Across the Andes

The hot days drifted by in easy sociability, dividing themselves into a pliant routine. The morning was devoted to golf on the canvas covered deck over a nine-hole course chalke...

One morning when the official sanitary junta--the port doctor, the town druggist, and three shopkeepers, all of whom except the first, were contentedly selling us supplies--were...

These Leccos are among the finest Indians, or semi-civilized savages, I have met. They are sturdy and muscular, with a distinctly Malaysian suggestiveness, and very superior to...

Slowly at first we rose, skirting the great foothills or gently ascending valleys and always crossing some dismantled relic of the dead Inca empire. Then we plunged boldly into...

It was useless to attempt to battle with the river further. Above, before Mapiri could be reached, were narrower cañons where there were only handholds and often not that, where...

It was in the cold dusk of the high altitude and tingling with the chill winds that blew from Mount Sorata when we clattered through the streets of Achicachi. Little crystals of...

The stand-by bell of the _Limari_ tinkled from her engine-room, our baggage and freight were safely stowed in the wallowing Peruvian lanchas alongside, and the Bolivian mail fol...

Among the Cholo workmen it developed that each preferred to cook for himself with his own little pot and over his own individual fire. It was too great a waste of time and energ...

Packing the mules in the bitter winter dawn was slow work. The rawhide lashings were frozen stiff; our saddles were covered with sleet, before we could mount and swing into them...

The next day the river was harder and steeper and the banks offered more difficulties either for poling or dragging. From one side to the other we shifted, losing hundreds of ya...

At first the plateau was dotted with the lines of converging burro- and llama-trains, but, as the morning passed, there was nothing but the lonely distance of the plateau, with...

FOR a month we waited in this tiny straggling rectangle of thatched huts before the _balsas_ or _callapos_ could get up to us to move our outfit down the river. Somewhere below...

As we tied up, the next day, I saw the crew quietly sneaking their bows and arrows and feeble shot-guns out of the batalon. I stopped them, and, buckling on my cartridge-belt, p...

That night we made camp on a sand bar in one of the more open reaches of water and close to the river's edge. With their short machetes the Leccos cut some canes, unlashed our t...

Here in La Paz were completed the final arrangements for reaching the interior; this was the last of the easy traveling, from now on it would be by pack train and saddle, raft a...

One night we made no camp at sunset, but steadily paddled in the darkness; for the journey was nearly over for the Tacanas, and their paddles dipped in happy, eager rhythm. Then...

The intermittent fog and mist turned to a cold rain that drove in stinging gusts square in our faces. Slowly we climbed, and went a few miles beyond the divide. A huge pile of l...

It was in Panama--the old Panama--and in front of the faded and blistered hotel that I met him again. A bare-footed, soft-voiced mozo had announced that a person, a somebody, wa...

Slowly cataract after cataract was passed Madeira, Misericordia, Riberon--with three long portages that consumed a day and a half--Araras, Tres Hermanos, Perdonera, Paredon, Cal...

A clumsy cart, with its two wheels cross-cut from a single mahogany log, and slowly dragged by a pair of mud covered oxen, crawled across the open space before the settlement th...

The baking heat of the desert boiled in through the open doors of the freight car, the blazing sun beat down upon the roof, and, inside, a thousand essences from its variegated...

A long line of half-naked Leccos trotted across the grass-covered bluff and disappeared over the edge and down the steep path to the river, where our clumsy rafts swung and eddi...

At daybreak we left the Ysipuri barraca and emptying our rifles in salute to the Englishman's Winchester, we started on for the next rapids, the greatest rapids on the river--th...

More difficulty developed when I, in an amiable frame of mind bought a chance in a watch from a Sorata man, for when a man moves from a village he raffles off all his household...

Early in the morning I was off; some of the celebrants of the night before were strewn along the streets, still drunk, and among them the sociable hogs rooted or wandered. The h...

This Indian music is interesting and I was fortunate in being able to have some preserved in musical form for repetition. In the remains of the vast Indian nation shattered by P...