Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

At seven or eight miles' distance another streamlet was reached, named the Mamabamba. It is a slender affluent of the Cconi, to be called a rivulet in any country but South America, but here named a river with the same proud effrontery which designates as a _city_ any collection of a dozen huts thrown into the ravine of a mountain. The Mamabamba was crossed by an extemporized bridge, constructed on the spot by the ingenuity of Garcia and his men. Strange and incalculable was the engineering of Pepe Garcia. Sometimes, across one of these continually-occurring streams, he would throw a hastily-felled tree, over which, glazed as it was by a night's rain or by the humidity of the forest, he would invite the travelers to pass. Sometimes, to a couple of logs rotting on the banks he would nail cross-strips like the rungs of a ladder, and, while the torrent boiled at a distance below, pass jauntily with his Indians, more sure-footed than goats. The wider the abyss the more insecure the causeway; and the terrible rope-bridges of South America, or the still more conjectural throw of a line of woven roots, would meet the travelers wherever the cleft was so wide as to render timbering an inconvenient trouble. Occasionally, on one of these damp and moss-grown ladders, a peon's foot would slip, and down he would go, the load strapped on his back catching him as he was passing through the aperture: then, using his hands to hold on by, he would compose, on the spur of the moment, a new and original language or telegraphy of the legs, _kicking_ for assistance with all his might. Juan of Aragon was usually the hero to extricate these poor estrays from the false step they had taken, the other peons regarding the scene with their tranquil stolidity. A glass of brandy to the unfortunate would always compose his nerves again, and make him hope for a few more accidents of a like nature and bringing a like consolation.

The bridge of the Mamabamba conducted the party to a site of the same name, through an interval of forest where might be counted most of the varieties of tree proper to the equatorial highlands. Up to this point the vegetation everywhere abounding had not indicated the presence, or even the vicinage, of the cinchona. The only circumstance which brought it to the notice of the inexperienced leaders of the expedition would be a halt made from time to time by the Bolivian bark-hunters. The examinador and his cascarilleros, touching one tree or another with their hatchets, would exchange remarks full of meaning and mysteriousness; but when the colonel or Mr. Marcoy came to ask the significance of so many hints and signals, they got the invariable answer of Sister Anna to the wife of Bluebeard: "I see nothing but the forest turning green and the sun turning red." The most practical reminder of the quest of cinchona which the travelers found was an occasional _ajoupa_ alone in the wilderness, with a broken pot and a rusted knife or axe beneath it--witness that some eager searcher had traveled the road before themselves. The cascarilleros are very avaricious and very brave, going out alone, setting up a hut in a probable-looking spot, and diverging from their head-quarters in every direction. If by any accident they get lost or their provisions are destroyed, they die of hunger. Doctor Weddell, on one occasion in Bolivia, landed on the beach of a river well shaded with trees. Here he found the cabin of a cascarillero, and near it a man stretched out upon the ground in the agonies of death. He was nearly naked, and covered with myriads of insects, whose stings had hastened his end. On the leaves which formed the roof of the hut were the remains of the unfortunate man's clothes, a straw hat and some rags, with a knife, an earthen pot containing the remains of his last meal, a little maize and two or three _chuñus_. Such is the end to which their hazardous occupation exposes the bark-collectors--death in the midst of the forests, far from home; a death without help and without consolation.

It was not until after passing the elevated site of San Pedro, and clambering up the slippery shoulders of the hill called Huaynapata--the crossing of half a dozen intervening streamlets going for nothing--that the explorers were rewarded with a sight of their Canaan, the bark-producing region. To attain this summit of Huaynapata, however, the little tributary of Mendoza had to be first got over. This affluent of the Cconi, flowing in from the south-south-west, was very sluggish as far as it could be seen. Its banks, interrupted by large rocks clothed with moss, offered now and then promontories surrounded at the base with a bluish shade. At the end of the vista, a not very extensive one, a quantity of blocks of sandstone piled together resembled a crumbling wall. Other blocks were sprinkled over the bed of the stream; and by their aid the examinador and the colonel hopped valiantly over the Mendoza, leaving the peons, who were less afraid of rheumatism and more in danger of slipping, to ford the current at the depth of their suspender-buttons.

It was on the top of Huaynapata, while the interpreters built a fire and prepared for supper a peccary killed upon the road, that Marcoy observed the examinador holding with his Bolivians a conversation in the Aymara dialect, in which could be detected such words as _anaranjada_ and _morada_. These were the well-known commercial names of two species of cinchona. The historiographer interrupted their conversation to ask if anything had yet been discovered.

