CHAPTER V

LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT

Bolivia was for two centuries after the Spanish Conquest a part of Peru and has neither natural boundaries nor any distinctive physical character to mark it off from its neighbours, Peru on the northwest and Argentina on the southeast. It is an artificial creation, whose separate national existence is due to two events. After the Jesuits had, by the king of Spain's decree in 1769, been forced out of Paraguay, which they had ruled with considerable success for many years, the Spanish government found that it was more and more difficult to administer from Lima their vast southeastern dominions lying to the east of the Andes, since these were then becoming more and more exposed to contact with European nations, reaching them across the Atlantic. Accordingly, they created, in 1776, the viceroyalty of Buenos Aires and assigned to it all the River Plate countries, while for the southeastern parts of what had hitherto been upper Peru they set up a separate administrative authority with the seat of its _audiencia_ at Chuquisaca. Then came the War of Independence. When that struggle ended with the decisive battle of Ayacucho, in 1824, and the surrender of Lima and Callao, the triumphant revolutionary leaders determined to maintain the political separation from Peru of this southern region, which had been under the audiencia of Chuquisaca, and to constitute a distinct republic lying between Peru and Argentina. To this new creation the name of Bolivia was given in honour of Simon Bolivar, the "Liberator," himself a Venezuelan. Independent it has since then remained, having, however, lost in an unfortunate war with Chile a large slice of territory adjoining the Pacific. It is now, except Paraguay, the only entirely inland state in South America. And just as on no side has it anything that can be called a natural frontier, neither have its inhabitants any distinctive quality or character to distinguish them sharply from other peoples. They differ but little from the Andean Peruvians, being of similarly mixed Spanish and Indian blood and living under similar physical conditions.

Bolivia includes several regions quite different in their character. Nearly all the western part is a desert, with a few mining towns scattered here and there, a desert enclosed by the two great almost parallel Cordilleras of the Andes. The southeastern part is a plateau, or rather succession of plateaux, lying on the eastern side of the Eastern Cordillera, and gradually sinking into those vast levels on the borders of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil, from which rivers flow northward into the Amazon and southward to form the Paraná and Rio de la Plata. Much of this region is too dry or too rugged for cultivation or even for ranching. Yet much is also valuable for one or other purpose, and capable of supporting an agricultural population as well as that which lives off the mines. The third or northeastern region is a part of the great Amazonian low forest-covered country,--the so-called Selvas (woodlands),--which stretches out to the east from the declivities of the Eastern Cordillera, and is still, save for a few white settlements, inhabited only by wild Indians. Thus in the enormous total area of Bolivia, 605,000 square miles, there are only 2,000,000 people, and the large majority of these are Indians, uncivilized in the forests, semicivilized in the other regions. The white population, estimated at 200,000, most of whom, however, have some Indian blood, is virtually confined to a few towns, only one of which, La Paz, has more than 25,000 people. Santa Cruz (de la Sierra), far out in the eastern lowlands, and Chuquisaca, now called Sucre, Cochabamba, and Potosi, with its wonderful mountain of silver, have some families of Spanish blood. Oruro and Uyuni in the desert are mining towns with the mixed population that gathers in such places. La Paz, the largest city, and virtually, though not officially, the capital, has 50,000 inhabitants, the bulk of whom are Indians. These six towns are far apart, there are few inhabitants between them, and these are nearly all Indians. Till the railroad from Uyuni by Oruro to La Paz was made, communication was very slow and difficult. Anyone can see what obstacles to economic and political progress such conditions create.

The traveller who approaches La Paz from Lake Titicaca--and this has been the usual route from the coast--rises slowly through the bare hills amidst which Tiahuanaco stands till he emerges on an immense level, stretching south to a distant horizon, and bounded on the west by bare rolling mountains and on the east by the still loftier Eastern Cordillera. Here in the bleakest spot imaginable, about 13,000 feet above sea-level, the railway from Guaqui, the port on Titicaca, meets the railway from Antofagasta, the Chilean port on the Pacific, four hundred miles away to the south, and this is the point to which a third railway is now converging, that which is being built to connect La Paz with Arica on the Pacific, one hundred miles to the west. From this point, called Viacha, the route turns eastward towards the Cordillera, the line climbing slowly in wide sweeps over the dusty and shrubless plateau on whose thin grass sheep are browsing. There is not a house visible and the smooth slope seems to run right up against the mountain wall beyond. Where can La Paz be? asks the traveller. Presently, however, he perceives strings of llamas and donkeys and wayfarers on foot moving along the slope towards a point where they all suddenly vanish and are no more seen. Then a spot is reached where the railway itself seems to end between a few sheds. He gets out and walks a few yards to the east and then suddenly pulls up with a start on the edge of a yawning abyss. Right beneath him, fifteen hundred feet below, a grey, red-roofed city fills the bottom of a gorge and climbs up its sides on both banks of the torrent that foams through it. Every street and square, every yard and garden, is laid out under the eye as if on a map, and one almost seems to hear the rattle of vehicles over stony pavements coming faintly up through the thin air.

I had often heard La Paz described as lying in a deep rift of volcanic origin, due to a sudden subsidence in the course of an eruption, or perhaps to an earthquake. Such a hypothesis seemed natural in a land of earthquakes and volcanoes. But there is no trace here of any volcanic action, whether eruption or disruption. This _barranca_--it is the Spanish name for such a hollow--has evidently been scooped out by the action of water. The sloping plateau up which the railway rises from Viacha is an immensely thick alluvial or lacustrine deposit of earth and gravel, doubtless formed in the days when the whole region between the Eastern and Western Cordilleras formed part of a far larger Lake Titicaca. The torrent which comes down from the snows of the Cordillera Real to the north has cut its way down through this deposit and thus formed the "gulch," to use the word which, in western North America, is appropriated to gorges hollowed out by streams. The sides of the hollow are all of earth, extremely hard, and in many places almost precipitous, but there is no rock, certainly no igneous rock, visible anywhere.

