Читать книгу The Andes of Southern Peru - Isaiah Bowman - Страница 12

Fig. 11—A temporary shelter-hut on a sand-bar near the great bend of the Urubamba (see map, Fig. 8). The Machiganga Indians use these cane shelters during the fishing season, when the river is low.

Fig. 12—Thirty-foot canoe in a rapid above Pongo de Mainique.

Rosalina is hardly more than a name on the map and a camp site on the river bank. Some distance back from the left bank of the river is a sugar plantation, whose owner lives in the cooler mountains, a day’s journey away; on the right bank is a small clearing planted to sugar cane and yuca, and on the edge of it is a reed hut sheltering three inhabitants, the total population of Rosalina. The owner asked our destination, and to our reply that we should start in a few days for Pongo de Mainique he offered two serious objections. No one thought of arranging so difficult a journey in less than a month, for canoe and Indians were difficult to find, and the river trip was dangerous. Clearly, to start without the loss of precious time would require unusual exertion. We immediately despatched an Indian messenger to the owner of the small hacienda across the river while one of our peons carried a second note to a priest of great influence among the forest Indians, Padre Mendoza, then at his other home in the distant mountains.

The answer of Señor Morales was his appearance in person to offer the hospitality of his home and to assist us in securing canoe and oarsmen. To our note the Padre, from his hill-top, sent a polite answer and the offer of his large canoe if we would but guarantee its return. His temporary illness prevented a visit to which we had looked forward with great interest.

The morning after our arrival I started out on foot in company with our arriero in search of the Machigangas, who fish and hunt along the river bank during the dry season and retire to their hill camps when the heavy rains begin. We soon left the well-beaten trail and, following a faint woodland path, came to the river bank about a half day’s journey below Rosalina. There we found a canoe hidden in an overhanging arch of vines, and crossing the river met an Indian family who gave us further directions. Their vague signs were but dimly understood and we soon found ourselves in the midst of a carrizo (reed) swamp filled with tall bamboo and cane and crossed by a network of interlacing streams. We followed a faint path only to find ourselves climbing the adjacent mountain slopes away from our destination. Once again in the swamp we had literally to cut our way through the thick cane, wade the numberless brooks, and follow wild animal trails until, late in the day, famished and thirsty, we came upon a little clearing on a sand-bar, the hut of La Sama, who knew the Machigangas and their villages.

After our long day’s work we had fish and yuca, and water to which had been added a little raw cane sugar. Late at night La Sama returned from a trip to the Indian villages down river. He brought with him a half-dozen Machiganga Indians, boys and men, and around the camp fire that night gave us a dramatic account of his former trip down river. At one point he leaped to his feet, and with an imaginary pole shifted the canoe in a swift rapid, turned it aside from imminent wreck, and shouting at the top of his voice over the roar of the water finally succeeded in evading what he had made seem certain death in a whirlpool. We kept a fire going all night long for we slept upon the ground without a covering, and, strange as it may appear, the cold seemed intense, though the minimum thermometer registered 59° F. The next morning the whole party of ten sunned themselves for nearly an hour until the flies and heat once more drove them to shelter.

Returning to camp next day by a different route was an experience of great interest, because of the light it threw on hidden trails known only to the Indian and his friends. Slave raiders in former years devastated the native villages and forced the Indian to conceal his special trails of refuge. At one point we traversed a cliff seventy-five feet above the river, walking on a narrow ledge no wider than a man’s foot. At another point the dim trail apparently disappeared, but when we had climbed hand over hand up the face of the cliff, by hanging vines and tree roots, we came upon it again. Crossing the river in the canoe we had used the day before, we shortened the return by wading the swift Chirumbia waist-deep, and by crawling along a cliff face for nearly an eighth of a mile. At the steepest point the river had so under-cut the face that there was no trail at all, and we swung fully fifteen feet from one ledge to another, on a hanging vine high above the river.

After two days’ delay we left Rosalina late in the afternoon of August 7. My party included several Machiganga Indians, La Sama, and Dr. W. G. Erving, surgeon of the expedition. Mr. P. B. Lanius, Moscoso (the arriero), and two peons were to take the pack train as far as possible toward the rubber station at Pongo de Mainique where preparations were to be made for our arrival. At the first rapid we learned the method of our Indian boatmen. It was to run the heavy boat head on into shallow water at one side of a rapid and in this way “brake” it down stream. Heavily loaded with six men, 200 pounds of baggage, a dog, and supplies of yuca and sugar cane our twenty-five foot dugout canoe was as rigid as a steamer, and we dropped safely down rapid after rapid until long after dark, and by the light of a glorious tropical moon we beached our craft in front of La Sama’s hut at the edge of the cane swamp.

