CHAPTER IV

OVER THE ANDES TO CHILE

It was with keen regret that I cut myself off from Uncle Sam’s modest bounty when the time came to set out on a journey that was to carry me outside the Argentine and beyond the jurisdiction of our overworked consulate. But with a handful of gold sovereigns to show for my exertions in running errands and eluding _Porteño_ prices, the day seemed at hand for continuing my intensive tour of South America. The “International,” of the “Buenos Aires al Pacífico” leaves the capital three times a week on what purports to be a trip clear across the continent. In spirit its assertion is truthful, for though the “International” itself halts where the Argentine begins to tilt up into the Andes, other trains connect with it and one can, with good luck and ample wealth, reach Santiago de Chile, or Valparaiso on the Pacific, thirty-six hours after bidding the _Porteños_ farewell.

On a crisp May morning I set out westward from “B.A.,” lying featureless and yellow-white in the brilliant early-winter sunshine, not a church spire, scarcely a factory chimney, though many unsightly American windmills, rising above its monotonous level. The heavy “limited” train made scarcely half a dozen stops all day, though no extraordinary speed. At the rare stations a few passengers hastened to enter or leave the cars; between them trees and windmills rose or receded hull-down over the horizon of the dreary pampas. Outside each uninspiring town was an ostentatious city of the dead; in the sodden fields were flocks of sheep, cattle, and horses, fat as barrels, some snorting away at sight of the train, others gazing disdainfully after it. In many places the pampa was flooded, sometimes for miles, the shallow temporary lakes dotted with wild ducks, the roads mere rivers of mud, with only the tops of the fence-posts out of water, in which dismal looking animals were huddled up to their bellies, or crowded together on little muddy islands. Many mud houses were half under water, their thatched roofs and adobe walls turned into velvety green lawns; hay-stacks had grown verdant with sprouting grass; several pairs of horses dragging along the churned roads a load of baled alfalfa was one of the rare signs of activity. Even the _ñandúes_ seemed to have fled to some modern Ararat.

Farther west the country was somewhat drier, or at least more often above water. Here the vast pampa was divided by wire fences, producing the illusion of an immense cobweb, broken only rarely by a dense blue grove of eucalyptus trees planted about the central house of an enormous _estancia_, estates in most cases too large for the economic health of the country. Up to recent years the great mistake of the Argentine government was to grant mammoth tracts of land to men who quickly became so wealthy that they moved to private palaces in the capital, leaving little or nothing for the homesteads of what might be a host of productive freehold farmers. The railway company is striving to get these huge estates broken up, encouraging colonization by offering prizes for the best crops along its lines, as well as special inducements of transportation. For much of the region through which the “Buenos Aires al Pacífico” runs is so thinly populated that, as in some of our western states, the common carrier is forced to help produce something to carry. But the big landed proprietors have a Spanish pride in the size of their holdings, and with it an abhorrence not only of manual labor but even of living on their estates, from which the income is large enough for their comfort under the poorest systems of farming, or mere grazing, and it is not easy to induce them to sell even those portions lying wholly idle. The company has various ways of combatting this attitude. The most common is to build stations only where wealthy _estancieros_ donate not merely the land needed for immediate use, but room for future railroad development and sometimes for the building of a village and the beginning of more intensive agriculture about it.

A few of these have developed into true frontier towns, with enormously wide mud streets and electric lights, stretching far out into the country, as if the inhabitants expected to wake up any morning and find the place trebled in population. They were like a country without a history,—prosperous, contented—and uninteresting. There being almost no stone or wood all the way from the Córdoba hills to Tierra del Fuego, it was not strange that the majority even of town houses were made of the only material at hand, mud, as the Esquimaux build of snow and ice; yet the most dismal of these structures were by no means the comfortless dens of the Indians and _cholos_ of the Andes. It was Sunday, and especially on that day is it the custom in the smaller provincial towns to _hacer el corso_, to parade back and forth, at the station at train-time. Groups of comely girls, well dressed for such districts, powdered and perfumed, with flowers in their hair, their arms interlocked, were not content to display their charms to their rustic fellow-townsmen outside the station barriers, but invaded the platforms and strolled from end to end of the train as long as it remained. As attractive members of the fair sex are never without their attendant groups of admirers in South America, the latter increased the platform throng to a point where it was a lucky traveler who could find room to descend and make his way across it.