How did so strange a site come to be chosen? Apparently in the first instance because gold had been found in the earth along the river, and the Spaniards set the Indians to wash it out for them. This industry has long been abandoned; but the spot, first settled in or about 1548, when the civil wars among the Conquistadores were ended by capture and execution of Gonzalo Pizarro, and called Our Lady of Peace, was recommended for continued occupation by its having a copious and perennial stream, by its sheltered position, and by its standing at the opening of a deep ravine through which a track leads down along the banks of the river, into the forest country on the east. Through this ravine it is supposed that Lake Titicaca formerly sent its surplus waters to the Atlantic. No spot within many a mile is so well protected from the fierce winds that sweep over the plateau. Up there nothing will rise three feet from the ground. Down below flowers are grown and trees can be coaxed up to give shade and put forth branches in which birds can sing.

From the edge of the _barranca_--it is called the "Alto"--electric cars descend into the city by a track which doubles hither and thither in zigzags along the face of the almost precipitous declivity. The line has been skilfully laid out, and as the cars are light and fitted with powerful brakes, the descent is perfectly safe, steep as is the grade. Such a railway is, of course, not capable of carrying heavy goods traffic; but there is not, and may not for a long while be, any great quantity of heavy traffic to carry. The new line, which is to connect the city with the coast at Arica, is meant to have its terminal station at the southern end of the _barranca_, where descent from above is somewhat easier.

La Paz has the distinction of being the loftiest capital city in the world, as it stands 12,470 feet above sea-level, more than 2000 feet higher than Quito, and 5000 feet higher than Mexico. Lhasa in Tibet comes next to it at 11,830 feet. The mean annual temperature is 50 degrees Fahrenheit. The keen air which this elevation gives has a fine, bracing quality, yet there are disadvantages. One is never warm except when actually in the sunlight, and there are no fires, indeed, hardly any fireplaces, partly, no doubt, because there is nothing to burn, the country being treeless and coal far distant. The inhabitants get accustomed to these conditions and shiver in their ponchos, but the traveller is rather wretched after sunset, and feels how natural was Sun worship in such a country. So thin is the air that people with weak hearts or narrow chests cannot live here. An attack of pneumonia is rapidly fatal, because there is not enough oxygen to keep the lungs going under stress, and the only chance for the patient is to hurry him down to the coast by railway. Pressure on the breathing and palpitation of the heart are the commonest symptoms of the _soroche_, or _puna_, the so-called mountain sickness which prevails all over the plateau at heights exceeding 10,000 feet, many persons suffering from it at even lower levels. Less frequent symptoms are nausea and vomiting, violent headache, and general disturbance of the digestive organs. Some constitutions are, of course, much more liable to suffer than others are, but all who come from the lowlands experience a difficulty in any violent physical exertion, such as running uphill or lifting heavy weights. We enquired before leaving the coast whether any remedies or preventives could be applied, and were told that drugs were of little or no use, the best prophylactic being to abstain from smoking, from drinking, and from eating. I observed only the second of these directions, but neither of us suffered in any way, not even at heights exceeding 15,000 feet, save that it proved desirable in climbing hills to walk more slowly than we were accustomed to do at home, and that, when lying down in bed at night, we found ourselves drawing a few very long and deep breaths before sleep came. English and North American acquaintances in La Paz told us that to play single sets in lawn tennis was too hard work, because the effort of getting quickly to different corners of the court tried the lungs; and we heard of people who, having come here for business purposes, found, after a few months, that it was prudent to return to the coast for an interval of rest. The native Indians, being to the manner born, seem to suffer from the thinness of the air no more than they do from the cold, and in the days of the Incas they performed extraordinary feats of swift running for long distances.

The causes which make elevation above the sea affect our organs more on some mountains than on others have never been fully ascertained. Sir M. Conway thinks that the rarity of air is more felt in dry regions, as here in the central Andes and in Colorado, where I personally remember to have found it a greater hindrance to exertion at 8000 feet than on the Alps at 15,000 feet. Others declare that it is more severe in moist and rainy weather than in clear weather. One may venture to suggest that it is more felt on a plateau or wide mass of lofty mountains than on a narrow range where there is abundance of denser air just below, which rises from the valley. This would explain why climbers suffer so little from it in the Alps. Such experience as I have had on the Himalayas and in America as well as on the North American ranges and in Hawaii favours this view.

The lesson of slowing down one's pace in walking uphill is soon learnt in La Paz, for, as it stands on very irregular ground, sloping sharply on both sides to the stream which traverses it in a broad, stony channel, all the streets are steep, except those that run along the bottom of the valley parallel to the stream. All are very roughly paved, so driving is no great pleasure till you get outside the town upon one or two well-kept suburban avenues. Still less is riding, till one has learnt to trust the experienced local animal to keep his feet on the large, smooth cobblestones. In such a city, where there never were rich people and no church had any special sanctity, one cannot expect to find that charm, frequent in the old cities of Spain, which arises from the variety of architectural detail in the buildings. Few in La Paz bear an air of antiquity, few have anything picturesque in gables or doors or windows. The same thing is true of the churches also. Some have a more spacious interior than others, some a richer façade, some statelier towers, but all are of the invariable late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century type, with the same heavy and often tawdry ornament in the nave and choir. The churches of the friars have often more quality than the others; and here San Francisco with its handsome front and elaborate reredos pleased us better than the Cathedral. There are a few good houses, some of which tradition allots to former governors, with galleries built round the _patio_ and gateways surmounted by armorial bearings, but the _patio_ is cheerless, for it is apt to be a reservoir of chilled air. The central Plaza, where one usually looks to find the best that a town can do, is here quite small, but tastefully laid out. On one side of it are the government offices, on another the seat of the legislature, not a bad building, if it were not surmounted by a zinc spire. The markets are the most interesting places, because here, as in the open-air booths of the Plaza San Francisco and still more in the large covered passages of the principal Mercado (much like an Oriental bazaar or the Suk at Tunis), one sees not only the various fruits and roots and grains, the scanty produce of the plateau and of the nearest warmer valleys, together with such textile fabrics as native industry weaves or embroiders, but also the natives themselves in all their variety of costume. The Indian wears a felt hat, and the mestizo (half-breed), who belongs to a higher social stratum, a straw one. The former has always, the latter often, a woollen poncho, brightly coloured, over his rough and dirty cotton shirt and short, loose trousers. The white man, or the mestizo of the upper class who considers himself to be white, wears a European cloth coat, and usually for warmth's sake a cloak or overcoat above it; this is the distinctive note of social pretension. The native women are gorgeous in brilliantly coloured woollen petticoats, very heavy and very numerous. Orange and pink are the favourite colours. Strong and solidly built as these Indian women are, one wonders how their waists can support the weight of three, four, or even five of these thick pieces of closely woven cloth.

