The_Other_Side_Of_The_Mountain_An_Escape_To_The_Amazon

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The
OTHER SIDE

of the

MOUNTAIN

The
OTHER SIDE

of the

MOUNTAIN

^in Escape to the Amazon

BY JAMES RAMSEY ULLMAN

CARRICK & EVANS, INC.
JVeiv York

1938, BY
ck & EVANS, INC.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY QTJINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC., RAHWAY, N. J.

TO RUTH

'whom 1 wnssed

and
<who, I hope, missed me

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION BY BROOKS ATKINSON I 1

GENESIS I?

I. MATTO GROSSO IN MANHATTAN 19

II. DOWN TWO OCEANS 3 2

m. "TURISTA" 4 8

IV. MOUNTAINS AND MEN 79

V. ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 114

VI. THE BIG PUSH *47

VII. THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 183

VIII. THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 222

IX. THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 263

X. HOW LIKE A GOD 3*3

Q.E.D.

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

LIMA'S BACKDROP: CERRO SAN CRISTOBAL 50

TICLIO: HIGHEST STATION ON THE FERROCASRIL CENTRAL 50

CHOSICA AND THE RIMAC VALLEY 96

A MOUNTAINEER AND A LADY 96

NAT WRITTEN 112

THE CHURCH AT TARMA 112

OUR HABITATION ENFORCED AT PUEBLO PARDO 148

RAPID TRANSIT NEAR LA MERCED 148

DANIEL BOONE ROVER MERRIWELL-QUTXOTE 156

AND HIS BIOGRAPHER 156

THE LONG GREEN TUNNEL OF THE PICHIS TRAIL 164

CROSSING THE PUCHELINI RIVER 164

THE TAMBO AT PUERTO YESSUP 172

A CHUNCHO FAMILY (WITH GUEST) AT TAMBO SANTA ROSA I J2

LEAVING PUERTO YESSUP 192

WE REACH THE "HUANA CAPAc" AT DAWN 192

UCAYALI STOPOVER 2O8

MAIN STREET, MASISEA 208

DOWN THE MALECON TOWARD THE MARKET, IQUITOS 240

THE MALECON-PALACE HOTEL, IQUTTOS 240

9

ID ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

PROMOTING INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 256

THREE THOUSAND MILES OF IT 256

THE SHELL GAME: THE FLAGSHIP AND THE ADMIRAL 272

STANDARD TRANSPORTATION 272

THE "CUYABA" 288

LOADING RAW RUBBER AT REMATE DOS MALLES 288

THE OPERA HOUSE THAT RUBBER BUILT, MANAOS 304

ITACOATIARA (SERPA IS EASIER) 304

PARA ALSO BOASTS A SEAGOING JUNGLE 320

A TUNNEL OF MANGO TREES ON THE PRAQA DA REPUBLICA 320

Map of Route from Lima to Iquitos page 161

INTRODUCTION

by BROOKS ATKINSON

A LTHOUGH I am one of the drama critics who drove Mr. Ull-
\ man out of die producing business, he permits me to
\. write an introduction to his book of escape. I am not
dear in my mind about his logic. Is permission a malign form of
revenge? Not to me, at any rate. For his book is die chronicle of
a voylge to Peru and of a headlong trek by automobile, mule and
river steamer across the Andes and down the Amazon, and after
reading it I am persuaded that the drama critics did him a good
turn. If the "night watch constables" had not sharply wrapped
their night sticks on four of his productions in succession, he
might have gone on for years imagining that all the worlds a
stage with Broadway at the heart of it. Purely as business shrewd-
ness it might be more logical for the producers to send critics on
long iourneys to the mountains, jungles and rivers; but until that
piece of logic occurs to them I am content to write introductions
to books about places and people I have never seen.

As a matter of fact, I am in a fine position to appreciate escape
and to promote it with sincerity. The Hudson River lies only a
quarter of a mile from the windows of my wnong-room; and
although I cannot see as far south as the Upper Bay, where the
Statue of Liberty patiendy stands, I can see enough of the Hud-
son to frame the Normmdie and Queen Mary as they steam up
and down the stream. If Mr. Ullman had looked up at my win-
dow when he headed south in the Smta Kta, he would have
seen me waving and wishing him well. Since he did not look up
I was compelled to turn back to my desk and go to work on the
producers he had left in town.

Some of them were in luck that season. Some of diem pro-
duced plays that die public thoroughly enjoyed Indeed, some of
ta produced plays that the critics liked, which shows how

II

12 INTRODUCTION

friendly the theater business can be. While Mr. Ullman was bat-
tering around in the jungle and making friends with at least one
fabulous American, we were wriggling through Times Square at
night, breathing the carbon dioxide of fashionable opening per-
formances and going to bed at about the time he was getting up
to greet the sunrise. We were shivering in the cold draughts of
New York streets while he was steaming in the jungle. Although
he was nursing a broken heart, I fancy he knew that he was
having the best of it, and probably he has written this book to
torture those of us who had to stay at home.

The journey got into his blood stream in more ways than one.
I know that, for last summer an inquiring newspaperman re-
marked to me: "Do you know a producer named Ullman who is
just starting off with an expedition to Borneo?" I was a little
annoyed by this. There is no sound reason why Mr. Ullman
should get two journeys on four sets of bad notices, particularly
to an island I almost visited once but missed because a cargo of
sulphur went to a rival ship at the last moment. My office staff,;
which has a fine sense of moral justice, instantly tracked Mr.
Ullman down, although he thought he was in hiding, and made
absolutely sure that he was not going away just then. Having
been infected once, however, he will be burning with travel
fever again some day. If he will only look up at my window
when his ship steams down the river I will a little enviously
perhaps give him the mariner's farewell.

AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I should like to express my debt of gratitude to my
traveling companion, HERMAN LORD, and to NATHANIEL
WRITTEN, of Tarma, Peru, for the contributions their
cameras have made to this book. The frontispiece is
MR. WHITTEN'S, and approximately half of the other
photographs are MR. LORD'S. J* R. U.

The
OTHER SIDE

of the
MOUNTAIN

GENESIS

(POSIES FROM THE PRESS)

The intentions of "The Laugh-
ing Woman" are laudable, but
the results are lamentable.

BROOKS ATKINSON, Times.

"Stork Mad," Mr. UUman's new
offering at the Ambassador, is
horribly, depressingly dull.

WELLELA WALDORF, Post.

"So Proudly We Hail" doesn't
amount to a hoot in Joe Leblang's
bargain basement.

JOHN ANDERSON, Journal.

"The Laughing Woman" has
the dramatic content of a hole in
a doughnut.

JOHN MASON BROWN, Post.

After producing "Stork Mad"

Mr. Ullman should face his mirror

this morning flushed and ashamed.

BURNS MANTLE, News.