For long distances there were almost no signs of animate life except occasional flocks of _ñandúes_ cantering away like awkward schoolgirls. About every _boliche_, country store and liquor shop, were groups of shaggy pampa ponies and their no less shaggy riders, the animals prevented from deserting their owners by rawhide thongs binding their front feet together. _Bombachas_, the bloomer-like nether garments of the pampas, were much in evidence among these modern _gauchos_. A few of these, no doubt, were independent farmers; the majority were plainly hired men whose greatest likeness to the hardy part-Indian cowboys of a generation ago is the ability to absorb some five pounds of meat a day, washing it down with copious draughts of boiling _mate_. Vegetables are as little grown in the Argentine as in most of South America, and the employees, only the _mayordomos_ and the pen-driving class missing, who gather daily about the _asado_ provided by the _estanciero_, still live almost entirely on meat, with occasionally a few hardtack _galletas_ from these pampa stores. Boys of seven or eight, with true _gaucho_ blood in their veins, who sat their horses as if they were part of them, galloped about some of these smaller towns, _boleando_ cats and dogs with astonishing skill. At the more important crossings an old man or woman, sometimes a little girl, stood waving as solemnly as if the whole future of the railroad depended upon them the black-and-yellow flag that means “all safe” to Argentine trainmen. Country policemen were almost numerous, riding along the miserable roads or dismounted at the stations, covered with dust or mud and mingling with the hardy, independent countrymen. The rural Argentine police still have a far from enviable reputation, though they no longer tyrannize over the new style of _argentino_ as they once did over the bold but unsophisticated _gaucho_ of the “Martín Fierro” type. Yet on the whole they were not a body of men to inspire confidence. One felt at a glance that, far from trusting to their protection, it would be better to have someone else along in the more lonely sections of the country to protect one from the police.

Mendoza, metropolis of western Argentine and capital of the province of the same name, lies at the very base of the Andes, six hundred miles inland from Buenos Aires and barely one fourth as far from the Pacific, though with the mighty Andean wall intervening. Built on plentiful flat ground in what is sometimes called the “Argentine California,” the city is laid out in wide checkerboard streets, some of them shaded by rows of magnificent trees of abundant foliage. Each street is bordered with ditches made of mosaics of small cobbles, for the torrents that pour down from the Andes at certain seasons are worthy of man’s attention, and though the town is not tropical, banana, acacia, and mulberry trees bathe their feet in these intermittent streams and take on an extraordinary vigor. The central section has a number of modern business buildings, but the dwellings are nearly all still in the old Spanish style, often large houses, but capacious chiefly in depth, so that one only half suspects the several flowery patios they inclose. Few buildings are of more than one story, and even the stylish habitations, with columned façades and _corredores_ paved with colored marble _dalles_, are made of mud baked with straw and lime. For Mendoza still remembers the days, sixty years ago, when an earthquake destroyed the entire town, burying nearly the whole population of ten thousand in the ruins. Nothing remains now of the old town except the ruins of a church or two that are preserved as historical souvenirs and warnings against high buildings, mere masses of bricks standing like monoliths on the summits of walls that seem ever ready to fall down and on which a bush or a plant has here and there taken root; yet the _mendocinos_ are only beginning to put their faith in reinforced concrete. Many of the houses are smeared pink, saffron, blue, or other bright color, and when it rains the mud roofs run down over the façades, streaking the colors or washing them out to a leprous gray.

Being almost entirely a one-story town, and retaining the Moorish style of architecture, even the hotels of Mendoza have no windows on the streets, the only openings to the rooms being the door on the patio, so that the guest who needs a bit of light must disclose to servants and fellow-clients all his domestic activities; and to reach the bathroom, if there is one, means parading the entire length of the courtyard. Sidewalk cafés are thronged even on “winter” evenings; as elsewhere in the Argentine, every workingman’s restaurant has its _cancha de bochas_, a kind of earth-floored bowling-alley native to rural Italy. There are electric street-cars, and the electric lights, outdoors and in, outdo our own in size and brilliancy. While the English own the important Argentine railroads, Germans hold most of the concessions for electric light and power in the provincial towns, and Mendoza is no exception to this rule.

The modern _argentino_ is not only a transplanted European, but in most cases has come over within the past century. Only Caucasian immigration is welcome, no negroes and none of the yellow races being admitted. As in Buenos Aires, there is in the capital of each province an immigration bureau, with attendants speaking the principal tongues of Europe, which strives to place the newcomer to his and the country’s advantage. Thus there is a decidedly European atmosphere even in towns as far back in the depths of America as Mendoza, one that all but obliterates the purely American aspect. The city retains a suggestion of Spanish colonial days, but the native _bombachas_ are no more familiar sights than the Basque cap of the Pyrenees and the hemp-sole sandals, the short blouse with wide sash of contrasting color, and the clean-shaven features of the hardy Spanish peasant and _arriero_.