Thus, though there is not much for the tourist to see or do, nor for the art student to admire, still La Paz is a picturesque place, with a character so peculiar that it makes for itself a niche in the memory and stays there, as being unlike any other place. The strange irregularity of the steep, rough streets with cliffs of brown earth standing up at the ends of them, the brawling torrent, the wild-looking Indians in their particoloured dresses, the flocks of graceful llamas with their long, curved necks and liquid, wondering eyes, the extraordinary situation of the city in this deep pit, deep but not dark, for the vertical sun blazes into it all day long; and, above all, the magnificent snowy mass of Illimani, towering into the sapphire blue sky with glaciers that seem to hang over the city though they are forty miles away, its three pinnacles of snow turning to a vivid rose under the departing sun,--all these together make La Paz a fascinating spot, one of those which flash quickly and vividly before the mind when you think of them.

The outskirts of the city, too bare and stern for beauty, have a weird grimness which approaches grandeur. A pretty avenue between rows of _Eucalyptus_, the only tree that seems to thrive here, and which stands the frost better than it does in England, perhaps because Bolivia has a dry air and a strong sun which more nearly reproduce the conditions of its Australian home, leads to a public park whence a splendid view of the surrounding heights and down the valley is obtained. The precipices of hard earth that enclose it have been here and there broken up into lofty earth pyramids like those which one sees near Botzen in Tyrol, and have doubtless been formed, like those, by the action of rain upon the softer parts of the cliff. Behind the eastern earth wall rise the spurs and buttresses of the Cordillera, wild, bare glens running up to the watershed of the chain, across the head of one of which is the pass which leads down into the forest _Montaña_. It reminded me of some of the recesses among the Noric Alps behind Gastein, but was on a vaster scale, and more gloomy, as Andean landscapes usually are. Quitting the city on another side, I rode southward for some seven or eight miles along the road which leads down the gorge, by a long and devious course, through the heart of the Eastern Cordillera under the southern flanks of Illimani, into the land of gold and rubber, of alligators and jaguars. In the sheltered nooks at the lower end of the town there were gardens full of bamboos and flowering shrubs, and one met strings of llamas, mules, and donkeys coming up the road, laden with tropical fruits and other products of the Yungas, as this region is called. Farther down the scenery was stern and harsh, with great rock-masses, crowning slopes that rose steeply three or four thousand feet above the valley, but here and there where there was room for cultivation beside the river, a patch of bright green alfalfa relieved its monotony of brown and black--a weird country, with these sharp contrasts of heat and cold, of verdure and sterility. The air was already warm, and after thirty miles, one comes into the rains and the insects and the fevers of the tropics.

Within the city there is little for a visitor to do except wander through the market and buy rugs made of the deliciously soft and warm wool of the vicuña, the finest and costliest of Andean skins. Neither is there much to see except the museum, which contains an interesting collection of minerals, specimens of woods, stuffed animals, and all sorts of curiosities, such as Indian weapons and various kinds of handiwork. As the rooms are far too small for their contents, these are not seen to advantage. The gentleman who seems to have the chief share in the management (Señor Ballivian) is a historical scholar and archæologist of high repute, belonging to one of the old families of La Paz. Such accomplishments are not common in Bolivia, yet there are few countries which offer a wider and more attractive field to the naturalist and to the student of ethnology.

The legislature being in session, I was invited to be present at its sittings. Both houses are small in number and are composed chiefly of lawyers, as, indeed, are most South American legislative bodies, law being the occupation which naturally leads to and comports with the profession of politics. On this particular occasion the proceedings were unexciting and the speeches conversational in tone. Members speak sitting, a practice which, though general in these republics, seems ill adapted for displays of that sonorous eloquence which belongs to the Spanish-American temperament. Among the eminent citizens whom it was my good fortune to meet none impressed me more than the veteran General Pando, who has been president of the republic and might have been so again, had not his patriotism made him prefer to devote his energies to the organization of the Bolivian army, the smallness of which makes its efficiency all the more needful. Nobody in the country is more widely respected and trusted.

There is a handful of foreign residents, German business men, English and North American railway men, a pleasant little society. The best school is said to be that conducted by a North American mission, which, however, devotes itself to education and not to proselytizing. Children of good Roman Catholic families attend it.

That the educated residents of Spanish stock should be few is not surprising when one realizes that La Paz is really an Indian city. Aymará is the language commonly spoken by three-fourths or more of its inhabitants. It has probably a larger aboriginal population than any other city in the New World, though the percentage of Indians may be somewhat greater in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. This may be a fitting place to give a brief account of their present condition, since of what they seem to have been before the Conquest something has been said in the last preceding chapter.

