is a terrible tangle of woodland to be devastated before the way lies clear for a picture. The Botanist wishes that he had taken the precaution of hardening his muscles and his hands by judicious exercise in the past; and he becomes annoyed with me because I insist upon so meticulously clear a view. He cannot understand why a foolish little twig before the lens should interfere with a picture of an eighty-foot tree. I become annoyed with him and tell him that I shall give him a course in optics later. What he must concentrate upon just now is brawn-work, not brain-work. The arrieros become annoyed at the delay; and those of them who do not sit about in attitudes of disapproval besiege the Eminent Director to order an immediate resumption of the journey, urging the well-worn plea that the next nearest possible camping-place is many miles distant and that we shall never reach it before dark. The Director becomes annoyed at the importunities of the arrieros and enters into spiteful debate with the Botanist about delay, who enters into spiteful debate with me about twigs.

It is a party divided against itself that eventually starts off after three hours, in a vast hurry and ill humor, and pushes forward with anxiety against the threatened night—and arrives suddenly, with plenty of time to spare, at a little sheltered clearing where there is water within handy reach and a kindly old hermit who has a hut and a goat and an orchard of two orange-trees and a lemon-tree and five or six pineapple bushes.

We hunger for oranges and pineapples, with all the eagerness of seafarers of the old wind-jammer days for their lime-juice; for we have been living out of cans for three weeks. The kindly hermit, with a grand gesture as though he were presenting us with a whole Florida grove, makes us free of his orchard. But alack-a-day! it is too high up for oranges and pineapples to thrive! These are the acidest things that ever set teeth on edge.