Like several of the more important cities far distant from the federal capital, Mendoza enjoys a certain local autonomy, though the prevailing political party in the Argentine advocates a strongly centralized government more nearly like that of France than that in the United States. The province prints its own small money, legal tender only within its limits, for the national currency not only becomes scarcer but more and more ragged and illegible in ratio to the distance from Buenos Aires. A not entirely unjustified fear of revolution, too, causes the province to maintain a large police force, for the Argentine has nothing like our National Guard. It is easy for the federal government, often looking for just such a chance, to intervene at the first suggestion of trouble in a province, and as such intervention means a suspended governor, a legislature forced out of office, and the loss of nearly all political patronage, the provincial authorities find it to their advantage to have a dependable police force. Persistent rumor has it that the police of Mendoza, however, are far from perfect, that they lose few opportunities to force bribes from, and otherwise tyrannize over, the population. Many fines may legally be imposed and collected directly by the police, and the story runs that it is particularly unfortunate to attract their attention toward the end of the month. They are then apt to be penniless, and are given to wandering the streets after dark, seeking whom they may run in and threaten to lock up if he does not at once pay the “fine” then and there levied by the police. If the victim asks for a receipt, rumor adds, he is instantly clapped into jail, or rather, is sent to stand all night or sit down in mud in the prison yard. Even important citizens of Mendoza hesitate to go out alone after dark at the end of the month.

I spent May twenty-fifth, the Argentine Independence Day, in Mendoza. An official salute woke the town at sunrise, to find itself already fluttering with flags, the blue-and-white Argentine banner predominating, but with many others, the yellow-and-red of Spain in particular—and one lone Stars and Stripes, in front of a sewing-machine agency. The uninformed stranger might have suspected that there is more patriotism to the square yard in the Argentine than in any other land. Had he inquired a bit, however, he would have learned that the law requires all inhabitants—not merely citizens, be it noted—to fly the national flag on May 25 and July 9, as it requires all men to uncover when the national anthem is played, and all school children to learn by rote certain chauvinistic platitudes. Nor should the fact be overlooked that the “Veinticinco de Mayo”—for which Argentine towns, streets, shops, cafés, and even dogs are named—is perilously near the end of the month.

In the morning everyone went to church, from white-haired generals lop-shouldered with the weight of the gleaming hardware across their chests to newly-rich Spaniards who still wore shoes with less ease than they would have cloth _alpargatas_. Scores of police, dozens of firemen, still wearing their hats or helmets, as is the custom throughout South America, lined the aisles from entrance to altar. When all the élite and high government officials had gathered, the archbishop himself preached a sermon founded on the not wholly unique assertion that politicians seek government places for their own good rather than for that of the governed, ending with the warning that the Argentine was sliding pellmell to perdition because the teaching of the Catholic religion is not permitted in the public schools. The governor of the province lent an attentive ear throughout this harangue, and watched the service with attentive Latin-American politeness; but it was noticeable that he did not show enthusiasm, and that no ceremony was included that required kneeling or crossing oneself on the part of the congregation, for Argentine government officials are often noted for their anticlerical attitude. There was an entirely different atmosphere here than at the Te Deum I had attended on Colombia’s Independence Day two years before in cloistered Bogotá.

The municipal band met us outside the cathedral and led the parade of police and firemen—marching like men long accustomed to drilling—of citizens and ecclesiastics, the archbishop, still in his purple, surrounded by a guard of honor with drawn bayonets. The procession broke up at the entrance to the Parque del Oeste, said to be the largest city park in South America. Miniature trains, astride which human beings look gigantic, carried those who did not care to walk, or hire other transportation, out to this extensive civic improvement, spreading over all the landscape at the base of the Andes to the west of the city. The crowning feature of this enormous new park, with an artificial lake nearly a mile long, concrete grandstands, and broad shaded avenues, is a solid rock rising from the plain on which the city is built, the first outpost of the Andes that bulk into the heavens close behind it. The entire top of this hill, reached by a roadway cut in a complete circuit of it, has been blasted off, and on this great platform has been reared a gigantic creation of granite and bronze called “The Armies of the Andes.” It commemorates the passage of the Andes by San Martín’s troops early in the last century to free Chile from Spanish rule, one of the most heroic expeditions in American history,—a badly equipped, half starved force struggling through snow-blocked passes on what seemed then an almost quixotic mission. Yet the conception and execution of the monument, magnificent in proportions, rarely surpassed in dignity, is worthy of its subject. Behind and above the splendid equestrian statue of San Martín are his officers and the army of liberation, ranging all the way from low relief to detached figures, the whole surmounted by an enormous winged victory, while around the monument hover huge bronze condors. All this, be it noted, was planned and carried out by a provincial town of fifty thousand inhabitants. Of the view to be had from it, on one side the plains of the Argentine, flat as a motionless sea, on the other this same plain, bursting suddenly into mountains, which climb in more and more jagged formation to the snow-clad summits of the Andes almost sheer overhead, mere words are but weak symbols to describe.