Though the bulk of the inhabitants of La Paz and Cuzco are Indians, the larger Andean towns are generally Spanish in appearance, and it is in the rural districts that the Indian is best seen and understood. He is essentially an agriculturist. Nearly all the land except in some coast plantations where a little Chinese or negro labour is employed is cultivated by the Indian, and all the llamas and sheep are herded by him. There is, indeed, no other industry by which a living can be made, except mining, for no factories on a large scale yet exist in these countries. Attached to the land, and dwelling usually in small villages which, save in fertile tracts like the Vilcamayu Valley, are seldom near together, the Indian has retained the beliefs and habits of his forefathers more than even the peasantry of Russia or the Turkish dominions. His primitive organization, the ayllu or clan, composed, like the Roman gens, or perhaps rather like a Greek phratry, of persons who traced their descent to a supposed common ancestor, still subsists in Bolivia, though it has of late years been interfered with by a new kind of grouping, that of the tenants or labourers on the same _finca_ (landed estate). A number of _ayllus_ made up a tribe, but this division has lost its importance since the _cacique_ or chief of ancient times vanished. In every Indian agricultural community there are two officials. One is the _Ilacata_, whose functions are administrative, including the division of the land each year between the persons who are to till it and the receipt of the crops from common land, and the supervision of common labour. The other is the _Alcalde_, who combines executive and judicial powers, maintaining order, deciding petty disputes, and leading in fighting if the need for fighting should arise. The peasant, though legally free, practically goes with the estate, and though legally a voter, practically does not vote, the government being kind enough to relieve the rural citizens, and frequently the urban ones also, from a duty which few of them are qualified to discharge. They are in some places oppressed by the landowners,--that one must expect where there is a great difference of race and capacity,--yet much less than in colonial days, for there have been Indian risings, and firearms are more largely in their hands than formerly. They so preponderate in numbers that any movement which united them against the upper class might, could they find a leader, have serious consequences. Thus the fear of trouble restrains the excesses of power. Those who have land of their own are said to fare as ill at the hands of the lawyer and money-lender as any tenant could do at those of a landlord.

Scarcely any are educated. In Titicaca Island, with a population of about three hundred, there was a few years ago only one man who could read. In all Bolivia only 30,000 children were in the schools out of a population of 2,000,000. The sparseness of the population makes the provision of instruction difficult; nor do the aborigines seem to care for education, being so far satisfied with their lot as to have no notion of other pleasures than those which their fairs and festivals supply, and those derived from the use of alcohol at these festivals, and at all times of the coca leaf, which is for an Indian the first necessity of life. He is never without his bag containing a bundle of leaves, which he masticates (usually with a little clay) while walking or working, finding in them a support which enables him to endure fatigue without food for long periods. The leaf when chewed is tasteless, and whether taken thus or in a decoction produces no directly pleasurable feeling of stimulus. I have experimented with it in both forms without being able to discover any result except that of arresting hunger. Taken by chewing the leaf, as the Indians take it, it cannot have the highly deleterious effects of cocaine, which is a concentrated essence; indeed, if it had those effects, the aborigines of the plateau must have been long ago ruined by it.[41] Possibly there is something in the physical conditions of their life rendering it comparatively or altogether innocuous. It does not seem to be much used by the whites, nor in the lowlands by any class of the population. Perhaps, therefore, it is "indicated" in the mild form of a chewed leaf, as a stimulant suitable to those who take continuous exertion at great altitudes.

What has been said here refers generally to the aborigines of the high Andean regions, but there are two great divisions of them, the characteristics of which are not altogether the same. In very early times there were probably many diverse tribes, and every valley spoke a language, or at least a dialect, of its own. This is still the case in the Montaña region (the forests at the east foot of the Andes), where adjoining tribes are sometimes wholly unlike one another in speech and aspect. The conquests of the Incas, with their levelling and unifying rule, effaced most of these distinctions. There was a tongue called Mochica spoken by the coast people of Chimu, the race to whose artistic talent reference was made in last chapter, which seems to have been quite unlike the speech of the plateau. It is now extinct, but a grammar, made by a learned ecclesiastic, has fortunately survived. There is also another distinct tongue which remains among a half-savage tribe called the Urus, who dwell, now very few in number, among the rushy lagoons on the Desaguadero River, near the southwest end of Lake Titicaca. With these exceptions, the Spaniards seem to have found on their arrival only two forms of speech prevailing over Peru, corresponding to two racial divisions, the Quichuas to which the Incas apparently belonged, and the Aymarás. The latter held all the Collao, _i.e._ the country round Titicaca, and south of it round La Paz. The former occupied the northern valleys of Peru and the coast regions south of Lima, and a part of what is now southern Bolivia around Oruro and Uyuni. As these two languages are of the same type, it is generally held that the Quichua and Aymará races are cognate. Those who know both declare that the Quichuas are the gentler and the less forcible. The Aymarás, by the testimony of European as well as Peruvian observers, are ruder in manners, more sullen and vindictive in disposition. Both races are alike secretive and suspicious of the whites, and for this sentiment they have had good reason. The impressions of a passing traveller are of no value, but it seemed to me, in noting the faces and deportment of the Indians whom we saw, that while both races had less intelligence and rather less look of personal dignity than the Indians of Mexico, the Aymarás seemed both a more dogged and a less cheerful race than the Quichuas. We might, perhaps, expect to find little buoyancy of spirit in those to whom Nature turns on this wind-swept roof of the world so stern a countenance. Yet the Icelander, whose far-distant isle is surrounded by a melancholy ocean, is of a lively and cheerful temper.

Both Quichuas and Aymarás have that remarkable impassiveness and detachment which belongs to all the American peoples and which in the Old World one finds only in some of the East Asiatic races. With plenty of stability, they lack initiative. They make steady soldiers, and fight well under white, or mestizo, leaders, but one seldom hears of a pure Indian accomplishing anything or rising either through war or politics, or in any profession, above the level of his class. The Mexican Juarez, the conqueror of Maximilian and of the priesthood, was a pure-blooded Indian. Since the days of the Araucanian chiefs Lautaro and Caupolican, South America has shewn no native quite equal to him. Curiosity and ambition are alike wanting to the race. Though one sees plenty of Indian blood in Peruvians and Bolivians of eminence, so that there must have been formerly much racial intermixture, and though there is practically no social distinction (except in three or four cities) between the white and the educated mestizo, intermarriage between pure Indians and pure Europeans is very uncommon.