Here for five days we endured a most exasperating delay. La Sama had promised Indian boatmen and now said none had yet been secured. Each day Indians were about to arrive, but by nightfall the promise was broken only to be repeated the following morning. To save our food supply—we had taken but six days’ provisions—we ate yuca soup and fish and some parched corn, adding to this only a little from our limited stores. At last we could wait no longer, even if the map had to be sacrificed to the work of navigating the canoe. Our determination to leave stirred La Sama to final action. He secured an assistant named Wilson and embarked with us, planning to get Indians farther down river or make the journey himself.

On August 12, at 4.30 P.m., we entered upon the second stage of the journey. As we shot down the first long rapid and rounded a wooded bend the view down river opened up and gave us our first clear notion of the region we had set out to explore. From mountain summits in the clouds long trailing spurs descend to the river bank. In general the slopes are smooth-contoured and forest-clad from summit to base; only in a few places do high cliffs diversify the scenery. The river vista everywhere includes a rapid and small patches of playa or flood plain on the inside of the river curves. Although a true canyon hems in the river at two celebrated passes farther down, the upper part of the river flows in a somewhat open valley of moderate relief, with here and there a sentinel-like peak next the river.

A light shower fell at sunset, a typical late-afternoon downpour so characteristic of the tropics. We landed at a small encampment of Machigangas, built a fire against the scarred trunk of a big palm, and made up our beds in the open, covering them with our rubber ponchos. Our Indian neighbors gave us yuca and corn, but their neighborliness went no further, for when our boatmen attempted to sleep under their roofs they drove them out and fastened as securely as possible the shaky door of their hut.

All our efforts to obtain Indians, both here and elsewhere, proved fruitless. One excuse after another was overcome; they plainly coveted the trinkets, knives, machetes, muskets, and ammunition that we offered them; and they appeared to be friendly enough. Only after repeated assurances of our friendship could we learn the real reason for their refusal. Some of them were escaped rubber pickers that had been captured by white raiders several years before, and for them a return to the rubber country meant enslavement, heavy floggings, and separation from their numerous wives. The hardships they had endured, their final escape, the cruelty of the rubber men, and the difficult passage of the rapids below were a set of circumstances that nothing in our list of gifts could overcome. My first request a week before had so sharpened their memory that one of them related the story of his wrongs, a recital intensely dramatic to the whole circle of his listeners, including myself. Though I did not understand the details of his story, his tones and gesticulations were so effective that they held me as well as his kinsmen of the woods spellbound for over an hour.

It is appalling to what extent this great region has been depopulated by the slave raiders and those arch enemies of the savage, smallpox and malaria. At Rosalina, over sixty Indians died of malaria in one year; and only twenty years ago seventy of them, the entire population of the Pongo, were swept away by smallpox. For a week we passed former camps near small abandoned clearings, once the home of little groups of Machigangas. Even the summer shelter huts on the sand-bars, where the Indians formerly gathered from their hill homes to fish, are now almost entirely abandoned. Though our men carefully reconnoitered each one for fear of ambush, the precaution was needless. Below the Coribeni the Urubamba is a great silent valley. It is fitted by Nature to support numerous villages, but its vast solitudes are unbroken except at night, when a few families that live in the hills slip down to the river to gather yuca and cane.

By noon of the second day’s journey we reached the head of the great rapid at the mouth of the Sirialo. We had already run the long Coribeni rapid, visited the Indian huts at the junction of the big Coribeni tributary, exchanged our canoe for a larger and steadier one, and were now to run one of the ugliest rapids of the upper river. The rapid is formed by the gravel masses that the Sirialo brings down from the distant Cordillera Vilcapampa. They trail along for at least a half-mile, split the river into two main currents and nearly choke the mouth of the tributary. For almost a mile above this great barrier the main river is ponded and almost as quiet as a lake.

We let our craft down this rapid by ropes, and in the last difficult passage were so roughly handled by our almost unmanageable canoe as to suffer from several bad accidents. All of the party were injured in one way or another, while I suffered a fracture sprain of the left foot that made painful work of the rest of the river trip.

At two points below Rosalina the Urubamba is shut in by steep mountain slopes and vertical cliffs. Canoe navigation below the Sirialo and Coribeni rapids is no more hazardous than on the rapids of our northern rivers, except at the two “pongos” or narrow passages. The first occurs at the sharpest point of the abrupt curve shown on the map; the second is the celebrated Pongo de Mainique. In these narrow passages in time of high water there is no landing for long stretches. The bow paddler stands well forward and tries for depth and current; the stern paddler keeps the canoe steady in its course. When paddlers are in agreement even a heavy canoe can be directed into the most favorable channels. Our canoemen were always in disagreement, however, and as often as not we shot down rapids at a speed of twenty miles an hour, broadside on, with an occasional bump on projecting rocks or boulders whose warning ordinary boatmen would not let go unheeded.