Last night, after a long wait, we
saw "The Laughing Woman, 1 ' and
I for one am sorry that I did.

GILBERT GABRIEL, American*

"Double Dummy*' is imitative
and second-rate.

BROOKS ATKINSON, Times.

''Double Dummy" suffers from
ineptness. Those of us who were
duty-bound to sit it out also
suffered.

JOHN MASON BROWN, Post .

WALTER WINCHELL
On Broadway

James R. Ullman, the theatrical
producer, is leaving for the Ama-
zon jungles next week.

I

MATTO GROSSO IN MANHATTAN

rHAD all happened with such incredible suddenness.
At the beginning of October I had been a New York the-
atrical producer with four plays in preparation for Broad-
way. At the end of November I was a former theatrical producer
with four sets of scenery in Cain's Warehouse.

"What next?" inquired Ruth one morning over the coffee cups.

"Well, there's always Fuller Brushes," I said. "Or sheep-raising
in Wyoming. Or maybe Roosevelt will appoint me to the Su-
preme Court."

Ruth contemplated me with wifely concern. How different,
she must have been thinking, things had been before the Great
Extermination.

"I know what we'll do," she declared suddenly. 'We'll take a
trip. That's just what you need. You're worn out, and a nice trip
will give you a chance to think things over and get away from
from-"

"/* *B, I suggested.

"Yes, it's just the thing. Now where shall we go? How about
Virginia Beach?"

"Wrong season."

"Bermuda, then?"

Far down inside of me, in the dark remoteness of the inner
man where the Atkinsons, Andersons and Browns of the worid
can never penetrate, something quietly, gently stirred something
that was still unbruised, unbloodied and unbowed.

"Bermuda?" I repeated. "Mmmmm "

In the library we pulled out the adas and contemplated the
pin-points that were die Summer Isles.

19

20 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

"Of course we've been there-" Ruth was saying.

My eye had traveled down the pale blue inches of the Atlantic.

"There's Cuba," I ventured, "and the West Indies."

Ruth seemed interested, and we threaded our way among the
islands-Puerto Rico, Haiti, Jamaica, Antigua, Saint Kitts, Marti-
nique

"Some of the cruise-ships," I heard myself saying, "go as far
as South America."

Ruth looked up suddenly.

"South America!" she exclaimed. "But I was thinking of just
one week."

"We could make it two," I muttered, my eyes on the map. Yes,
there was Venezuela, green and beckoning at the bottom of the
page. And nestling beside it, pink Colombia.

"Do you remember that chap we met last week?" I asked.
"The one who had been in Peru."

"Uh-huh," said Ruth. It was a very restrained uh-huh indeed.

"He told me it was the most fascinating country he had ever
visited. The Andes, the deserts, the dead cities of the Incas
Did you know that practically all of civilized Peru lies in a little
strip between the Andes and the Pacific? On the other side of
the mountain there's nothing; just jungle wilderness, the same as
before white men came."

I had been turning the pages of the adas.

"Look there's eastern Peru. See how blank it is; only the
rivers and Iquitos. There it is Iquitos. The only city in two
thousand miles of jungle. It's on the Amazon"

"Had you thought of a rocket to Mars?" Ruth inquired
sweedy.

"Eh?"

"I said Mars. We might go there, mightn't we?"

I shook my head.

"They say there's life on Mars; maybe civilized beings. There'd
be critics"

MATTO GROSSO IN MANHATTAN 21

That was how it began.

For a few days Ruth clung with forlorn hope to her modest
vision of Virginia Beach, but it was no use. The bacilli of wander-
lust were in my blood stream where she herself, innocently
enough, had planted them and they were there to stay, multi-
plying, rampaging, virulent. If I was going to get away from
it ally I damn well was going to get so far away that it all, with
all its horses and all its men, could not get me back into its toils
until I was good and ready to come. In my outward life I was
still busy consoling investors and pacifying creditors, but in my
mind's eye I was already stalking along white tropic beaches,
clinging to Andean crags, threading dark jungle rivers. Broadway
was remote. From my perch atop a coconut palm I could spit
right in its eye.

At last Ruth capitulated. If the Andes and the Amazon, heat,
mosquitoes, anacondas and tarantulas were what I needed to re-
fresh my critic-scarred soul, she would not, she said, stand in my
way. But she did not feel it necessary that both members of the
family should go out of their minds simultaneously. Striking a
rational compromise, she would accompany me to Peru, spend a
short time with me in Lima, and return to New York when I
struck out for parts uncouth. The implied, though not openly
stated, thought was that I would in due time see the error of my
ways and return with her. As insurance, however, she had per-
suaded her sister to come along with us. Edna, she pointed out,
would be company for her on the trip back if I did stick by my
plan and would be useful to help lace me into my straitjacket
when need arose.

You don't just decide to go to South America and go. Not
by a damn sight.

I have often contemplated with awe and envy the superlative
ease with which certain travelers or at least certain writers of
travel-storiesare able to roam the earth with untrammeled free-
dom and an utter disregard of such trivia as passports, visas,

22 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

express-checks, tickets, clothing and toothbrushes. "Come with
me to Tibet," chirrups the peripatetic scribe, and forthwith skips
nonchalantly over that nation's rigidly closed frontier. "With five
kopeks in my pocket I hitch-hiked from Moscow to Singapore,"
chronicles the debonair adventurer, as if tying his shoe-laces
were all the preparation needed for such a jaunt. Alas, it was not
my lot to inhabit such a footloose, happy-go-lucky world. Every
ocean I would cross was guarded by implacable steamship agents;
every strange land I would visit was hemmed in by platoons of
customs officials; on every mountain crag and jungle trail lurked
a prefect or a vice-consul waiting to give me the works. Long
before I first set foot on South America yes, long before I got
as far as Sandy Hook I was already a trained and hardened
veteran in the jungle of international officialdom.

First, of course, there was the passport a comparatively easy
acquisition. When it came to visas, however, things perked up,
the Peruvian and Brazilian consulates letting it be known that
they could issue them only after submission by the applicant of
health and character certificates, plus a half-dozen photographs
apiece. The photograph part of it was painless until I had to
look at them. The Quest for Character consisted of being finger-
printed by the police department and receiving a grudging writ-
ten admission that I had never been in jail for a major offense.
It was in the Search for Health that the going grew really
rough. My physician was delighted when I told him where I
was going; it would give him a reason to read up on tropical
diseases, which he had theretofore had little occasion to study.
His thoroughness was appalling, and on my next visit he greeted
me with an array of shining syringes and enough vaccines, cap-
sules and antitoxins to convey an army healthfully through the
Black Death. He had also prepared for me a list of the infectious
diseases to which I might be exposed, including malaria, amoebic
and bacillary dysentery, yellow fever, typhoid fever, undulant
fever, leprosy, hookworm, cholera, bubonic plague and the com-
mon cold, and appended an outline of the symptoms and treat-
ment for each. The only difficulties seemed to be (i) that the

MATTO GROSSO IN MANHATTAN 23

course of most of the diseases was such that you couldn't tell
which was which until rigor mortis had set in and (2) that there
wasn't any effective treatment for most of them anyhow. Thus
reassured, I submitted to a vaccination and some twelve assorted
inoculations and couldn't lift my arms for a week.

