Chapter XVIII · THE COLLASUYU, OR “UPPER” PERU (continued 2)

Meanwhile nine enormous carts, each drawn by six sleek and mighty mules, laden with all the bulky material required for railroad construction, to say nothing of my baggage, and covered in Forty-niner fashion, got under way. I set off ahead. The trail followed a broad, stony and sandy river-bed across which serpentined a yellow brook of brackish, luke-warm water which it was impossible by just two steps to cross dry-shod. The unfinished railroad flanked the barren, stony hills on the left, the embankment carved out of them being broken by unbuilt bridges and incomplete cuts and tunnels that cost me many a steep scramble. In the river-bed below passed a broken stream of Indians and cholos driving donkeys and mules, heavy-laden, as were most of the drivers themselves, their ponchos, chiefly of red with narrow perpendicular stripes, standing out against the barren brown landscape. Every little green patch on its edge was well-populated; many a hacienda or small village having become a railway construction camp where haughty young Englishmen gazed coldly and suspiciously at one of their race sinking his caste to travel on foot. The Briton who has “knocked about” the world until the corners have been blunted is an agreeable fellow; but in his youthful, fresh-from-London days he is best avoided.

The embankment gave out, and we struck a gorge where the carts 515were saved only by the vigilance of “Sandy,” astride his splendid macho, and the mules, as by a miracle. In the blazing, dusty, river-bed, sweat poured profusely as I plodded, clinging to the tail of a cart to be snatched across the ever-recurring stream. The towns were miserable, yet misery seems far less pitiful in perpetual summer. Worst of all, there was no water a man dared drink. The banks of the river were lined for broken spaces with large quantities of cobbles inside wire nets—an Argentine idea, according to the Scot—to keep the river from undermining and washing away the coming railroad. It seemed absurd to have to take such precautions against a tiny meandering brook, but in the rainy season this increases to a rushing torrent filling all the valley.

It was starving mid-afternoon before “Sandy” called a halt for “breakfast,” and the peons prepared a chupe,—a stew of potatoes, charqui, rice, and anything else that it occurred to them to toss into the pot. At sunset we camped like gypsies in the stony, wind-blown, waterless river-bed; the mules were turned loose among several heaps of straw carried in one of the carts, and we rolled up in blankets on the sand. The drivers were a motley gang of Bolivian, Argentine, and Chilian cholos, each with the accent peculiar to his nationality. All had long knives in their belts and were inclined to use them on slight provocation. Several carried their wives, or at least their women, with them in the carts, sometimes with a child or two in addition.

Next day as I plodded beside his long-legged mule, “Sandy” whiled away the long, hot hours with reminiscences.

“Did they tell you in Juliaca how I cleaned out their damned hotel,” he asked.

They had, but I wanted “Sandy’s” own version of the affair.

“Well, we were playing billiards, when some greaser said something about gringos, and I told him to shut up. The crowd was too drunk to know better, so I had to take a bunch of billiard-cues and clean out the thirty-two of them. It cost me just a hundred and twelve pounds—twelve for the greasers’ doctor-bills and a hundred to get my friend the subprefect to lie low until I could get over the line.

“Before the railway came I used to transport across the desert from Arica,” he went on, steering his mule around a hollow of broken rock, “and I had a little dog named Bobbie Burns. He was a wise little dog, and as the desert sand burned his feet he got still wiser, and used to run way ahead of me, a mile or so, so far he could just see me, and then dig a hole in the sand and lie in it until I was a 516mile ahead and almost out of sight again; and then he would race by me with a ‘how-d’-do’ yelp and dig another hole. A chileno greaser killed that little dog,” said “Sandy,” gazing dreamily across the mirage-flowing landscape, “and I never got a chance to do as much for him.”

The Capinota river we had been following, or rather criss-crossing, for two days came to an alfalfa-green village, exceedingly restful to eyes that had been gazing unbrokenly on the sun-flooded desert, and the trail struck off at right angles up a branch of a stream milky with dust. That night we camped again in the sand at the end of the haul, in celebration of which “Sandy” shaved and put on a purple neckcloth to scream at his red hair. There I took leave of him, with seventeen miles still separating me from Cochabamba. It was not the problem of transporting myself, but rather my baggage, that forced me to trot several times into blazing-hot Parotani in quest of a donkey—all in vain. At length—strange chances one takes in South America—I caught a total stranger bound for the city, and he was soon lost in the dust ahead, with all my possessions on the crupper of his mule. The sweating trail with its plaguing brook grew in time into a road on the left bank; huts, then entire villages sprang up beside me; troops of pack-animals increased to an almost steady stream, and at four I overtook my baggage in Vinto, recovered it by payment of a boliviano, and was soon screaming in a little toy train on a 75-centimeter-gage track, at the terrifying speed of an hour and forty minutes for the twelve miles, into the second city of Bolivia.

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