The scenery at the great bend is unusually beautiful. The tropical forest crowds the river bank, great cliffs rise sheer from the water’s edge, their faces overhung with a trailing drapery of vines, and in the longer river vistas one may sometimes see the distant heights of the Cordillera Vilcapampa. We shot the long succession of rapids in the first canyon without mishap, and at night pitched our tent on the edge of the river near the mouth of the Manugali.

From the sharp peak opposite our camp we saw for the first time the phenomenon of cloud-banners. A light breeze was blowing from the western mountains and its vapor was condensed into clouds that floated down the wind and dissolved, while they were constantly forming afresh at the summit. In the night a thunderstorm arose and swept with a roar through the vast forest above us. The solid canopy of the tropical forest fairly resounded with the impact of the heavy raindrops. The next morning all the brooks from the farther side of the river were in flood and the river discolored. When we broke camp the last mist wraiths of the storm were still trailing through the tree-tops and wrapped about the peak opposite our camp, only parting now and then to give us delightful glimpses of a forest-clad summit riding high above the clouds.

The alternation of deeps and shallows at this point in the river and the well-developed canyon meanders are among the most celebrated of their kind in the world. Though shut in by high cliffs and bordered by mountains the river exhibits a succession of curves so regular that one might almost imagine the country a plain from the pattern of the meanders. The succession of smooth curves for a long distance across existing mountains points to a time when a lowland plain with moderate slopes drained by strongly meandering rivers was developed here. Uplift afforded a chance for renewed down-cutting on the part of all the streams, and the incision of the meanders. The present meanders are, of course, not the identical ones that were formed on the lowland plain; they are rather their descendants. Though they still retain their strongly curved quality, and in places have almost cut through the narrow spurs between meander loops, they are not smooth like the meanders of the Mississippi. Here and there are sharp irregular turns that mar the symmetry of the larger curves. The alternating bands of hard and soft rock have had a large part in making the course more irregular. The meanders have responded to the rock structure. Though regular in their broader features they are irregular and deformed in detail.

Deeps and shallows are known in every vigorous river, but it is seldom that they are so prominently developed as in these great canyons. At one point in the upper canyon the river has been broadened into a lake two or three times the average width of the channel and with a scarcely perceptible current; above and below the “laguna,” as the boatmen call it, are big rapids with beds so shallow that rocks project in many places. In the Pongo de Mainique the river is at one place only fifty feet wide, yet so deep that there is little current. It is on the banks of the quiet stretches that the red forest deer grazes under leafy arcades. Here, too, are the boa-constrictor trails several feet wide and bare like a roadway. At night the great serpents come trailing down to the river’s edge, where the red deer and the wildcat, or so-called “tiger,” are their easy prey.

It is in such quiet stretches that one also finds the vast colonies of water skippers. They dance continuously in the sun with an incessant motion from right to left and back again. Occasionally one dances about in circles, then suddenly darts through the entire mass, though without striking his equally erratic neighbors. An up-and-down motion still further complicates the effect. It is positively bewildering to look intently at the whirling multitude and try to follow their complicated motions. Every slight breath of wind brings a shock to the organization of the dance. For though they dance only in the sun, their favorite places are the sunny spots in the shade near the bank, as beneath an overhanging tree. When the wind shakes the foliage the mottled pattern of shade and sunlight is confused, the dance slows down, and the dancers become bewildered. In a storm they seek shelter in the jungle. The hot, quiet, sunlit days bring out literally millions of these tiny creatures.

One of the longest deeps in the whole Urubamba lies just above the Pongo at Mulanquiato. We drifted down with a gentle current just after sunset. Shrill whistles, like those of a steam launch, sounded from either bank, the strange piercing notes of the lowland cicada, cicada tibicen. Long decorated canoes, better than any we had yet seen, were drawn up in the quiet coves. Soon we came upon the first settlement. The owner, Señor Pereira, has gathered about him a group of Machigangas, and by marrying into the tribe has attained a position of great influence among the Indians. Upon our arrival a gun was fired to announce to his people that strangers had come, upon which the Machigangas strolled along in twos and threes from their huts, helped us ashore with the baggage, and prepared the evening meal. Here we sat down with five Italians, who had ventured into the rubber fields with golden ideas as to profits. After having lost the larger part of their merchandise, chiefly cinchona, in the rapids the year before, they had established themselves here with the idea of picking rubber. Without capital, they followed the ways of the itinerant rubber picker and had gathered “caucho,” the poorer of the two kinds of rubber. No capital is required; the picker simply cuts down the likeliest trees, gathers the coagulated sap, and floats it down-stream to market. After a year of this life they had grown restless and were venturing on other schemes for the great down-river rubber country.

Fig. 13—Composition of tropical vegetation in the rain forest above Pongo de Mainique, elevation 2,500 feet (760 m.). Scores of species occur within the limits of a single photograph.