Finally, provided with my doctor's certificate, I returned to the
consulates, only to learn that before acceptance it would have to
be approved by the Board of Health of die city. As soon as pos-
sible, therefore, I went to the new Department of Health Build-
ing on Center Street. What befell me there I shall set down
briefly and without comment, and anyone may make of it what
he chooses.

Entering the central lobby I espied a sign over a nearby door
reading CERTIFICATES ISSUED HERE. This looked promising, but
almost immediately stopped looking promising as I continued
reading and saw CHARGE, ONE DOLLAR. It was Monday morning,
and on Monday mornings I am invariably not only penniless but
in debt. I had fifty cents in my pocket, and my bank was four
miles uptown. Eight miles later I reappeared at CERTIFICATES ISSUED
HERE, stood in line for fifteen minutes, and was then informed by
a clerk that these were birth certificates, not health certificates.
Health certificates were issued somewhere else in the building
(he did not know where) and they didn't cost anything.

The man in the information booth outside went him one better.
Not only didn't he know where health certificates were issued,
but he had never heard of health certificates, was certain there
were no such things as health certificates, and assured me that
even if there were health certificates, the Department of Health
would not be the place that issued them. A man in a chauffeur's
uniform, who had been standing by, came up.

"I know what you mean, buddy," he said. "You mean a health
certificate."

I agreed that that was what I meant, and he promptly escorted
me through a complicated series of doors and corridors until we
arrived at what was apparently a surgical dispensary. At least

24 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

there were many nurses and many unhappy-looking people with
bandages.

"Miss O'Brien here will take care of you/' he said, and left me
in charge of the head nurse. Miss O'Brien was efficient-looking
and had heard of health certificates.

"I'll be with you in just a minute," she said, and returned in a
half-hour. By that time she had forgotten what I came for, but
when I reminded her she said, oh, yes, Dr. Goldy was my jnan.
Dr. Goldy's office was somewhere in the building, but she wasn't
sure where.

"Just ask for health certificates at the information desk," she
suggested.

There was a Dr. Goldy and he had an office in the building,
and finally I found him. He too had heard of health certificates,
but had nothing whatever to do with them. He suggested I try
the commissioner's office on the eighth floor.

By this time, apparently, the elevator operators in the building
had grown tired of carrying me up and down, for five minutes
of ringing for a car elicited no response. A stiff climb and a two-
mile walk brought me to a door marked COMMISSIONERS, but
subsequent inquiries of the young lady inside disclosed that this
was the deputy-commissioners' office and that what I wanted
was the commissioner's office on the fourth floor. After a while
I arrived at the commissioner's office, where, to my amazement,
a young man assured me that, yes, he issued the certificates, but
that first I would have to have my own physician's certificate
certified [sic] at the Bureau of Permits on the ground floor.
When this had been done I could return to him.

The Bureau of Permits turned out to be my old friend
CERTIFICATES ISSUED HERE: CHARGE, ONE DOLLAR, and the queues at
the windows were longer than ever. I selected a comparatively
short one, stood in line for about ten minutes and was rewarded
with the information that I should go to Window No. 14, over
in the corner. Window No. 14 had a sign above it. The sign read:
BURIAL PERMITS. By this time I didn't gready care whether I went
to South America or Woodlawn, and as there was no line at

MATTO GROSSO IN MANHATTAN 25

BURIAL PERMITS I had nothing to lose, I showed the clerk my
doctor's letter.

"There must be some mistake," I said, "but I was told"
The clerk took the letter, stamped it and handed it back to me
without a word. My certificate had been certified.

I have a dim recollection of stumbling back to the commis-
sioner's office and of the young man there doing some rapid
stamping and signing. Five minutes later the sane and soothing
roar of the subway was in my ears, my health certificate was in
my pocket, and a serene self-confidence was in my heart. The
Amazonian jungles would be a pushover after this.

None of my subsequent skirmishes with officialdom had the
epic quality of the Quest for Health, but some of them contained
the elements of drama and fantasy. The purchase of steamship
accommodations was complicated by the unshakable conviction
of all travel agents that what every traveler really wants, all his
protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, is a cruise de luxe,
complete with tiled swimming pool, M.G.M. Feature Presenta-
tions and a master of ceremonies. I wanted a one-way passage
to Callao, Peru, on a cargo ship or small passenger vessel. It was
only by keeping wide awake and on guard that I did not sign
up for a Mediterranean trip on the Rex, Coronation Week in
London or a ten-thousand-dollar, round-the-world cruise on the
Empress of Britain. Finally though with stern disapproval I was
permitted to engage passage on the Grace Liner Santa Rita,
which was small enough to resemble a ship rather than Rocke-
feller Center and was going where I wanted to go.

As instructed, I sent my passport, together with my collection
of certificates, to the consuls for visa. In due time it came back,
accompanied by many stamped and ribboned subsidiary docu-
ments. I shall <juote from only one of them my Folba de Identi-
ficafao para Pedido de Vista em Passaporte Estrmgeiro en Brasil:

Name: James Ramsey Ullman.

Profession: Writer.

Can you Read and Write: No.

26 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

Married or Single: Single.
Number of Children: Two.
Vessel on which Sailing: Chimu.

One way or round-trip ticket: Round trip (it was one way).
Port of entry into Brazil: Rio de Janeiro (it was to be the
Amazon village of Tabatinga).

You get the general idea.

The only item that disturbed me at all was that referring to
port of entry. I called up the Brazilian Consulate and asked if
there might not be difficulties because of it. They said they didn't
think so. I indicated that I'd appreciate it if they could be a
little more certain, as I had no desire to arrive at Tabatinga and
be told to go around to the front door at Rio, a distance of a
mere eight thousand miles through the Panama Canal or the
Straits of Magellan. They said there would probably be no
trouble. I hoped they were probably right.