The Indian of the plateau is still only a half-civilized man and less than half a Christian. He retains his primeval Nature worship, which groups together the spirits that dwell in mountains, rivers, and rocks with the spirits of ancestors, revering and propitiating all as _Achachilas_. In the same ceremony his medicine man invokes the Christian "_Dios_" to favour the building of a house, or whatever enterprise he undertakes, and simultaneously invokes the Achachilas, propitiating them also by offerings, the gift made to the Earth Spirit being buried in the soil.[42] Similarly he retains the ceremonial dances of heathendom and has secret dancing guilds, of whose mysteries the white man can learn nothing. His morality is what it was, in theory and practice, four centuries ago. He neither loves nor hates, but fears, the white man, and the white man neither loves nor hates, but despises him, there being some fear, at least in Bolivia, mingled with the contempt. They are held together neither by social relations nor by political, but by the need which the white landowner has for the Indian's labour and by the power of long habit which has made the Indian acquiesce in his subjection as a rent payer. Neither of them ever refers to the Conquest. The white man does not honour the memory of Pizarro; to the Indian the story is too dim and distant to affect his mind. Nor is it the least remarkable feature of the situation that the mestizo, or half-breed, forms no link between the races. He prefers to speak Spanish which the Indian rarely understands. He is held to belong to the upper race, which is, for social and political purposes, though not by right of numbers, the Peruvian (or Bolivian) nation.

In no capital city have I felt so far removed from the great world, the European and Asiatic and North American parts of which are now so closely linked together, as here in La Paz. There may probably be an equal sense of isolation in Quito and Bogotá, there can hardly be a stronger one. To be enclosed between two lofty ranges and two deserts, to live at the bottom of a hole and yet be nearly as high above sea-level as the top of the Rocky Mountains or the Jungfrau are strange conditions for a dwelling place. Nevertheless it was a place in which one might do much meditation, for new sensations awaken new thoughts, and solitude helps one to pursue them. So it was with regret for everything except its climate that we quitted La Paz early one morning to resume our southward journey, bidding a long farewell to the _Achachila_[43] of the majestic Illimani, to which we had offered orisons of admiration in each dawning and each departing light. After we had climbed to the rim of the _Barranca_ in the electric car, an hour's run on the steam railroad carried us across the open plateau to Viacha, whence one route leads to Titicaca and over the lake to Mollendo, and another, now in construction, will in 1913 be ready to carry passengers down through the great Western Cordillera to the Pacific at Arica.[44] As this will be hereafter the most direct way of reaching La Paz from the coast, Viacha may some day be an important railroad centre, like Crewe or Chicago or Cologne. At present it is inexpressibly bleak and dreary, standing alone on a dusty and treeless waste. But the traveller of the future who has to wait here to "make his connections" will, while he paces up and down enquiring how much the incoming train is behind time, be able to feast his eyes on the incomparable view of the great Cordillera Real, piercing the northeastern sky, and here ending towards the south in the snowy pyramid of Huayna Potosi, round whose flanks gather the clouds that rise from the moist eastern forests sixteen thousand feet below.

At Viacha we entered the cars of the Antofagasta and Bolivia railroad, owned by an enterprising English company, and moved off to the south across a wide undulating plain which seemed an arid waste, but turned out to be pastured upon by flocks of sheep and llamas. Dry as the ground looked,--it was the end of September, when the summer showers were just beginning,--there was feed to be had and a few brooks here and there supplied drink. Some of those ancient round buildings of unmortared stone which the natives call _Chulpas_ and which seem to have served as tombs rather than shrines were to be seen. Here and there were villages, clusters of rude mud huts, sometimes with a bare, ugly church far too large for the place, and probably owing its size to the zeal of some seventeenth-century Jesuit or Augustinian. At first low, brown mountains cut off to the west the view of that Western Cordillera through which the Arica line is making its difficult way, but presently they subside, and one sees far off across the plain a group of magnificent snowy peaks, apparently, from their shape and their isolation, ancient volcanoes. Sahama, the highest, a pyramidal cone of beautiful proportions, seemed, from the amount of snow it carried, to be not less than 21,000 feet high. It has never yet been ascended. In this western range the snow line is higher than it is in the Eastern Cordillera because the latter receives more moisture. To the northeast the great Cordillera Real which one admires from Titicaca has now disappeared behind the low ridges crossing the plain, and Illimani is seen only now and then overtopping the nearer hills. On the east, however, farther south than Illimani, a new line of snows comes into view, distant, perhaps, nearly a hundred miles and doubtless forming part of the Eastern Cordillera. On each side there stretches out a wide plain, but in one place the line runs for some miles through a range of hills of black (apparently volcanic) rock, following the course of a stream which presently wanders off to the west and is there lost, swallowed up in marshes. Besides the tufts of coarse bunch grass and a few low shrubs, there is still in the moister spots some little pasture,--it is astonishing how llamas can find something to eat on what seems bare ground,--but the land grows more and more sterile as the line continues southward. Presently the Indian villages cease; and great flats are seen to the west which are covered by water in the wet season. At last a group of high, brown hills marks the site of Oruro, an old and famous mining town, one of whose mines, which has been worked for hundreds of years, formerly stood second only to Potosi in its output of silver. Copper and tin as well as silver are worked in the hills, and on mining depends the prosperity of the town, which has now some twenty thousand inhabitants. The long, straight streets of mean one-story adobe houses, covered with plaster, with only a few better residences where the business men and foreign mining people live, give little idea of the former importance of the place, but there is a large and rather handsome Plaza wherein stand the government buildings and a well-built arcade containing good shops. Beside the big church are two enormous bells, of which the city has long been proud, but which have to stand on the ground because too heavy for the little erection on the church roof on which the bells in daily use are hung. To the east, beyond a barren flat some eight or ten miles wide, a range of hills bounds the plateau, and beyond them the ground falls towards the Argentine frontier, so that within a day or two's riding one can get off this dry land of scorching days and freezing nights down into soft moist air and tall trees.

Oruro used to be the end of the railway which came up hither from the Pacific coast, and from here southward the gauge is of only two feet and a half. It is, however, to be widened, for traffic is increasing, and the company prosperous.