Fig. 14—The mule trail in the rain forest between Rosalina and Pongo de Mainique. Each pool is from one and a half to two feet deep. Even in the dry season these holes are full of water, for the sunlight penetrates the foliage at a few places only.

Fig. 15—Topography and vegetation from the Tocate pass, 7,100 feet (2,164 m.), between Rosalina and Pongo de Mainique. See Fig. 53a. This is in the zone of maximum rainfall. The cumulo-nimbus clouds are typical and change to nimbus in the early afternoon.

Fig. 16—The Expedition’s thirty-foot canoe at the mouth of the Timpia below Pongo de Mainique.

A few weeks later, on returning through the forest, we met their carriers with a few small bundles, the only part of their cargo they had saved from the river. Without a canoe or the means to buy one they had built rafts, which were quickly torn to pieces in the rapids. We, too, should have said “pobres Italianos” if their venture had not been plainly foolish. The rubber territory is difficult enough for men with capital; for men without capital it is impossible. Such men either become affiliated with organized companies or get out of the region when they can. A few, made desperate by risks and losses, cheat and steal their way to rubber. Two years before our trip an Italian had murdered two Frenchmen just below the Pongo and stolen their rubber cargo, whereupon he was shot by Machigangas under the leadership of Domingo, the chief who was with us on a journey from Pongo de Mainique to the mouth of the Timpia. Afterward they brought his skull to the top of a pass along the forest trail and set it up on a cliff at the very edge of Machiganga-land as a warning to others of his kind.

At Mulanquiato we secured five Machigangas and a boy interpreter, and on August 17 made the last and most difficult portion of our journey. We found these Indians much more skilful than our earlier boatmen. Well-trained, alert, powerful, and with excellent team-play, they swept the canoe into this or that thread of the current, and took one after another of the rapids with the greatest confidence. No sooner had we passed the Sintulini rapids, fully a mile long, than we reached the mouth of the Pomareni. This swift tributary comes in almost at right angles to the main river and gives rise to a confusing mass of standing waves and conflicting currents rendered still more difficult by the whirlpool just below the junction. So swift is the circling current of the maëlstrom that the water is hollowed out like a great bowl, a really formidable point and one of our most dangerous passages; a little too far to the right and we should be thrown over against the cliff-face; a little too far to the left and we should be caught in the whirlpool. Once in the swift current the canoe became as helpless as a chip. It was turned this way and that, each turn heading it apparently straight for destruction. But the Indians had judged their position well, and though we seemed each moment in a worse predicament, we at last skimmed the edge of the whirlpool and brought our canoe to shore just beyond its rim.

A little farther on we came to the narrow gateway of the Pongo, where the entire volume of the river flows between cliffs at one point no more than fifty feet apart. Here are concentrated the worst rapids of the lower Urubamba. For nearly fifteen miles the river is an unbroken succession of rapids, and once within its walls the Pongo offers small chance of escape. At some points we were fortunate enough to secure a foothold along the edge of the river and to let our canoe down by ropes. At others we were obliged to take chances with the current, though the great depth of water in most of the Pongo rapids makes them really less formidable in some respects than the shallow rapids up stream. The chief danger here lies in the rotary motion of the water at the sharpest bends. The effect at some places is extraordinary. A floating object is carried across stream like a feather and driven at express-train speed against a solid cliff. In trying to avoid one of these cross-currents our canoe became turned midstream, we were thrown this way and that, and at last shot through three standing waves that half filled the canoe.

Below the worst rapids the Pongo exhibits a swift succession of natural wonders. Fern-clad cliffs border it, a bush resembling the juniper reaches its dainty finger-like stems far out over the river, and the banks are heavily clad with mosses. The great woods, silent, impenetrable, mantle the high slopes and stretch up to the limits of vision. Cascades tumble from the cliff summits or go rippling down the long inclines of the slate beds set almost on edge. Finally appear the white pinnacles of limestone that hem in the narrow lower entrance or outlet of the Pongo. Beyond this passage one suddenly comes out upon the edge of a rolling forest-clad region, the rubber territory, the country of the great woods. Here the Andean realm ends and Amazonia begins.

From the summits of the white cliffs 4,000 feet above the river we were in a few days to have one of the most extensive views in South America. The break between the Andean Cordillera and the hill-dotted plains of the lower Urubamba valley is almost as sharp as a shoreline. The rolling plains are covered with leagues upon leagues of dense, shadowy, fever-haunted jungle. The great river winds through in a series of splendid meanders, and with so broad a channel as to make it visible almost to the horizon. Down river from our lookout one can reach ocean steamers at Iquitos with less than two weeks of travel. It is three weeks to the Pacific via Cuzco and more than a month if one takes the route across the high bleak lava-covered country which we were soon to cross on our way to the coast at Camaná.