Between bouts with the Established Powers I devoted myself
to another stern duty of all prospective travelers Reading Up.
In no time, it seemed, I had amassed a vast and heterogeneous
library, ranging from Prescott's stately "Conquest of Peru" to
Peter Fleming's breezy "Brazilian Adventure," and from Darwin's
"Voyage of the Beagle" to the monthly journal of the Paara
Chamber of Commerce. Virtually all the travel books of which
there were hundredsbegan with the flat statement that the
interior of the South American continent is utterly unknown
and forthwith proceeded to describe it in minute detail This
would have been discouraging to the adventure-minded traveler
had it not been for the fact that the data and impressions in one
book differed so widely from those in another. The greatest
discrepancies occurred between the stories of the "adventure"
type and those of the commercial-promotion or "good-will"
type. The authors of the former were always in the direst straits;
they subsisted on coca leaves and fried scorpions, were hope-
lessly lost in the jungle whenever they strayed a hundred yards
from camp, and walked constantly with death at their elbow

MATTO GROSSO IN MANHATTAN 2J

and a poisoned arrow in the seat of their pants. The "good-will"
authors, on the other hand, encountered none of these perils,
though they traveled through the identical terrain as their ad-
venturesome competitors. For them there were swift, modern
ships plying upon even the smallest Amazonian tributaries; when-
ever they tired, while journeying overland, there was always a
delightful tomboy or native inn, just around the turn in the trail;
and even the humblest rubber-station was a paradise of passion
fruit and Kelvinators. The divergence was confusing, but it was
also encouraging. At least it indicated that my record, when I
got to it, would be as authoritative as the next.

The one branch of Reading Up on which I should have been
laboring, but of course wasn't, was the study of Spanish and
Portuguese. It was, I fully realized, both impractical and im-
polite to travel in a foreign country without having at least a
rudimentary knowledge of the native language, and each day
I promised myself that on the next I would get to work and
advance myself beyond the buenos noches, machos gracias stage
in which I was currently floundering. As a matter of fact, I
could not even say that much in Portuguese. My only hope, it
seemed, was to head immediately for a region where the in-
habitants spoke only Quichua or Araucanian, for they at least
could not blame me for not having taken a Berlitz course.

More or less related to Reading Up, in the earnest business of
preparation for travel, are Contacts. Contacts consist principally
of dozens of letters of introduction from people you know
slightly to people you don't know at aU, probably don't want
to know, and who certainly don't want to know you. In my
particular case the situation was somewhat complicated by the
fact that I had only the foggiest notion of where I was going,
but that did not deter me from collecting a briefcase-full of
introductory notes to practically everybody anybody knew
south of Philadelphia. During the entire trip I made use of two.

Another unavoidable phenomenon in the realm of Contacts is
The-Man-Who-Has-Been-There. Let it become known that you
are going on a journey be it to Iquitos, Irkutsk or Antarctica

28 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

and all your friends will immediately produce acquaintances who
"know the region intimately" and "will be able to give invaluable
information." Most of the authorities to whom I was thus re-
ferred turned out to be movie actors who had once passed
through the Panama Canal on their way to Hollywood or
elderly ladies who had had a day in Caracas during a Caribbean
cruise. And the few persons I met who had actually been in the
interior of tropical South America were of little more assistance.
Inasmuch as January and February were the rainy season, said
one, I must be sure to be equipped with boots and poncho.
Inasmuch as January and February were the dry season, said
another, I must be sure to carry along my own drinking water.
And so on. All agreed, however, that I would be devoured by
insects, bitten by snakes, racked by fever and drowned in the
rapids, and assured me that if such minor inconveniences didn't
bother me I would have a perfectly marvelous time. 1

It was the night before sailing. I crammed the last pair of
underdrawers into the bulging suit case, clicked the lock and
stood up.

'Well, 5 ' said I, "we're set."

It was not, I confess, a moment at which I could justifiably
be very proud of myself. My business had just collapsed, and as a
result I was going to South America. Not to start a new business-
just going. Instead of rolling up my sleeves and applying myself
to the job of building success out of failure, I was clearing out
of the scene of the accident and blandly going on a journey

1 There were, to be sure, a few bright exceptions, and I should like to
express my thanks to Dr. R. C. Oliveira of the Brazilian Information
Bureau, Dr. Frank Tannenbaum of Columbia University, Mr. Raye Plate
of the American Geographical Society, Mr. George O'Rourke of Thomas
Cook & Son, and Dr. Robert E. Kaufman, all of whom gave me valuable
information and suggestions relative to various aspects of my trip.

The maps of the American Geographical Society, incidentally, can be
of great assistance to anyone planning a journey into the lesser known
parts of South America. They are on the scale of one to a million and
possess far more detail than the ordinary South American maps on the
market. Some of them have been printed, but for much of the interior of
the continent they are not yet complete, and only photostatic copies of
the originals can be secured.

MATTO GROSSO IN MANHATTAN 29

which had not the remotest connection with my life as it had
been or as it would be when I returned.

Even the journey itself was vague in the extreme. It had only
a beginning; no middle and no end. Ruth, her sister Edna and I
were leaving for Peru; they with round-trip tickets, I with a one-
way ticket and that was all. After they left, the prospectus was
exclusively negative. My trip, wherever it might take me, would
have no plan and no purpose; it would contribute nothing toward
scientific knowledge or the wealth of nations; it would not, in
all probability, result in the discovery of a gold mine, Colonel
Fawcett, or a Way of Life. No one was sending me on it; no one
had any direct interest in where I would go or what I would do;
and no one was concerned with what I might acquire from it.
This, of course, excepted Ruth, whose wifely intuition told her
I would acquire' both malaria and a beard.

No, there was no use pretending. This journey of mine was a
running away. From failure; from work; from the problems and
responsibilities that hemmed me in. Why, then, South America?
Why the Andes and the Amazon rather than Virginia Beach or
Bermuda or the bars of West Fifty-second Street? Partly, I
suppose, because I would be rather less likely to encounter well-
meaning friends who "knew me when" and would tell me just
what they thought was wrong with "Stork Mad." Partly because
I had always found the ocean, the mountains and long miles of
forest to be a better therapeutic for die ills of the spirit than
3-Star Hennessey or the lobbies of hotels. But chiefly, I think, I
was going to South America for the childishly simple reason
that it was remote and unknown to me and many horizons beyond
my horizon. There were a hundred good reasons why I should
not go, and practically none why I should, but I was still young
enough to believe that a good journey, like a good marriage,
should be an affair of the heart rather than of the mind.

And just what was it that South America offered the heart?
Well, there were many pkces I wanted to visit, many men and
things I wanted to see and know. The dark-breasted Pacific, the
blinding beaches, the desolation of high peaks. The caves by the

30 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

Urubamba where dead Incas sit through the centuries with their
arms crossed on their chests; the hills north of Cuzco where the
eye cannot tell what is the work of man and what the work of
geologic time. The long, green tunnel of the Pichis Trail; the
straggling remnants of European colonists who came to find
empire and took to themselves brown wives and coca leaves; the
shy Chuncho Indians who, they say, are hospitable to the gringo
but keep their arrows sharp. The jungle, dark and trackless as
the brain of man. And the great Amazon, rising in Peru, Bolivia,
Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, pouring down in a thou-
sand streams from mountains above the Pacific, clawing out the
soil of a continent with a thousand silver nails and depositing
it three thousand miles away on the floor of the Atlantic the.
blood stream and the intestine of three million square miles of
living earth which man has scarcely touched.