Next to the Germans, the most ubiquitous people in the world are the Aberdonians, so I was scarcely surprised to meet one here in the person of the principal doctor of the place, who, when we had talked about our friends on the banks of the far-distant Dee, gave me much information regarding the health conditions of Bolivia. He described Oruro as a more agreeable place of residence than its rather dreary externals promised. There was some agreeable society, for mining, which does not improve the quality of the working population, usually draws to a place a number of men of superior ability and sometimes of scientific attainments. Here, as elsewhere in Bolivia, foreigners, including some Chileans, own the mines, while business is chiefly in the hands of Germans. Manual labour is done by Indians (here speaking Quichua), whose number does not increase, because, although the families are large, the mortality among their children is very high, or else by half-breeds, here usually called _Cholos_, who would be good workers, were they not addicted to the use of the horrible spirits that are too easily procurable. There are, however, also some Chilean half-breeds and some English-speaking men, brought for the higher kinds of work.

About twenty miles away to the south is the great lagoon called Aullagas or Poopo,--the names are taken from villages on its shores,--which is fed by the river Desaguadero. This singular lake, which has the interest of a vanishing quantity, is fifty-three miles long by twenty-four broad, is nowhere more than nine feet deep and mostly less than five, is salt, turbid, with a bottom of dark mud, and full of fish too small to be worth catching. Like those of Titicaca they belong to species found nowhere else. Having so small a volume in proportion to the surface area which it exposes to a strong sun and an intensely dry air, it loses by evaporation all the water it receives by the river from Titicaca and probably a little more, for it seems to be now shrinking. When Titicaca, itself probably subsiding, has still less to give, Poopo will disappear altogether, and this plain will become a sheet of glittering salt.[45]

As one pursues the journey farther south, the country becomes always more arid, and at Uyuni, the next town of consequence, it is a veritable desert where only the smallest stunted shrubs are seen among the sand and stones. This uninhabited region will soon be a converging point of railroads, for it is here that the existing line from La Paz to the Pacific coast at Antofagasta is to be joined by the new railway which is to be constructed to provide a quick through route from central Bolivia to the Atlantic coast at Buenos Aires. Its completion from Uyuni to Tupiza near the Argentine border is expected by 1916, and when the link has been made, there will be a complete railway connection across the Continent from the River Plate to the Pacific at Arica. Bolivia has hitherto suffered greatly from the want of communications, so when La Paz has been brought within twenty-four hours of the one ocean at Arica and within seventy-two or eighty hours of the other at Buenos Aires, a great impetus ought to be given to her export trade. This lofty and desert part of Bolivia finds its only source of wealth in minerals. The Western Cordillera is especially rich in copper and silver, the Eastern in gold and tin. One-third of all the world's production of tin now comes from Bolivia. Besides the silver found in various places,--the great silver mountain is still worked at Potosi,--the eastern spurs of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes are believed to contain plenty of gold, which would be extracted from the gravels, perhaps from rock reefs also, much more extensively, but for the extreme difficulty of conveying mine machinery across the mountains down abrupt slopes and through trackless forests. It was from these East Andean regions that the Incas obtained those vast stores of gold which excited the cupidity of the Spaniards. Pizarro got from Atahuallpa a quantity roughly estimated at £3,000,000 ($15,000,000) on a promise that the Inca's life would be spared,--a promise broken as soon as most of the gold had been delivered. Yet the contemporary Spanish annalists declare that what the Spaniards laid their hands upon first and last in the days of the Conquest was much less than what the Indians buried or threw into the lakes when they could no longer guard it. Great, however, as is the mineral wealth of the Bolivian highlands, it is less on them, than on the development of the agricultural and pastoral resources of the eastern part of the republic that future prosperity must in the long run depend. Mines are a transitory source of wealth; they enrich the foreign capitalist rather than the nation itself; they do not help to build up an intelligent and settled body of responsible citizens.

It is not solely for the sake of industry and commerce that Bolivia may welcome the advent of railways. She is the least naturally cohesive and in some ways the least nationally united of South American states. Europeans and North Americans hear but little about her, and underestimate the difficulties she has had to contend with. Imagine a country as big as the German and Austrian dominions put together, with a population less than that of Denmark, four-fifths of it consisting of semicivilized or uncivilized Indians, and the few educated men of European or mixed stock scattered here and there in half a dozen towns, none of which has more than a small number of capable citizens of that stock. An energetic monarch with a small but efficient and mobile army might rule such a country, but it offers obvious difficulties to the smooth working of a republican government, for one of the essentials to such a government is that the minority of competent citizens, be they many or few, should be in easy communication with one another, capable of understanding one another and of creating a public opinion. This has hitherto been difficult, owing to the want of railways, for Santa Cruz, Cochabamba, and Sucre (Chuquisaca) have all been a many days' journey from one another and from La Paz. These towns know little of one another and are mutually jealous. The old Spanish-colonial element in them regards with disfavour the larger but more Indian La Paz. Sucre is made the legal capital, but neither it nor any other city has both the size and the central position that would qualify to act as a unifying force. There is hardly any immigration, and little natural increase of population, so the vacant spaces do not fill up, even where they are habitable. Anything, therefore, that will help both to increase the material prosperity of Bolivia and to draw its people together will be a political benefit.

Besides the railway which is to run from Uyuni to Buenos Aires, five other lines through the High Andes are likely to be constructed. One is to connect Cuzco with the existing railway from Lima to Oroya, a wonderful line, which reaches a height of 15,600 feet. A second will continue that line eastward to the Ucayali River. A third is also to cross the Eastern Cordillera from Tirapata (north of Lake Titicaca) to the river Madre de Dios. A fourth will run from La Paz down the canyon of its torrent to the river Beni. A fifth will connect Potosi with a port upon the Paraguay River via Sucre and Santa Cruz. The opening of these communications must accelerate the development of Peru and Bolivia.