"Nothing yet," replied the examinador; "and this valley of the Cconi must be bewitched, for with the course that we have taken we should long ago have discovered what we are after. But this place looks more favorable than any we have met. I shall beat up the woods to-morrow with my men, and may my patron, Saint Lorenzo, return again to his gridiron if we do not date our first success in quinine-hunting from this very hillock of Huaynapata!"

The above style of threatening the saints is thought very efficacious in all Spanish countries. Whether or not Saint Lawrence really dreaded another experience of broiling, at the end of certain hours the Bolivians reappeared, and their chief deposited in the hands of the colonel a few green and tender branches. At the joyful shout of Perez, the man of letters, who had been occupied in making a sketch, came running up. Two different species of cinchona were the trophy brought back by Lorenzo, like the olive-leaves in the beak of Noah's dove. One of these specimens was a variety of the _Carua-carua,_ with large leaves heavily veined: the other was an individual resembling those quinquinas which the botanists Ruiz and Pavon have discriminated from the cinchonas, to make a separate family called the _Quinquina cosmibuena._ After all, the discovery was rather an indication than a conquest of value. The examinador admitted as much, but observed that the presence of these baser species always argued the neighborhood of genuine quinine-yielding plants near by.

In the presence of this first success on the part of the exploration set on foot by Don Juan Sanz de Santo Domingo, we may insert a few words on the nature of the wonderful plant toward which its researches were directed.

It is doubtful whether the aboriginal inhabitants of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador were acquainted with the virtues of the cinchona plant as a febrifuge. It seems probable, nevertheless, that the Indians of Loxa, two hundred and thirty miles south of Peru, were aware of the qualities of the bark, for there its use was first made known to Europeans. It was forty years after the pacification of Peru however, before any communication of the remedial secret was made to the Spaniards. Joseph de Jussieu reports that in 1600 a Jesuit, who had a fever at Malacotas, was cured by Peruvian bark. In 1638 the countess Ana of Chinchon was suffering from tertian fever and ague at Lima, whither she had accompanied the viceroy, her husband. The corregidor of Loxa, Don Juan Lopez de Canizares, sent a parcel of powdered quinquina bark to her physician, Juan de Vega, assuring him that it was a sovereign and infallible remedy for "tertiana." It was administered to the countess, who was sixty-two years of age, and effected a complete cure. This countess, returning with her husband to Spain in 1640, brought with her a quantity of the healing bark. Hence it was sometimes called "countess's bark" and "countess's powder." Her famous cure induced Linnaeus, long after, to name the whole genus of quinine-bearing trees, in her honor, _Cinchona_. By modern writers the first _h_ has usually been dropped, and the word is now almost invariably spelled in that way, instead of the more etymological _Chinchona_. The Jesuits afterward made great and effective use of it in their missionary expeditions, and it was a ludicrous result of their patronage that its use should have been for a long time opposed by Protestants and favored by Catholics. In 1679, Louis XIV. bought the secret of preparing quinquina from Sir Robert Talbor, an English doctor, for two thousand louis-d'or, a large pension and a title. Under the Grand Monarch it was used at dessert, mingled with Spanish wine. The delay of its discovery until the seventeenth century has probably lost to the world numbers of valuable lives. Had Alexander the Great, who died of the common remittent fever of Babylon, been acquainted with cinchona bark, his death would have been averted and the partition of the Macedonian empire indefinitely postponed. Oliver Cromwell was carried off by an ague, which the administration of quinine would easily have cured. The bigotry of medical science, even after its efficacy was known and proved, for a long time retarded its dissemination. In 1726, La Fontaine, at the instance of a lady who owed her life to it, the countess of Bouillon, composed a poem in two cantos to celebrate its virtues; but the remarkable beauty of the leaves of the cinchona and the delicious fragrance of its flowers, with allusions to which he might have adorned his verses, were still unknown in Europe.

The cinchonas under favorable circumstances become large trees: at present, however, in any of the explored and exploited regions of their growth, the shoots or suckers of the plants are all that remain. Wherever they abound they form the handsomest foliage of the forest. The leaves are lanceolate, glossy and vividly green, traversed by rich crimson veins: the flowers hang in clustering pellicles, like lilacs, of deep rose-color, and fill the vicinity with rich perfume. Nineteen varieties of cinchonae have been established by Doctor Weddell. The cascarilleros of South America divide the species into a category of colors, according to the tinge of the bark: there are yellow, red, orange, violet, gray and white cinchonas. The yellow, among which figure the _Cinchona calisaya, lancifolia, condaminea, micrantha, pubescens,_ etc., are placed in the first rank: the red, orange and gray are less esteemed. This arrangement is in proportion to the abundance of the alkaloid _quinine,_ now used in medicine instead of the bark itself.

