Chapter I: Front Matter

ACROSS THE
ANDES

BY
CHARLES JOHNSON POST

A Tale of Wandering Days Among the Mountains of Bolivia and the Jungles
of the Upper Amazon

_Illustrated by the Author_

NEW YORK
OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY
MCMXII

Copyright, 1912, by
OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY
All rights reserved

_Thanks are due to Harper and Brothers and to the Century Company for permission to incorporate as chapters in this volume, articles appearing in Harper's Magazine and The Century, and to the latter for the drawings and paintings accompanying such articles._

THE TROPICS

"The legion that never was listed,"
The soft-lilting rhythm and song,
The starlight, and shadowy tropics,
The palms--and all that belong;
The unknown that ever persisted
In dreams that were epics of bliss,
Of glory and gain without effort--
And the visions have faded, like this.

From dusk to dawn, when the heat is gone,
The home thoughts nestle and throb,
And the drifting breeze through the dim, gray trees
Stirs up the fancies wan
Of the old, cool life and a white man's wife
With a white man's babes on a lawn,
Where the soft greens please--yet each morrow sees
The flame that follows the dawn.

From dawn till eve the hot hours leave
Their mark like a slow-burned scar;
And a dull, red hate 'gainst the grilling fate,
Impulse and fevers weave;
While the days to come--in years their sum--
The helpless thoughts perceive
As an endless state, sans time or date,
That only gods relieve.

Rubber or gold--the game is old,
The lust and lure and venture;
And the trails gleam white in the tropic night
Where the restless spirits mould;
A vine-tied cross 'neath the festooned moss,
Bones in a matting rolled;
No wrong or right, the loss is slight,
The world-old fooled of gold.

"The legion that never was listed"--
The glamor of words in a song,
The lure of the strange and exotic,
The drift of the few from the throng;
The past that was never resisted
In the ebb or the flow of desire,
The foolish, the sordid, ambitious,
Now pay what the gods require.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
I. Old Panama, Agamemnon, and The Genial Picaroon 13
II. The Fighting Whale, and Chinamen in the Chicken Coop 27
III. Through a Tropical Quarantine 46
IV. A Forced March Across the Desert Of Atacama 62
V. Arequipa, the City of Churches 76
VI. Through the Inca Country 88
VII. Out of La Paz by Pack Train 103
VIII. The Back Trail Among the Aymarás 118
IX. Over the First Great Pass 131
X. The Toll Gate and Mapiri 145
XI. Waiting for the Leccos 159
XII. Off on the Long Drift 172
XIII. The Lecco Tribe 184
XIV. Drifting Down the Rio Mapiri 200
XV. Shooting the Ratama 214
XVI. Opening up the Jungle 224
XVII. Twenty-Three Days Against the Current 238
XVIII. By Pack Mule Through the Jungle 252
XIX. The Indian Uprising 266
XX. Ambushed by Ladrones 280
XXI. The Music of the Aymarás 289
XXII. Back Home 299
XXIII. Off Across the Continent in a Batalon 309
XXIV. Through the Rubber Country 321
XXV. A New Crew and Another Batalon 337
XXVI. The Falls of the Madeira and Home 350

ILLUSTRATIONS

Running the Rapids of the Ratama _Frontispiece_
PAGE
Announced that a person, a somebody, was awaiting me below 13
Pointed scornfully to the outside 15
Agamemnon 18
Those who refused to pay were thrown into the chicken coop 35
When the end lid was taken off the bodies of eight dead Chinamen were
taken out 37
A deserted brigantine at anchor dipped slowly with the long Pacific
swells 42
What the diplomat said was direct and voluble 49
A wide dusty canal which in the intervals between showers serves as a
market (_facing page_) 50
Close resemblance to an army of drunken bugs 52
Every day our winches whirred and clattered off some dusty, sand-blown
port (_facing page_) 54
Lima, a delightful city of contrasts 58
An Arequipa carrier 78
In Arequipa, the city of churches (_facing page_) 80
Hardly a day without its Saint's _fiesta_ 83
An Andean touring car 85
In Pizarro's day it was probably the same--costume, craft, and barter
(_facing page_) 100
Haggled with arrieros over pack mules 104
Prisoners along the trail up from La Paz (_facing page_) 106
Aymará driver of pack llamas 111
Members of a gang of prisoners 112
The guard for the road menders 114
Rodriguez and his Cholo helpers tightened the rawhide cinches and
replaced the packs 116
Aymará herders played their weird flutes 123
A few streets were still plainly marked, though the village has been
dead these many centuries (_facing page_) 128
Blizzards blowing from the Andean passes 133
Soldering the food in tin cans 138
Scattered in hysterical flight up and down the precipitous slope 141
Skirted the base of an unbroken cliff 142
Toll gate in Mapiri 145
An Andean mountaineer 146
There loomed the big mound of stones with a twig cross on top
(_facing page_) 148
Slowly the rafts sank under the weight 172
The shrewish, leather-skinned Indian wife 174
There were, according to the Lecco standards, no "bad places" yet 179
Leccos lowering the callapo through shallows 181
Lecco of the twig raft 182
These Leccos are among the finest Indians 184
Napoleon, a Lecco chief 188
A Lecco type 189
We seemed to move with intolerable slowness 203
But it is those parts of the river that the Leccos fairly love 209
A rubber picker 211
On a rope a trolley worked back and forth from which was suspended a
tiny platform 258
Never was there such a ride--not even in the Rapids of the Ratama
(_facing page_) 264
The Tacana brides, adjusted for themselves comfortable niches in the
cargo 314
At the tiller presided a huge Tacana 316
Never was such an exhibition in the history of firearms 319
But it was monkey that furnished them with the greatest delicacy 323
Often we pass a little shelter of palm leaves 326
Night camp on the Rio Beni on the way out (_facing page_) 328
It was only the shack of a lonely rubber picker 330
In the thin blue smoke, it at once turned a pale yellow 332
Justice is administered according to the standards of his submissive
domain 333
The bolachas of rubber are threaded on long ropes 348
Dragging a batalon around the portage of the Madeira Falls 351

ACROSS THE ANDES