However superficially, I should come to know a little of these
things. However impermanendy, I should move for a little while
through a world of new sights and sounds, new men and things,
new values. That my mildly lunatic little venture would help
solve any of my practical problems I had not the faintest expec-
tation. I was embarking on it not for any result which it might
bring, but for its own sake. Many journeys have been made in
the world by many men, and each traveler has his own ostensible
purposes and ends. But whether he go by ship, by train, by horse,
by dirigible or afoot, whether on the Normandie with ten thou-
sand in express checks or by the roadside with a toothbrush and
a hopeful thumb, he goes, though he may not know it, for the
same reason as his fellows. He is escaping, and he is seeking.
Beyond the horizon there is always hope. On the other side of
the mountain is El Dorado.

During the sixteenth century the story was sometimes told in
the courts and along the water fronts of Europe that far up the
reaches of the Amazon River, in newly discovered South Amer-
ica, there lived an Indian tribe whose city was called Manoa and
was built of gold. The chief of the tribe, the story related, was
each morning dusted with gold by his attendants until he shone

MATTO GROSSO IN MANHATTAN 31

all yellow in the sun. Thus gilded he moved about aU day, and
in the evening the gold was washed from him into the river, so
that, having touched his sacred person, it could never be used
again. There were sailors and adventurers who claimed to have
seen these specks of gold swirling in the waters of the great river,
near its mouth, but none of diem knew the location of the
storied city in the inner darkness of the continent. The years
passed, and still no man had found it.

Then, in 1595, Sir Walter Raleigh, undaunted by the failure
of so many men before him, crossed the Atlantic to the wilder-
ness of the New World "in quest of the Golden City of Manoa
and the Golden King, who by the Spaniards is called El Dorado."
He didn't find them. But if this was a good enough reason for
Sir Walter Raleigh to go to South America it was good enough
for me.

II

DOWN TWO OCEANS

No tengo dinero, no tengo papel,
No tengo trabajo-cancmba! Oh, hell!
No tengo emplepoh, what shall I do?
Carramba! Carrajo! Me voy al Pern!
From a West Coast ditty

I WAS glad it was raining. As we bumped down to the pier, in
the cab the streets were dreary and dank with water that
was trying to turn to snow but couldn't. Times Square, as
we passed through it, looked frowsy and disheveled, its side-
walks almost empty, its thousand electric pin-points winking
feebly through the gloom. A theater marquee slid by.-opENiNG
TONiGHT-Alas, poor impresario. His hand-picked audience would
arrive at the end of the first act, and the critics would have wet
feet. Gray December was in the city's bones. It was a good day
to be leaving it, to be escaping. I had, of course, but the faintest
notion of what I was escaping to, but one look at what I was
escaping from was enough to reassure me. Somewhere in the
world the sun was shining hot and golden in the zenith; some-
where there were white beaches, tall mountains and long green
trails through the jungle; somewhere there were men and women
who didn't know the difference between a Broadway producer
and a man from Mars. And I was going there

The Grace Line pier was a cavern of dampness and smells,
but our two-by-four cabin on the Santa Rita was snug and bright
We spent a leisurely hour unpacking, saying good-by to such
of our hardy friends as braved the elements to see us off, and
wondering what our berths would look like when the hardy
friends with their highballs finally got off them. Edna appeared

32

DOWN TWO OCEANS 33

from her cabin down the corridor with a worried expression and
the dreadful premonition that her roommate might snore. Ruth
and I, preoccupied with our own problems, flipped coins for
choice of berths. Ruth won and picked the berth nearest the
portholea choice she was to have ample time to regret.

Presently the ship's siren was howling, the last visitors had
stumbled down the gangway, and the pier was slowly receding
into the water-front mist. Down the river there was no skyline,
no green of Battery Park, no Statue of Libertyonly gray shapes
and the gray rain falling slantwise on the water. Soon the inevi-
table convoy of gulls picked us up and screamed us impatiently
on our way. Beyond the Narrows we could see no land at all*
but after an hour a sudden accentuation of the ship's motion
made us surmise that we were in the open ocean. Descending to
our cabin the surmise was confirmed. The Atlantic had bade us
welcome by depositing a small section of itself in the middle
of Ruth's berth.

On the morning of the first day out the weather was still grim,
but no grimmer than the faces of the passengers. About a third
of them, apparently, were seasick. Another third the philosophers
and fatalists were not actually ill, but had decided they were
going to be and were conducting themselves accordingly. The
remainder, though neither sick nor preparing to be sick, were
engaged in the morose occupation of sizing up their fellow-
travelers and as a result appeared even more depressed than the
other two-thirds. As a member of the third group I made my
rounds of the promenade deck, punctiliously observing the ritual
of shipboard etiquette which requires all passengers, for their
first few hours on board, to stare at each other with either (a)
icy indifference or (b) undisguised loathing.

As I walked I kept passing a young woman who was circling
the deck in the opposite direction. The first five times we
observed the strictest decorum by ignoring each other com-
pletely. The sixth time we both permitted ourselves a disapprov-
ing stare. The seventh and eighth we set our jaws and registered

34 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

disdain, and on the ninth we eyed each other with wholehearted
ferocity. Coming around for the tenth time I was nervous; at
the next encounter there would be nothing for it but to punch
her nose. But as we came toward each other again I had an
inspiration.

"Hello," I said.

"Hello," she replied, and smiled.

For a moment I was stuck. Things began to look black again.
Then:

"Gulls," I said, pointing at the gulls.

"Yes," she said, and from there on it was easy.

In due time she turned out to be Miss Sara Forbes, daughter
of the British minister to Peru, currently on her way from the
Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where she had been studying nursing,
to rejoin her family in Lima. By mid-afternoon we were thor-
oughly acquainted with each other's life history, family, friends,
philosophy and shuffleboard games. When the ice breaks on ship-
board you go through with a crash.

During the day others, too, of the Ktcfs passengers emerged
from behind their hostile anonymity and turned into recogniz-
able individuals. There was Mr. Hicks, a British-American, who
was traveling to Chile for a London export house; and Mr.
Marden, from Terre Haute, who was on his way to the Canal
Zone to supervise the building of a road; and Professor Jones,
on sabbatical leave from Miami University in Ohio, en route to
Valparaiso and an exchange fellowship; and Mr. Cunningham,
of the Canadian Department of Agriculture, who was on an ob-
scure horticultural junket to the Argentine; and Mr. Capps, who
was the proprietor of an alligator farm in Costa Rica; and the
Fernandinis, a Peruvian family of husband, wife, daughter, nurse
and dog, homeward bound after a New York vacation; and
engineers, and more engineers; and salesmen, and more sales-
men Indeed, practically all our fellow-travelers began to ex-
hibit human characteristics after the first day's miasma of sea-
sickness and suspicion had been dispelled.