The specimens found by the examinador were carefully wrapped in blankets, and the march was resumed. After a slippery descent of the side of Huaynapata and the passage of a considerable number of babbling streams--each of which gave new occasion for the colonel to show his ingenuity in getting over dry shod, and so sparing his threatening rheumatism--the cry of "Sausipata!" was uttered by Pepe Garcia. Two neat mud cabins, each provided with a door furnished with the unusual luxury of a wooden latch, marked the plantation of Sausipata. The situation was level, and within the enclosing walls of the forest could be seen a plantation of bananas, a field of sugar-cane, with groves of coffee, orange-orchards and gardens of sweet potato and pineapple. The white visitors could not refrain from an exclamation of surprise at the neatness and civilization of such an Eden in the desert. At this point, Juan of Aragon, who had been going on ahead, turned around with an air of splendid welcome, and explained that the farm belonged to his uncle, the gobernador of Marcapata, who prayed them to make themselves at home. Introducing his guests into the largest of the houses, Juan presented them with some fine ripe fruit which he culled from the garden. Colonel Perez, who never lost occasion to give a sly stab to the mozo, asked, as he peeled a banana, if he was duly authorized to dispose so readily of the property of his uncle: the youth, without losing a particle of his magnificent adolescent courtesy, replied that as nephew and direct heir of the governor of Marcapata it was a right which he exercised in anticipation of inheritance; and that just as Pepe Garcia, the interpreter-in-chief, had regaled the party in his residence, he, Juan of Aragon, proposed to do in the family grange of Sausipata.

Meantime, the examinador, who had pushed forward with his men, returned with a couple more specimens of quinquina, which they had discovered close by in clambering amongst the forest. Neither had flowers, but the one was recognizable by its flat leaf as the species called by the Indians _ichu-cascarilla,_ from the grain _ichu_ amongst which it is usually found at the base of the Cordilleras; and the other, from its fruit-capsules two inches in length, as the _Cinchona acutifolia_ of Ruiz and Pavon. To moderate the pleasures of this discovery, the examinador came up leaning upon the shoulder of his principal assistant, Eusebio, complaining of a frightful headache, and a weakness so extreme that he could not put one foot before the other.

The sudden illness of their botanist-in-chief cast a gloom upon the party, and utterly spoiled the festive intentions of young Aragon. Lorenzo was put to bed, from which retreat, at midnight, his fearful groans summoned the colonel to his side. The latter found him tossing and murmuring, but incapable of uttering a word. His faithful Eusebio, at the head of the bed, answered for him. The honest fellow feared lest his master might have caught again a touch of the old fever which had formerly attacked him in searching for cascarillas in the environs of Tipoani in Bolivia. These symptoms, recurring in the lower valleys of the Cconi, would make it impossible for the brave explorer safely to continue with the party. As the mestizo propounded this inconvenient theory, a new burst of groans from the examinador seemed to confirm it. The grave news brought all the party to the sick bed. Colonel Perez, whom the touching comparison of wives made in the hammocks of Morayaca had sensibly attached to Lorenzo, endeavored to feel his pulse; but the patient, drawing in his hand by a peevish movement, only rolled himself more tightly in his blanket, and increased his groans to roars. Presently, exhausted by so much agony, he fell into a slumber.

In the morning the examinador, in a dolorous voice, announced that he should be obliged to return to Cuzco. This resolution might have seemed the obstinate delirium of the fever but for the mournful and pathetic calmness of the victim. Eusebio, he said, should return with him as far as Chile-Chile, where a conveyance could be had; and he himself would give such explicit instructions to the cascarilleros that nothing would be lost by his absence to the purposes of the expedition. Yielding to pity and friendship, the colonel gave in his adhesion to the plan, and even proposed his own hammock as a sort of palanquin, and the loan of a pair of the peons for bearers. They could return with Eusebio to Sausipata, where the party would be obliged to wait for the three. After sketching out his plan, Colonel Perez looked for approval to Mr. Marcoy, and received an affirmative nod. The proposition seemed so agreeable to the sick man that already an alleviation of his misery appeared to be superinduced. He even smiled intelligently as he rolled into the hammock. In a very short time he made a sort of theatrical exit, borne in the hammock like an invalid princess, and fanned with a palm branch out of the garden by the faithful Eusebio.

"Poor devil!" said Perez as the mournful procession departed: "who knows if he will ever see his dear wife at Sorata, or if he will even live to reach Chile-Chile?"