Uyuni is smaller than Oruro, and even less attractive. It has an enormous empty plaza and four wide streets of mud houses. Standing at 12,500 feet above sea-level, in a dry and cloudless air, where the radiation of heat is great the moment the sun goes down, we found the later hours of night so cold that the water froze inside our sleeping car, while the heat of the day, reflected from the desert floor, is no less intense. There is a famous mine at Pulucayo, in the eastern mountain range,--some ten miles distant from Uyuni and fifteen hundred feet above the town. We mounted to it by a little railway and were struck by the appearance of vegetation when we had risen some hundreds of feet above the torrid plain. Conspicuous was a cactus-like plant, with white, silky hairs, lifting its prickly fingers ten feet up, and ending in clusters of brilliant crimson blossoms. The staff of the French company who work the mine received us hospitably and explained the processes of extraction and the way in which electricity is applied to do the work. Silver, copper, zinc, lead, and iron are all found associated here; and shafts one thousand feet deep are sunk from the long galleries, driven far into the mountain, one of which goes right through to Huanchaca on the other side. A town of six or seven thousand people has grown up, to accommodate the labourers, all Indians or _Cholos_.[46] A church and school and tiny theatre have been built for them, and as their hardy frames can support the cold and the thin air, they seem cheerful and contented. The contrast between the refined appliances of modern science and the rudeness of semicivilized man never seemed sharper than when one saw this machinery and these labourers.

From this height of about fourteen thousand feet one could look for more than a hundred miles over the desert,--and such a desert! Many of us can remember the awe and mystery which the word Wilderness in the Old Testament used to call up in a child's mind. When a boy reads of the Desert of Sahara, he pictures it as terrible and deathful. After he has grown up and travelled outside Europe, the only continent that has no wildernesses, and has seen the deserts on either side of Egypt, or the Kalahari in South Africa, or the deserts of India, or Arizona, or Iceland, he comes to realize that a large part of the earth's surface is desert, and that deserts, if awful, can have also a beauty and even a charm of their own.[47] This may not seem to the practical mind to be a sufficient final cause for their existence, but that is a side issue, and philosophy has, since Bacon's time, ceased to enquire into final causes. Of the deserts I have named, those of northern Arizona are perhaps the most beautiful, but this high plateau of southern Bolivia, while very different, is not less impressive.

Right in the midst lay a sparkling plain of white. It was a huge salt marsh, on which the salt crystals shone like silver, for at this season it looks dry, though soft enough to engulf and entomb in its bottomless depths of mud any misguided wayfarer who may attempt to cross it. Beyond it to the northwest and north the waste of sand stretched out to the horizon, while southwest and south long ranges of serrated mountains ran hither and thither across the vast expanse, as if they had been moulded on a relief map, so sharp and so near did they seem to lie, though fifty miles away. Some were capped or streaked with snow, indicating in this arid land a height of seventeen thousand feet.

The splendour of such a view consists not only in the sensuous pleasure which the eye derives from the range of delicate tints and from the fine definition of mountain forms, hardly less various in their lines than they are in their colours, but even more in the impression which is made on the imagination. The immensity and complexity of this nature speak of the vast scale on which natural forces work and of the immense spaces of time which their work has occupied.

Returning to the railway at Uyuni, we set off in the afternoon on our southward way across the desert floor, here perfectly flat and about 12,000 feet above the sea. A deep red soil promised fertility if water could be brought to it, but there was not a tree nor a house, though many a mirage shewed shining water pools and trees around them. Rocky hillocks rising here and there like islands strengthened the impression that this had been in some earlier age the bed of a great inland sea, larger than Lake Superior in North America, stretching from here all the way to the Vilcañota peaks north of Titicaca, and including, besides Titicaca itself, the salt lagoon of Poopo and the white salt marsh we had seen from the heights of Pulucayo. Subterranean forces which, as we know, have been recently at work all over these regions, may have altered the levels, and alterations of level may, in their turn, have induced climatic changes, which, by reducing rainfall, caused the inland sea to dry up, as the Great Salt Lake of Utah and the Aral Sea are drying up now. Looking eastward, we could see heavy clouds brooding over the eastern ranges, which shewed that beyond it lay valleys, watered by the rains which the trade-wind brings up from the far-distant Atlantic. Presently the sweetest hour of the day came as the grey sternness of the heights to the south softened into lilac, and a pale yellow sunset, such as only deserts see, flooded the plain with radiance. The night was intensely cold, and next morning, even at eight o'clock, the earth was frozen hard in the deep, dark hollow where the train had halted.

We were now just inside the Chilean frontier, in the heart of the Western Cordillera, among some of the loftiest volcanic mountains of the Continent. On one side a branch line of railway, the highest in the world, begins its long climb to the Collahuasi copper mine. On the other side, there rose above us the huge black mass of Ollague,[48] snow patches on its southern side and steam rising in wreaths from a cleft not far below the summit. We guessed the height at 19,000 feet. The Collahuasi mine is nearly 16,000. Beside us was what seemed a frozen lake, which glittered white when the welcome sun began to overtop the heights and warm our shivering bodies. Although the height is only 12,200 feet, this is a particularly cold spot, and the one place on the line which is liable to severe snowstorms. We had reached the smaller of the two famous lakes of borax, parts of which are water holding borax in solution, while the rest is mud covered with the valuable substance. They have neither influent nor outlet. This place, and a similar lake in Peru, not far from Arequipa, furnish the world with a large part of its supply, the rest coming from California and Siberia and Tibet, where the conditions of a rainlessness that keeps the deposit from being washed away out of the soil are somewhat similar. Presently we reached the larger lake, which is twelve miles long and two to five wide, and stopped to see the method of gathering and preparing the mineral. One end of the (so-called) lake is dry, a thin stratum of whitish earth covering the bed of borax, which is about three feet thick. When dug out, the mineral is spread out on the ground round the works to dry, and then calcined in furnaces, forming a white mass of crystals, which are packed in sacks and sent down to the coast to be shipped to Europe and there turned into the borax of commerce. A large number of labourers are employed in this lonely and cheerless spot fifty miles from the nearest village. When I asked what fuel was used for the furnaces, they pointed to a long wire cable stretched through the air from the works to a point high on the mountain side opposite Ollague. Down this rope small cars were travelling, containing masses of a kind of very hard, stiff plant with whitish flowers so inconspicuous that it is usually taken for a sort of moss.[49] It grows abundantly on the slopes between eight and fourteen thousand feet, and its thick hard cushions have to be cut out with a pickaxe. Being very resinous, it burns with a fierce flame, but so quickly that large masses must be constantly thrown in to keep the fire going. Hardly anything else grows on the mountains, but they are inhabited by the little chinchilla, whose light grey fur, exquisitely soft, fetches a high price in Europe.