Meanwhile the excellent municipal band had been playing all the afternoon in a kiosk nearer the park entrance. Soon after noonday we low-caste promenaders on foot had begun to gather about it; then a few poor public vehicles took to ambling around it; better and better carriages appeared, with coachmen in high hats and livery; finally private automobiles, large and gleamingly new, joined the now crowded cortège. Pedestrians had become too many for free movement; the carriages and automobiles circled in unbroken procession farther and farther out on the horseshoe-shaped drive, until each heard only occasional snatches of the music as they passed near it. A few silk-clad ladies and their perfumed escorts deigned to descend and stroll a bit. Policemen on magnificent horses, white plumes waving from their helmets, directed the traffic with princely gestures. By dusk all Mendoza was there, every class of society from the proud hidalgo descendent of the conquistadores to the millionaire Spaniard who came out forty years ago with his worldly possessions in a cardboard suitcase, and who now took care to avoid the old Spanish match-seller who was his boon companion on that memorable voyage. Vendors, hawkers and fakers, announcing their wares as loudly as they dared without arousing the wrath of the haughty army officer, master of ceremonies, who would presently vent his spleen upon those who failed to snatch off their hats at the first note of the national anthem, mingled with honest European workmen in _boínas_ and _alpargatas_ and sun-faded shirts, enjoying a rare day of recreation in the life-time of toil which they naïvely consider their natural lot. Though wine flows as freely in Mendoza as in Italy, not a suggestion of drunkenness did I see during the day.

As evening advanced, the crowd became more and more silk-hatted in looks and temperament, a better bred, less provincial, more cosmopolitan, yet also more blasé throng than similar gatherings over the Andes. The bony, ungraceful women numerous in northern countries were rare, the plump type not only of Mendoza but of all the Argentine most in evidence being physically attractive in spite of overdress and enameled faces. Soon after full darkness had fallen some of the most regal equipages fell out of the procession by failing to turn the outside corner of the drive, and wended their way homeward. The better class of hired vehicles gradually followed their example; the public hacks, whose occupants were having perhaps their one spree of the year, at last got tardy, regretful orders to turn townward, until the place was left again to the foot-going classes, many of the hawkers, fakers and vendors still wandering among them, emitting rather helpless yelps in a last effort to be rid of what remained of their wares. There came a hurried last number by the band, cut unseemly short as the players dropped out and fell to stuffing their instruments into their covers, and behind the hurrying musicians the last stragglers took up the march to town. Not a firecracker had exploded all day; no fireworks enlivened the evening, though the grounds of the chief plaza and several smaller parks were gaudy with colored electric lights set out in the form of flower-plots, and similar lights outlined the municipal theater into which all those who had attended services in the morning, with the exception of the ecclesiastics, crowded to hear “Rigoletto” sung by fresh young Italian voices with more power than polish.

The “Buenos Aires al Pacífico” has several lines in and about Mendoza province, with frequent trains out through the vineyard districts. One train travels an S-shaped route and comes back to the station from which it starts without covering any of the ground twice, then makes the same trip in the opposite direction. When I rose at dawn, the Andes stood out against the sky as if they had been cut out of cardboard; by the time I had reached the station long banks of steel-gray clouds were rising like a steam curtain under the rays of the red sun, until the range was all but hidden from view. My journey through the vineyards uncovered great peaks capped with snow and glaciers that seemed to touch the sky, and everywhere were grapevines, stretching away in endless rows, between some of which oxen were plowing and men hoeing, vineyards limited only by the horizon or the Cordilleras in the background. As there is little natural campo on which to fatten herds in Mendoza province and insufficient rainfall to make wheatfields productive, grapes were introduced here half a century ago by Spaniards who brought them over from Chile. The torrents pouring down from mighty Aconcagua were caught and put to work, and wherever there is irrigation grapes grow abundantly in what was a bushy Arizona when the first settlers came, until to-day the province does indeed resemble California. For a long time Mendoza furnished the Argentine all its wine. Then Europe began sending it over at prices that competed, the vineyards spread into neighboring provinces along the base of the Andes, and Mendoza lost its monopoly. When the railroad came, it brought French, Spanish, and Italian peasants who knew grapes as they knew their own families, and the Argentine became the greatest wine-producing country in all the world outside western Europe. Now there is a little corn, alfalfa, and grain, though all these are insignificant compared to the principal product. Spaniards I met along the way asserted that corn or wheat paid better now than grapes, so low in price as to be scarcely worth picking, and that olives would do best of all, if only the growers would bring in experienced workmen and give the trees proper care.