"Do you really think him in any such danger?" asked the more suspicious Marcoy.

"Danger! Did you not see his miserable appearance as he left us?"

"I saw an appearance far from miserable, and therefore I am convinced that the man is no more sick than you or I."

On hearing such a heartless heresy the colonel stepped back from his comrade with a shocked expression, and asked what had given him such an idea.

"A number of things, of which I need only mention the principal. In the first place, the man's sickness falling on him like a thunder-clap; next, his haste in catching back his hand when you tried to feel his pulse; and then his smile, at once happy and mischievous, when you offered him the peons and he found his stratagem succeeding beyond his hopes."

"Why, now, to think of it!" said the colonel sadly; "but what could have been his motive?"

"This gentleman is too delicate to sustain our kind of life," suggested Marcoy. "He is tired of skinning his hands and legs in our service, and eating peccary, monkey and snails as we do. His Bolivians are perhaps quite as useful for our service, and while he is rioting at Cuzco we may be enriching ourselves with cinchonas."

In effect, on the return of the peons ten days after, the examinador was reported to have got quit of his fever shortly after leaving Sausipata, and to have borne the journey to Chile-Chile remarkably well. He charged his men to take back his compliments and the regrets he felt, at not being able to keep with the company.

Nothing detained the band longer at Sausipata. The ten days of hunting, botanizing, butterfly-catching and sketching had been an agreeable relief, and young Aragon had assumed, with sufficient grace, the task of attentive host and first player on the charango. The returning porters had scarcely enjoyed two hours of repose when the caravan took up its march once more.

As usual, the interpreters assumed the head of the command: the Indians followed pellmell. Observing that some of them lingered behind, Mr. Marcoy had the curiosity to return on his steps. What was his surprise to find these honest fellows running furiously through the farm, and devastating with all their might those plantations which were the pride and the hope of the nephew of Aragon! They had already laid low several cocoa groves, torn up the sugar-canes, broken down the bananas, and sliced off the green pineapples.

Indignant at such vandalism, Marcoy caught the first offender by the plaited tails at the back of the neck. "What are you doing?" he cried.

"I am neither crazy nor drunk, Taytachay" (dear little father), calmly explained the peon with his placid smile. "But my fellows and I don't want to be sent any more to work at Sausipata." As the white man regarded him with stupefaction, "Thou art strange here," pursued the Indian, "and canst know nothing about us. Promise not to tell Aragon, and I will make thee wise."

"Why Aragon more than anybody else?" asked Marcoy.

"Because Senor Aragon is nephew to Don Rebollido, the governor, and Sausipata belongs to Rebollido; and if he were to learn what we have done, we should be flogged and sent to prison to rot."

The explanation, drawn out with many threats when the Indians had been driven from their work of ruin and placed once more in line of march, was curious.

The able gobernador of Marcapata had had the sagacious idea of making the local penitentiary out of his farm of Sausipata! It was cultivated entirely by the labor of his culprits. When culprits were scarce, the chicha-drinkers, the corner-loungers, became criminals and disturbers of the peace, for whom a sojourn at Sausipata was the obvious cure. Aragon, the nephew, shared his uncle's ability, and visited the plantation month by month. But the life in this paradise was not relished by the convicts. The regimen was strict, the food everywhere abounding, was not for them, and the vicinity of the wild Chunchos was not reassuring. Often a peon would appear in the market-place of Marcapata wrapped merely in a banana leaf, which, cracking in the sun, reduced all pretence of decent covering to an irony. This evidence of the spoliation of a Chuncho would be received in the worst possible part by the gobernador, who would beat the complainant back to his servitude, remarking with ingenuity that Providence was more responsible for the acts of the savages than he was.

This strange history, told with profound earnestness, was enough to make any one laugh, but Marcoy could not be blind to its side of oppression and tyranny. This was the way, then, that the humble and primitive gobernador, who had presented himself to the travelers barefoot, was enriching himself by the knaveries of office! Marcoy could not take heart to inform Juan of Aragon of the devastation behind him, but on the other hand he resolved to correct the abuse on his return by appeal, if necessary, to the prefect of Cuzco.