From this point onward the scenery is of incomparable grandeur. I doubt if there be any other spot in the Andes where the sternness and terror that surround the volcano are equally felt. The railway skirts the borax lake and then rises slowly along a ledge above it, whence one looks down on its still surface, where patches of whitish green open water reflect the crags and snows of the peaks that tower above. The deep, dark valley so winds and turns that it is in some places hard to guess where the exit lies. Above it stands a line of volcanoes, seventeen to nineteen thousand feet high. Their tops are of black rock, their faces, from which here and there black crags project, are slopes of ash and cinders, shewing those strange and gruesome contrasts of colour which are often seen in the mineral world when vegetation and the atmosphere have not had time to tell upon them. In some of these peaks one whole side of the crater seems to have been blown out by an explosion, laying bare the farther wall of the hollow, for the colours are just such as are seen in craters like those of Etna and Hekla, though here more vivid, because here there is so little rain to wash off their brightness. One such breached crater, forming the face of what is called (from the variety of its tints) the Garden Mountain, displays almost every colour of the spectrum, bright yellow and orange, pink and purple, and a brick red passing into dark brown. A ridge that stands out on its face shews on one declivity a yellowish white and on the other a brilliant crimson. But the intensity of these colours heightens rather than reduces the sombre gloom of the landscape. One seems admitted to view an abandoned laboratory of Nature, in which furnaces, now extinct or smouldering low, fused the lavas and generated the steam that raised them to the crater's edge and sent them forth in fiery streams. Where there is now a deathlike silence, flames lit up the darkness of the clouds of ash that rose with the gushing steam, and masses of red-hot rock were hurled to heaven while explosions shook the earth beneath.

In the middle of this narrow pathway which leads through the purple depths of the Cordillera we reach at Ascotan the top of the pass, 13,000 feet above sea-level, whence the valley, turning to the northwest, begins to descend towards the Pacific. The majestic portal through which one looks out into the western desert is guarded by two tall volcanoes standing side by side, St. Peter and St. Paul. The latter has been long extinct, but San Pedro still smokes or steams from its summit. A red hill near its foot has in quite recent times poured forth from its crater a vast lava stream through which the railway passes in a cutting, and which, splitting itself wherever it met a natural obstruction, has sent its long black tongues far down into the valley of the Loa River. For here, after hundreds of miles, one comes again upon a river. Behind the mass of San Pedro fountains fed by its snow break forth from the ground and come down into a clear green stream which has cut its way through the rock in a splendid cañon, across which the line is carried. The river has been turned to account by building several large reservoirs, whence pipes have been laid to the coast, supplying not only the nitrate fields below (of which I shall speak presently), but also the seaports of Antofagasta and Megillones one hundred and forty miles away, all these regions being without brook or spring.

Here we emerged from the mountains into broad sunshine and saw in front of us long ridges falling away, one behind the other, towards the still distant Pacific. Rattling rapidly down the incline, past junctions whence branch lines climb to mines high among the hills, we came at last to Calama, the first Chilean village, where rivulets drawn from the Loa make an oasis of bright green corn and alfalfa and support a few shrubs that gladden the wilderness. Evening is always the pleasantest time in the tropics, and it is most so in a desert, when, instead of the hard afternoon glare, gentle lights begin to fall upon rocks and earth and make their dryness luminous. It was our fortune to have at this best hour of the day a distant view of the Andes, as lovely as the landscapes through which we had passed were awesome. We were now some way west of the chain, and could see it running in a long serrated line from San Pedro southward. This line is the Western Cordillera, which from here all the way to the Straits of Magellan is the main Andean axis, rising over, and apparently created by, the great telluric fissure along which the eruptive forces have acted. Nearest and grandest were the massive cones of San Pedro and San Pablo; and from them the line of snows could in this clear and lucent air be traced without a break, peak rising beyond peak, till ninety miles away it sank beneath the horizon.

Seen close at hand, as we saw Ollague and the other volcanoes that rose above the borax lake, these mountains would be grim and terrible as those were, their slopes a chaos of tumbled rocks and brown cinders and long slides of crumbling ash, telling of the ruthless forces of Nature that had been at work. But seen afar off they were perfect in their beauty, with an exquisite variety of graceful forms, their precipices purple, and their snow crowns rosy in the level light of sunset. So Time seems to soften the horrors and sorrows of the Past as it recedes, and things which to those who lived among them were terrible and to those who had lived through them were fit only to be forgotten, become romantic to men of later generations, a theme for poets or painters, and glories for orators to recall.

Just where the range is lost to sight in the far south it forms the western wall of the great Desert of Atacama, long a name of terror to the Spaniards. Not often in these countries does one find natural objects associated with events important enough to figure in history. But it was in the dreary and waterless wastes of this desert that Almagro, first the friend and partner, then the rival and enemy, and at last the victim, of Pizarro, lost half his men and nearly perished himself in his march into Chile from Peru through what is now northern Argentina. The enterprise was one amazing even in that age of adventure, for Almagro's force was small, there was no possibility of succour, and he went into a land utterly unknown, a land of deserts and mountains. But it was an unlucky enterprise. The tribes of Chile were fiercer than those of Peru; he had gone beyond the regions of civilization and of gold, and returned an empty-handed conqueror.