I left Mendoza on a crisp May morning, and the autumn leaves I had not seen for years were falling so abundantly that a line from “Cyrano de Bergerac” kept running through my head, “_Regardez les feuilles, comme elles tombent_.” Here they lay drifted under the rows of slender yellowed poplars which stretched away through the vineyards, endless brown vineyards everywhere covered with the dead leaves of autumn standing in straight rows as erect as the files of an army and backed far off by the dawn-blue Andes, their white heads gradually peering forth far above as the day grew. Between the rows glided Oriental looking people, lightly touching them on either side, bent on unknown errands, for the fruit was nowhere being gathered. Unpicked grapes, shriveled to the appearance of raisins, covered even the roofs and bowers and patios of the flat adobe houses. Here and there a weeping willow or an _alfalfal_ showing the advantages of irrigation gave a contrasting splotch of deep green to the velvety-brown immensity. Before his majestic entrance the god of the Incas gilded to flaming gold a fantastic white cloud high up above his eastern portal, then lighted up the files of yellowing poplars, then brought out the golden-brown of the vast vineyards, gave a delicate pink shade to the range of snow-clads away to the west, and at last burst forth from the realms of night in a fiery glory that quickly flooded all the landscape.

I am not sure that I have ever seen nature so nearly outdo herself as in this dawn and sunrise across the vineyards of Mendoza, while we crept upward from the Argentine toward the Cordilleras. No other hour of the day, certainly, could have equaled this, and it made up amply for the discomfort of being routed out of our comfortable cabins on the “International” before daybreak, to wash in icy water and stumble about in the starlight until we were thoroughly chilled, before we had been permitted to board the little narrow-gauge _transandino_ train, so tiny in contrast to the roomy express that had carried us across the pampas that one seemed crowded into unseemly intimacy with one’s fellow-travelers. Across the aisle sat a priest with an open church-book, mumbling his devotions and crossing himself at frequent intervals, but never once raising his head to glance out the window. No doubt when he gets to Heaven he will falsely report that the earth has no landscapes to vie with those of the celestial realms. Over me swept a desire to get off and walk, to stride up over the steep trails and feel the exhilarating mountain air cut deep down into my lungs, sweeping through every limb like a narcotic, and to take in all the magnificent scene bit by bit, instead of being snatched along, however slowly, without respect either for nature or my own inclinations.

The day turned out brilliant and cloudless; in full sunshine the scene lost some of its delicate beauty of coloring, though still retaining its grandiose majesty. The vast pampa sank gradually below us as we turned away toward the mountains, the irrigated green patches grew almost imperceptible. Slowly the plain itself was succeeded by fields of loose rocks on which vegetated a few gaunt, deformed trees, spiny bushes, gnarled and crabbed clumps of brush scattered in unneighborly isolation. The sun flooded the barren, fantastic, million-ridged and valleyed foothills of many colors, rolling up to the base of abrupt mountains that climbed, rugged and unkempt and independent of all law and order, like some stupendous stairway to heaven, to the clouds in which their tops disappeared. Cliffs washed into every imaginable shape by centuries of hail, snow, and mountain winds—for there is no rain in this region—cast dense black shadows, which in the narrow valleys and tiny scoops and hollows contrasted with the thousand sun-flaming salient knobs and points and spires and hillocks—a lifeless stony barrenness only enhanced by the scattered tufts of a hardy yellow-brown bush barely a foot high.