A frightful night in a deserted hut on a site called Jimiro--where Marcoy had for mattress the legs of one of the porters, and for pillow the back of a bark-hunter--followed the exodus from Sausipata. The Guarapascana, the Saniaca, the Chuntapunco, flowing into the Cconi on opposite sides, were successively left behind our adventurers, and they bowed for an instant before the tomb of a stranger, "a German from Germany," as Pepe Garcia said, "who pretended to know the language of the Chunchos, and who interpreted for himself, but who starved in the wilderness near the heap of stones you see." Leaving this resting-place of an interpreter who had interpreted so little, the party attained a stream of rather unusual importance. The reputed gold-bearing river of Ouitubamba rolled from its tunnel before them, exciting the most visionary schemes in the mind of Colonel Perez, to whom its auriferous reputation was familiar. Nothing would do but that the California process of "panning" must be carried out in these Peruvian waters, and the peons, _multum reluctantes,_ were summoned to the task, with all the crow-bars and shovels possessed by the expedition, supplemented by certain sauce-pans and dishes hypothecated from the culinary department. The issue of the stream from under a crown of indigenous growths was the site of this financial speculation. Pepe Garcia was placed at the head of the enterprise. A long ditch was dug, revealing milky quartz, ochres and clay. The deceptive hue of the yellow earth made the search a long and tantalizing one. At the moment when the colonel, attracted by something glistening in the large frying-pan which he was agitating at the edge of the stream, uttered an exclamation which drew all heads into the cavity of his receptacle, an answering sound from the heavens caused everybody suddenly to look up. An equatorial storm had gathered unnoticed over their heads. In a few minutes a solid sheet of warm rain, accompanied by a furious tornado sweeping through the valley, caused whites and Indians to scatter as if for their lives. The golden dream of Colonel Perez and the similar vision entertained by Pepe Garcia were dissipated promptly by this answer of the elements. On attaining the neighboring sheds of Maniri the gold--seekers abandoned their implements without remark to the services of the cooks, and betook themselves to wringing out their stockings as if they had never dreamed of walking in silver slippers through the streets of Cuzco. They made no further attempt to wring gold from the mouth of the Ouitubamba. As for Maniri, it was the last site or human resting-place of any, the very most trivial, kind before the opening of the utter wilderness which proceeded to accompany the course of the Cconi River.

The Bolivians imagined an exploration of a little stream on the left bank, the Chuntapunco, which they thought might issue from a quinine-bearing region. They built a little raft, and departed with provisions for three or four days. They returned, in fact, after a week's absence, with seven varieties of cinchona--the _hirsuta, lanceolata, purpurea_ and _ovata_ of Ruiz and Pavon, and three more of little value and unknown names.

During the absence of the cascarilleros a flat calm reigned in the ajoupa of Maniri. Garcia and the colonel, the day after their unproductive gold-hunt, betook themselves into the forest, ostensibly for game, but in reality to review their hopeful labors by the banks of the Ouitubamba. Aragon was detailed by Mr. Marcoy to accompany him in his botanical and entomological tours. On these excursions the acquaintance between the mozo and the señor was considerably developed. The youth had naturally a gay and confident disposition, and added not a little to the liveliness of the trips. Marcoy profited by their stricter connection to converse with him about the cultivation of the farm at Sausipata, making use of a venial deception to let him think that the plan of operations had been communicated by the governor himself. Aragon modestly replied that the plantation in question was only the first of a series of similar clearings contemplated by his uncle at various points in the valley. Arrangements made for this purpose with the governors of Ocongata and Asaroma, who were pledged with their support in return for heavy presents, would enable him soon to cultivate coffee and sugar and cocoa at once in a number of haciendas. The enterprise was a splendid one; and if God--Aragon pronounced the name without a particle of diffidence--deigned to bless it, the day was coming when the fortune of his uncle, solidly established, would make him the pride and the joy of the region.

It may as well be mentioned here that the subsequent career of the chest-nut-colored interpreter is not entirely unknown. In 1860, Mr. Clement Markham, collecting quinine-plants for the British government, came upon a splendid hacienda thirty miles from the village of Ayapata, in a valley of the Andes near the scene of this exploration. Here, on the sugar-cane estate named San José de Bellavista, he discovered "an intelligent and enterprising Peruvian" named Aragon, who appears to have been none other than our interpreter escaped from the chrysalis. His establishment was very large, and protected from the savages by two rivers, Aragon had made a mule-road of thirty miles to the village. He found the manufacture of spirits for the sugar-cane more profitable than digging for gold in the Ouitubamba or hunting for cascarillas along the Cconi. In 1860 he sent an expedition into the forest after wild cocoa-plants. An india-rubber manufactory had only failed for want of government assistance. He contemplated the establishment of a line of steamers on the neighboring rivers to carry off the commerce of his plantations. "Any scheme for developing the resources of the country is sure to receive his advocacy," says Mr. Markham: "it would be well for Peru if she contained many such men."

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

PROBATIONER LEONHARD;

OR, THREE NIGHTS IN THE HAPPY VALLEY.