DOWN TWO OCEANS 35

We turned in that night with our blankets covering us and
awoke the next morning with them on the floor which meant
we were in the Gulf Stream. It was no longer raining, but sea
and sky were an almost indistinguishable gray, and we were very
much alone between them.

There was nothing of the Ocean Greyhound or Queen of the
Atlantic about the Santa Rita. She was geared for the marathon,
not the sprints. Her deep furrow in the ocean was cut with
patient deliberation, and the vibration of her body as she moved
was not that of straining exertion, but of measured plodding. In
a train, a plane or an automobile this would have been unpleasant
almost reprehensible. They are machines which are built to
move swiftly, and if they move slowly, they are belying their
only function. But it is different, I think, with a ship. The Rittfs
mileage like her bar, her bathtubs and her passenger-list may
not have borne comparison with those of the great transatlantic
liners, but she was not their inferior for that. Indeed, in our slow
and casual progress down the curving meridian of our course,
it seemed to me we made a showing of the sound sea virtues
of steadfastness and determination that none of the hotel-ferries,
shuttling back and forth between Cherbourg and New York,
could hope to match. The Santa Rita had business on the west
coast of South America and she would get there in her own good
time, with a sublime disregard of the number of movie stars at
the captain's table and the split second at which she passed
Ambrose Light.

Except on the occasion of the captain's dinner or a shipwreck
the cargo of a vessel is of considerably more importance than
the passenger-list. It pays more, it costs less to transport, and it
never complains or gets seasick. Our cargo on the Rita consisted
chiefly of trucks, rails and mining machinery consigned to big
American and British corporations in Chile and Peru. Among
this welter of hardware, however, there was one alien item that
had a wistful history of its own. It seems that some three months
previously there had been an exhibition of products and produce
of Chile at the Chilean Consulate in New York. For the occasion

36 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

the consul imported many articles from his native country, but
the particular pride of his heart was a rare blossom-bearing plant,
indigenous only to Chile and little, known elsewhere, which he
brought up by ship at considerable trouble and expense. It finally
reached New York, only to run afoul of the Department of
Agriculture, whose inspectors suspected it of harboring question-
able parasites and refused to allow it in. The consul appealed
to the Port Authority, then to the New York office of the De-
partment of Agriculture, then to the Department at Washing-
ton. From this eminent authority he finally received instructions
that not only could he not bring the plant into the country to
exhibit, but that, according to the law, it could not even be de-
stroyed here. It must be returned forthwith to Chile. By the
time this dictum transpired the exhibition, of course, was over,
and the plant itself had withered to a dry stalk. But stalk or no,
the Department of Agriculture would have none of it, and there
it was on the Santa Eita, Valparaiso-bound. I inquired of a few
ship's officers why they didn't just heave it overboard. They
were a bit vague on the point, but seemed to fear it might pre-
cipitate some international crisis.

On the fourth morning out the sea had turned from green to
blue; the officers appeared in white, and the sun in splendor.
Long clouds trailed southward, flat-bottomed and doming toward
the zenith, and the warm wind of the Caribbees came rolling
down the decks. At noon we raised San Salvador, first of the
Americas sighted by Columbus, and that night a lighthouse
beacon was blinking at us a few miles to die east; in the early
morning we would be rounding the easternmost tip of Cuba.
We were out of the open Atlantic, among the islands. The air
was softer, the stars were nearer and the broad belly of the sea
was shot with phosphorescent gleams. We were furrowing into
the tropics and they were showing us their loveliest face. I sus-
pected they would show me the other side too before I was
through with them, and they with me.

DOWN TWO OCEANS 37

How reasonless and arbitrary are most of our roles of social
conduct! In a New York apartment house families live cheek-by-
jowl for years without so much as nodding to each other in the
elevator, and a neighbor who makes friendly overtures is at once
suspected of being either an eccentric or a confidence man. On
shipboard, however, this is exactly reversed. A person who
within forty-eight hours of embarking does not know the voca-
tion, income, life-history and personal philosophy of every
fellow-passenger is rare indeed, and the hardy non-conformer
who fails to call anyone by his Christian name after the first
"how do you do" is forthwith branded a snob and a misanthrope.
We already knew more about Miss Forbes and Hicks and Jones-
than people whom we had known in New York for years. The
Fernandinis had invited us to dine with them in Lima and visit
their mining properties in the nearby Andes. Marden had re-
lated to Ruth in full detail the events leading up to his divorce
from his first wife, and I am quite certain that had it not been
for my unfortunate presence he would long since have asked
her to become his second.

At first it seemed that we were the only "tourists'* aboard;
that is, the only passengers with no specific and fairly rational
objective to our voyage. In due time, however, our group was
augmented by Mr. Capps he of the Costa Rican alligator farm.
There had, it seems, been some mistake about Mr. Capps. In the
first place, his name was not Capps, but Kaplan. In die second
place, he was the proprietor, not of an alligator farm, but of a
laundry. And in the third pkce, the laundry was not in Costa
Rica, but on De Kalb Avenue, Brooklyn. He was, he assured us,
"just going south to look around." In an unguarded moment,
apparently, he had expressed to a f ellow-passenger the hope that
he "might see an alligator," and the shipboard grapevine had
taken care of the rest,

To compensate for the loss of Mr. Capps, however, we had
made the acquaintance of a traveler whose vocation was, to say
the least, exotic. He was a deaf-mute Panamanian, and his life's
work, according to his own penciled story, was "trying to get

38 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

into die United States." Eight times in the past ten years he had
set out for the Land of the Free, and eight times he had been
held up by the immigration authorities in New York and de-
ported as an afflicted, and therefore undesirable, alien. This was
one of his deportation trips, but, far from being discouraged, he
was already making plans for die return voyage and his ninth
assault. He was confident that sooner or later he would wear
down somebody's resistance.

Our acquaintance with the fictitious Mr. Capps had begun
romantically and ended in anticlimax. Our acquaintance with
another fellow-traveler began as farce-comedy and ended as
something else. He was a German doctor, whose misfortune it
was to weight two hundred and fifty pounds, to speak English
with a comic-strip accent and, in the heat of midday, to re-
semble less a conventional human being than a steaming pudding
just removed from the oven. Our introduction to him had been
in the Rita's tiny swimming tank, in which his sudden immersion
had resulted in half the water, plus Edna, being washed over the
side onto the deck; and thenceforward his tide as ship's clown
was undisputed. It was not until the night before reaching
Panama that he existed for us as anything but a ponderously
amusing phenomenon.

That night, finding ourselves in adjoining deck-chairs, I in-
quired of him where he was going. He said to Nicaragua.

"On a pleasure trip?" I asked.

He shook his head.