Hour after hour we wound back and forth across the river Mendoza, fed by the glaciers above, taking advantage of its two flat banks to rise ever higher, while the river itself grew from a phlegmatic stream of the plain to a nervous mountain brook racing excitedly past through deep, narrow, rock gorges. The rare stations were “beautified” with masses of colored flowers that would have been pretty enough in their place, but which here looked tawdry and seemed to mock man’s feeble efforts to vie with nature in her most splendid moods. Above Cachueta, noted for its hot baths exploited by the city of Mendoza, in so dismal a landscape that visitors come only from dire necessity, all vegetation had disappeared and all the visible world had grown dry and rocky and barren as only the Andes can be in their most repellant regions. Not even the cactus remained to give a reminder of life; not even a condor broke the deadness of the peaks which seemed cut out with a knife from the hard heavens. After several bridges and tunnels there came an agreeable surprise,—the valley of Uspallata, with a little pasture for cattle. But this oasis did not last long, and soon the dull, reddish-brown cliffs shut us in again. Broken and irregular peaks eroded into thousands of valleys of all shapes and sizes gave lurking-places in which shadows still hid from the searching sun, like smugglers on a frontier. Though a certain grandiose beauty grew out of these crude, planless forms of nature, they ended by giving the beholder a disquieting sadness. One seemed imprisoned for life within these enormous walls; the utter absence of life, the uniformity of the dry desolation, especially the oppressive, monotonous solitude, enhanced by a dead silence broken only by the panting of the sturdy little locomotive crawling upward on its narrow cogwheel track and the creaking of the inadequate little cars behind it, seemed to hypnotize the travelers and plunge them into a sort of stupor from which nothing short of imminent disaster would arouse them.

Between ever higher stations the only signs of man were rare _casuchas_, huts of refuge built of the same dreary material as the hills, tucked away here and there against the mountainsides. Before the building of the railroad these served travelers as shelters for the night or against the dreaded _temporales_, hurricanes of the winter-bound Cordillera. At the Puente del Inca, a natural rock bridge under which the Mendoza River has worn its way in a chasm, we caught the first clear glimpse of Aconcagua, its summit covered with eternal snow and ice. Yet it seemed small compared with the tropical giants of Chimborazo and Huascarán, with their immense slopes of perpetual blue glaciers, perhaps because there was no contrast of equatorial flora below, and it was hard to believe the scientists who rank it the highest in the western hemisphere. By this time snow lay in patches about us and stretched in streaks up every crevice and sheltered slope, yet the mammoth glacier peaks and striking Alpine beauty one expected was little in evidence.

As we drew near Las Cuevas, the increasing desire for a mountain tramp, coupled with that of seeing the famous “Christ of the Andes” which the traveler by train comes nowhere near, caused me to sound several of my cosmopolitan fellow-travelers on the suggestion of leaving the train and walking over the summit. But the few of them who did not rate me hopelessly mad felt they could not spare the three days between this and the next train, even if they were not seriously infected with the tales of Chilean bandits. Yet I could not sit supinely in a railway coach and be dragged through a dingy, three-mile tunnel, to come out on the other side without having seen a suggestion of the real summit. Besides, there was another excellent reason to drop off the train at Las Cuevas. There, at the mouth of the international tunnel, my Argentine pass ended, and the fare through and over the summit, a mere fifty miles by rail, was almost twenty dollars. Even second-class, with the privilege of sitting on a wooden bench in a sort of disguised box-car, was but little less than that, and it was noticeable that all but the well-dressed had disappeared from this also, the most expensive bit of railroading in the world being too much of a luxury for the rank and file. These high rates make the Andes a doubly strong barrier against immigration from the more crowded and less capacious Pacific slope, which is to the _argentino’s_ liking, for on the eastern side the Chilean is hated and feared, all the talk of international affection notwithstanding, as something between a cruel and piratical Indian and a Prussianized tradesman.

As we drew into Las Cuevas I gathered together the essentials of kodak and note-book and turned the rest of my baggage over to a young Norwegian on his way to Valparaiso, with a request to leave it at Los Andes, where the _transandino_ joins the government railways of Chile.

The train went on. The detachment of Argentine police that had given it their protection up from Mendoza clambered upon the released engine and went back down the mountain, and I found myself stranded and almost alone in something far less than a hamlet at more than ten thousand feet above sea-level. A quick movement instantly reminded one of the height, an altitude doubly impressive at this latitude and at this season. Even near midday it was not particularly warm in the sunshine and it was decidedly cold in the shadows. Yet I must climb more than three thousand feet higher to get over into Chile. The section-gangs of half-Indians, in their heavy knit caps without visors and thick woolen socks reaching to the knees, were a sullen, cruel looking crew, with marks of frequent dissipation on their bronzed faces, men suggesting the Andean Indian stripped of his humility and law-abiding nature and gifted with the trickery that comes to primitive races from contact with the outside world.