"No, not a pleasure trip. You see," he continued in his strangu-
lated English, "I am a Jew, and four years ago it is necessary
for me to leave Germany if I want to continue practicing my
profession. I go to London, but I know so few people there I
cannot get a foothold. Then I try New York. Ach, New York!
It is-how you say?-lousy with exiled German-Jewish doctors.
There was no chance. Now I hear there is a shortage of physi-
cians in Nicaragua. Maybe I can make a living there." He paused
and shrugged. "Anyhow I try."

When we bade him good-by the next day at Cristobal he was

DOWN TWO OCEANS 39

still sweating and steaming, and his English was more strangu-
lated than ever. But he was no longer the fat man from the
comic-strips.

The great majority of the KtJs passengers were southward
bound on the regular routine of their work. Many were going
to the Canal Zone, either as government employees or as repre-
sentatives of business concerns with interests there. The rest-
bound for Lima, Arica, Antofagasta, Chavaral, Valparaiso were
engineers, geologists, salesmen, clerks, most of whom were in
the employ of big corporations and were returning to their jobs
in South America after vacations at home. Even those with
roving assignments were, without exception, traversing a route
long familiar to them in the course of their work.

These were men whose lives, by ordinary standards, are con-
sidered "interesting." Their jobs took them to the distant places
of the earth, and they spoke as casually and familiarly of Bogota
and "Valpo," Guayaquil and Cerro de Pasco, as if they were
discussing Albany, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. Hicks had left
London ten days before and had spent two days in New York
before boarding the Santa Rita. He was going to Valparaiso,
where he would spend six weeks; then back to New Yoric; then
London. An interesting trip? He didn't think so. He was making
it for the fifth time in five years. Then there was the representa-
tive of an American machinery manufacturing concern who was
going to Bogota for the twentieth time. And the Grace Line
accountant who was making his twelfth round-trip to check
over the books of die company's South American offices. And
many others like them. All had one major interest: to attend to
their business and return home as quickly as possible.

The man who travels for a living often finds his life as monoto-
nous and routinized as the man who catches the 8: 15 from New
Rochelle. His "interesting" work carries him to distant places,
but those places, visited and revisited on schedule, soon lose die
magic of their strange names and their remoteness. All too
quickly Managua becomes identified as a sales-resistance market,
Pernambuco as the city with the half-witted buying agent,

40 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

Buenaventura as the place where the hotel served rancid butter.
While the 8:15 suburbanite sits at home in the evening reading
with yearning in his heart of far-off lands, tropical seas, strange
capitals, ports and islands, the traveler, as likely as not, is pacing
the floor of his hotel room in Rio or Recife, thinking wistfully
of the Bronx Express, the green hills of Westchester in April,
and the double-feature bills at the neighborhood bingo palace.
Hicks liked ice-skating, New York night clubs and a girl in
West Orange. He did not like sea voyages, hot weather or
Valparaiso. What the Bogota commuter thought of Bogota
could be printed only in a privately circulated edition. Seiior
Fernandini, though a loyal son of Peru, confided that he some-
how acquired a sounder appreciation of his fatherland's virtues
when comfortably ensconced in his suite in New York's Bilt-
more or London's Savoy. Why I should wish to visit Lima-
much less Iquitos and the Amazon was a problem that he could
answer only with a baffled shake of the head.

However many kinds of men there were aboard the Scmta Rita,
however divergent our origins, aims and destinies, there was one
tie which bound us all together the desire to have what we
hadn't.

The Rita averaged just over three hundred miles a day about
half the speed of the big transatlantic ships. On the fifth morning
we threaded the strait that separates Cuba and Haiti. Both islands
were visible simultaneously-faint lavender outlines on the hori-
zon, scarcely distinguishable from the clouds that piled high
above them. Later in the day we steamed by the lighthouse on
Navasa Island, a barren patch in the sea ten miles off the ex-
treme southwestern tip of Haiti. Soon that too was hull down,
and we were again the center of our unbroken circular universe.
For the next forty-eight hours all that existed between heaven
and earth was air and water, the plodding ship, and the great
son frying like an egg in the blue oven of the sky.

Early on the seventh day we raised the low mountains of

DOWN TWO OCEANS 41

Panama and at two in the afternoon were at dock in Cristobal.
Our shore leave was limited to one hour, allowing us time only
for a quick one at Bilgay's and a session of violent guerrilla war-
fare with the lottery-ticket salesmen who seem to comprise two-
thirds of the population of the isthmus. By four we were ascend-
ing the three steps of Gatun Lock to gain our transcontinental
altitude of eighty-seven feet, and presently we were forging
through Gatun Lake and into the Gaillard Cut, Beyond the raw,
red flanks of the canal we could see the unbroken sweep of
tropical forest. The sun was sloping away astern, for in con-
f ormance with the eccentric geography of the isthmus we were
proceeding almost due eastward into the Pacific.

It was night before we reached the Pedro Miguel and Mira-
flores Locks and began our descent back to sea level. The tall
towers of the naval wireless station were ablaze with colored
lights, like Christmas trees; an airplane droned somewhere over-
head, and brilliant aerial flare-bombs shattered the darkness over
Panama City. All was light, sound and modernity in this thin
ribbon of civilization that cut the silent night of die jungle. By
eleven o'clock we were again at dockthis time in Balboaand
were permitted another hour of shore leave. More than half of
the Eittfs passengers were disembarking here, soon to be scattered
through Central America, Colombia and Venezuela (all, that is,
except the deaf-mute, who with indefatigable spirit was heading
right back for New York on the next ship) and most of our
time ashore was consumed by farewells on the pier. There were
only twenty minutes left for us to visit the pride of Panamanian
night-life a nearby roadside restaurant which featured an exotic
Latin dish known as the hot-dog and looked as if it had been
bodily transplanted from the corner of Queens Boulevard and
Jamaica Avenue.

Shortly after midnight the Rita was again under way, and
some two hours later we were out on the Pacific. Unlike stout
Balboa, however, we did not gaze at it with eagle eye, because
our eagle eyes were shut in sleep.

42 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

Not once during our passage down the South Pacific did we
sight either ship or land Our only encounter of any kind was
with the equator impressive but thoroughly invisible and to
celebrate the occasion the sun disappeared and the wind came up.
We were not yet in the cold Humboldt Current that washes
up the west coast of South America from the Antarctic, but
nevertheless it was a day for sweaters on deck and a wide berth
to the swimming tank. King Neptune, we learned to our dis-
appointment, does not hold court on the Grace Line ships. A
few years ago, it seems, a Peruvian passenger was forced into
the roughhouse against his will, duly lathered, shaved and
ducked, and subsequently sued the Line for the indignities he
had suffered and won the case. Since then the Grace people
have played safe. Anyone is free to shave himself and jump in
the tank to his heart's content, but they will have none of it.