With sunset it grew bitter cold, an icy wind howling and moaning incessantly even through the chinks of the dismal, guestless frontier hotel in which a coarse and soggy supper cost me three pesos. When it was finished, the landlord led the way out into the frigid, blustery mountain night and, wading through a snow-drift, let me into the first room of what is in summer-time a crowded wooden hotel, telling me to lock the outer door, as the whole building was mine. What he would have done had a lone lady also stopped here for the night I do not know—wired to Mendoza, perhaps, for a chaperon. I burrowed under a veritable wagon-load of quilts. Two or three times during the night I awoke and peered out the curtainless window upon the bleak, jagged snow-clads piled into the starlight above, each time wondering whether day was near, but there was no way of knowing, for not a sound was to be heard above the howling of the wind and the shivering of the doors and windows of the unsheltered wood structure.

At last there seemed to be something faintly brighter about the white crest of the range, and I coaxed myself out of bed. The darkness was really fading. I drank the cup of cold tea I had prevailed upon the landlord to leave with me the night before, strapped on my revolver for the first time since leaving Bolivia, and set out as soon as I could see the next step before me. The automobile road that zigzags up the face of the range, accomplishing the journey to the “Cristo” in seven kilometers of comparatively easy gradients in the bright summer days of December and January, was heaped high with snow in this May-day winter season and was plainly impassable. Beyond the last dreary stone refuge hut I took what had been pointed out to me the day before as a short cut and, picking up a faint trail, set out to scramble straight up the barren, rocky slope toward the grim, jagged peaks above.

For hours I clawed my way upward through loose shale and broken rock, all but pulling the mountain down about my ears, slipping back with every step, filling my low shoes of the city with sand, snow, and the molten mixture of both, panting as only he can understand who has struggled up an almost perpendicular slope in the rare atmosphere of high altitudes, my head dizzy and my legs trembling from the exertion. Every now and then I had to cross a patch of hard snow or ice so steep I must clutch with toes, heels, knees, and fingernails to keep from doing a toboggan to perdition hundreds of feet below. Sometimes there was nothing for it but to spring like a chamois from one jagged rock to another, at the imminent peril of losing my balance once for all. In many places the mountain itself was made of such poor material that it came apart at the slightest strain, so that many a time I laid hands upon a rock only to have it come sliding down toward me, threatening to carry my mangled remains with it to the bottom of the valley. I would gladly have gone down again and, after kicking the “short cut” informant, made a new start, but that was next to impossible. It was difficult enough to climb these great toboggan fields of loose shale and ice; it would have been a rare man who could have descended them whole without at least the aid of an Alpine stock. There remained no choice than to keep on picking my way back and forth across the face of the cliff, gradually clawing upward, reviving my spirits now and then by eating a handful of snow, always subconsciously expecting to receive a well-aimed shower of stones or knives from a group of bandits ensconced in one of the many splendid hiding-places about me.

I had lost myself completely and, convinced that I was in for an all-day struggle, could have met with resignation the lesser suffering meted out by bandits, when I suddenly struck what proved to be a gravelly ridge between two peaks and on it an iron caisson marking the international boundary. Far from coming out at the “Christ of the Andes,” I found the famous statue standing in utter solitude in a sandy pocket of the mountains free from snow so far below me that it looked almost miniature. By the time I had climbed down to it, however, the figure itself, erected by the two nations to signalize what they fondly hope will be perpetual peace between them, grew to several times life size and took on an impressiveness much enhanced by its solitary setting.

Not a sign of humanity had I seen or heard when I emptied my shoes and set off down the opposite slope. On the Chilean side the highway was drifted still deeper with snow, in places stone hard, in others so soft that at every step I sank knee-deep into it. The brilliant sun that had cheered me on all the breathless climb here grew so ardent that I was forced to shed my outer clothing. I was present at the birth, nay, the very conception, of the River Juncal, which later joins the Aconcagua and flows into the Pacific, for I had stood even higher than the point where the snow and glaciers begin to melt and trickle down the mountain. It is this foaming blue river which carves out the route down into Chile, leaving highway and railroad the precarious task of following it down the swift and insecure slope.

Near the mouth of the international tunnel the Lago del Inca, beautiful in its setting of haggard mountain faces, reflected the blue of the glaciers and the white of the snow peaks above. From there on all was comparatively easy going, for though the sharp ballasting of the little narrow cogwheel railroad mercilessly gashed and tore my shoes, I had already saved enough in fare to buy several pairs. Now and then I met a work-train straining upward out of the mouth of a sheet-iron snow-shed or one of the many long dark tunnels through which I passed with hand on revolver butt. By the time I had met several section-gangs, however, dismal, piratical looking fellows, with a suggestion of Japanese features, in ragged patched ponchos and wide felt hats, I decided that they were more savage in appearance than in character, and when at last a whole gang of these reputed cut-throats left off work to show me a short cut, I laid away the stories I had heard of them along with the fanciful tales of danger I had gathered in many other parts of the world. They were _rotos_ indeed, “broken” not only in the sartorial Spanish sense in which the word is used in Chile, but in the meaning it has in American slang. Not a suggestion did they have in manner or features of that hopefulness of the Argentine masses, but rather the air of men perpetually ill or saddened by a recent death in the family, who lost no opportunity to drown their sorrows in strong drink.

There were grades as steep as ten per cent. in the rackrail line down which I strode at forty cents a mile. In places the western face of the range was so steep that the mountain fell almost sheer for hundreds of feet to the railroad, the loose shale seeming ready to drop in mighty avalanches and bury everything at the slightest disturbance, and suggesting some of the problems faced by the American engineers who built the more difficult Chilean half of the _transandino_. The station of Juncal, perched on a rock, posed as a railway restaurant, but at sight of its price-list I fled in speechless awe, and at the next stream below fell upon the lunch I had been brilliant enough to pilfer from my Argentine supper the evening before. The tiny brook that had trickled from under the snow below the “Cristo” had swollen to a scarcely fordable river when, toward evening, with twenty-eight miles, or more than eleven dollars’ worth, of ups and downs behind me, the huts that had begun to appear, carelessly tucked in among the broken rocks and mammoth boulders of the Rio Juncal, collected at last into a little village called Rio Blanco, in which I found an amateur lodging. I had heard that Chile was different from the other west-coast countries, but this first glimpse of it scarcely bore out the assertion. Here were the same squalor, cur dogs, chicha—even though it was made from grapes—Indian fatalism and indifference to progress with which I had grown so familiar in the other lands of the Andes.

Descending still farther into Chile next morning, I met a fellow tramp limping toward the summit, a mere bundle of whiskers and rags, evidently a German, though he was either too surly or too sad to speak, carrying all his possessions in a grain-sack, his feet wrapped in many folds of burlap. The twenty-two miles left were an easy day’s stroll, much of it through the rocky canyon of the river that had roared all night in my ears. In mid-morning I passed the famous “Salto del Soldado,” where the railroad leaps across an abysmal chasm with the Rio Juncal brawling and foaming at its bottom, from one tunnel directly into another, and over which hovers the legend of some soldier jumping to fame and death in the revolt against Spanish rule. I had dinner in an outdoor dining-room under a red-flowered arbor beside the track, where a large steak—of rhinoceros, I fancy—corn cakes fried in grease, excellent coffee, and endless chatter from the pudding-like Chilean woman serving it, cost only a peso—and the peso of Chile is but little money indeed. The woman had never in her life been a mile farther up the valley, so that I was an object of the deepest interest to her as a denizen of the unknown world above and beyond the jagged snow-clad range that bounded her horizon.

By afternoon the weather had become like May at home. There was nothing autumnal about it except the pencil-like Lombardy poplars touched with yellow along the beautiful valley of the Juncal, back up which one looked almost wonderingly at the glacier-capped range walling off the rest of the world. The country was very dry, the hills inclosing it rocky and half-sterile, yet enlivened by the green of the organ cactus which grew plentifully, the more distant ranges showing a faint red tinge through their general blackness. Some of the parched fields were being plowed with oxen. Gradually the mountains flattened themselves out, a genuinely Andean traffic of mules, straw-laden donkeys, and half-Indian _arrieros_ on foot grew up along the broad highway following the valley, now well inhabited, chiefly in huts thrown together of a few reeds or willows, as if there was nothing to look forward to but perpetual summer. The once narrow gorge had expanded to a broad, well-settled valley that suggested California when, in the later afternoon, footsore, but many dollars ahead, I wandered into the town of Santa Rosa de los Andes, junction point of the most expensive and one of the cheapest railroads in the world, and found my half-forgotten baggage awaiting me.

The bewhiskered conductor of the express which snatched me on into the night looked like the Bowery at five in the morning. Indeed, one noticed at once a wide difference between the prosperous spick-and-spanness of the Argentine and squalid, uncheerful, _roto_ Chile, whether in the crowds of poor people quarreling over the few crumbs of coal to be found in the cinder heaps at the edge of town or in the general appearance of the government railway and its rather unkempt employees. I fell asleep soon after the train started at seven, woke once when we seemed to be rushing through high hills and over deep valleys, and again at a station where the one employee and the two policemen were wrapped to the eyes in ponchos heavy enough for the Arctic circle. Then myriads of lights flashed up out of the night ahead, the brakes ground us to a halt, and we were set down at a station named “Mapocho,” which turned out to be one of three serving Santiago, capital of Chile.