Late into the night we sat out on the top-deck. The soft trade
wind purred through the Eittts rigging in its everlastingly futile
effort to keep pace with the spinning midriff of the earth. To
the east was the coast of Ecuador. Hidden from the eye, it was
vivid in the imagination: white beaches fronting the Pacific;
green waves of jungle slowly thinning as they rose to the foot-
hills of the Andes; finally the great peaks themselves, implacable,
appalling in their sheath of equatorial ice Chimborazo, Coto-
paxi. To the east too, behind our ring of night, was the barren
islet of Gallo, from which Pizarro began his odyssey of blood
and gold in the empire of the Incas. It was there that the in-
domitable roughneck, when his men refused to advance and pre-
pared to return to Panama, drew his famous line upon the sand
with his sword and stepped across it. "Friends and comrades,"
he said, "to the south are toil, hunger, nakedness, the shattering
storm, desertion and death; to the north, ease and pleasure. There
lies Peru with its riches; there Panama and its poverty. Each man
must choose what best becomes a brave CastiUan. As for myself,
me voy d sur." And south he went, with a little group of his

DOWN TWO OCEANS 43

more reckless followers, and the first white shadow fell across the
red man's Andes.

We were far from home, from the great cities and trade routes
of Europe and North America, and it was strange to recollect
that these remote shores and empty seas were well known to
Europeans at a time when the eastern coast of the United States
was still an undiscovered, undreamed wilderness. Within forty
years after the first voyage of Columbus, the Inca Empire was in
the possession of the Spaniards; and by the time the first settlers
began clearing the forests of Jamestown, Plymouth and New
Amsterdam, Lima had long since become the affluent et Cuidad
de los Reyes," and her university and cathedral were aging be-
neath the bright Andean sun. Over the seas through which the
Rita now was furrowing the galleons and brigs of the Conqw&a-
dores were tacking four hundred years ago.

How different were thek wild journeys from ours, and yet
how much the same! They had no steam, no sailing schedule,
no cranes and customs officials awaiting them at port. I rather
imagine they were somewhat the worse for dirt and vitamin-
deficiency, and I am quite certain they did not pass their anxious
days with shuffleboard and cocktails. But the cool trade wind
that filled their canvas was the same as that which now sang
sorrowfully in our radio wires. The stars which guided their
courses were the same as those that winked above us that night.
And the motives that drove them and the goal that beckoned
them were not, after all, so very different from die motives and
goal of the engineers, executives, salesmen and adventurers aboard
the Santa Rita. "Me voy al suf* has not greatly changed its con-
notations since the Bandit of Estremadura drew his line in the
sand on the Island of Gallo and stepped across it into blood and
conquest. After four hundred years South America, to the white
man from the north, is still the milch cow with the golden dugs.

During the night we had rounded Cape Blanco, westernmost
point of the South American continent, and by morning were
well into the Humboldt Current. Although we were less than

44 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

five degrees south of die equator it was cooler than at any time
in the voyage since we had passed the latitude of Hatteras. The
officers had doffed their white in favor of their blue uniforms
and the thin mist that had crept up about us suggested deck-
chair reading rather than shuffleboard or swimming tank.

Having doggedly seen Scarlett O'Hara through to her last-
page destiny, I was at last free to look through the formidable
library of books on South America which had been doing duty
as ballast in my luggage. Being in the Humboldt Current, my
thoughts, not unnaturally, first turned to the man for whom it
was named Alexander Humboldt, it has always seemed to me, is
one of the least known of the world's truly great men. During
the ninety years of his life, from 1769 to 1859, his enormous
energy and intellect carried him into almost every known field
of human activity and inquiry, and on his trip to South America
alone (1799-1804) he accomplished what most scientists would
be willing to call a full life's work Selecting at random from
his hundreds of achievements, his work during his five years
along the Andes and the Amazon included the exploration of
the Orinoco River; the discovery of the connection of the
Orinoco and Amazon systems through the unique Casiquiare
Canal; the first ascent of many Andean peaks, including Chim-
borazo and Pichincha; an investigation of the sources of the
Amazon; a study of the transit of the planet Mercury and of the
phenomenon of meteor-showers; an inquiry into the nature of
volcanos and earthquakes; another into terrestrial magnetism;
another into the climatic distribution of plants; another into
mineral distribution. The list is endless, and the subsequent re-
cording of all that he did, saw and investigated -required the
monumental total of thirty volumes. (I did not, I confess, have
all thirty with me on the Santa Rita. Indeed, I compromised on
one.)

Many other great travelers have visited South America since
Humboldt, and the records of their journeys compose a travel
literature second, I think, to none in the world. Charles Darwin,
"The Voyage of the fiorgfe"; Henry Bates, "A Naturalist on

DOWN TWO OCEANS 45

the River Amazons"; Viscount Bryce, "South America: Observa-
tions and Impressions"-, W. H. Hudson, "Green Mansions" and
"The Purple Land"; H. M. Tomlinson, "The Sea and the
Jungle"; Theodore Roosevelt, "Through the Brazilian Wilder-
ness"; Hiram Bingham, "Inca Land" all these and many others
have visited the far corners of the continent and recorded in
books the fruits of their experiences. And let us not forget old
William Prescott and his "Conquest of Peru." After ninety years
his descriptions of the Andes and their people are among the
best ever written, even though he was never closer to them than
his home on Beacon Hill in Boston.

Through all of these plus the works of some half-dozen more
recent writers I skipped and dodged, like a gourmet at a table
of hors d'ceuvres. The result was litde knowledge, but much
stimulation and that was what I wanted. To know too much
about a place or, for that matter, a man before having personal,
first-hand contact is a dangerous thing. At best, you will have
to unlearn your preconceived ideas and relearn them in die
light of your own experience. At worst, those preconceptions
will be so firmly entrenched that you can never lose them, and
you might as well have stayed home in your own library, for
all you apprehend with your own eyes and mind. My reading,
diffuse and haphazard, had left me with no convictions; only
contradictions and questions. Would Lima be the fascinating
storehouse of history that my guidebook promised, or only an
horrific conglomeration of bad statuary and souvenir-vendors?
Would the Andes be as forbidding and their people as graceless
and brutish as Harry Franck pictured them, or would they both
be as colorful and fascinating as in Blair Niles's tales? Would
the Incaic ruins fill me with a supernatural awe, as they did
Prescott (who never saw them) or elicit a yawn, as they did
from Harry Foster (who guided tourists among them)? All these
things and many others I did not know and did not want to
know. Soon I would be finding out for myself. Carefully I re-
turned my library to its suit cases.

The Department of Modern Languages, I regret to report, was

46 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

not making much progress. Each morning our Spanish gram-
mar and conversation-book accompanied us to our deck chairs,
but once there their function was exclusively that of back-rests.
To be sure, we had picked up a certain rudimentary vocabulary
chiefly from the bi-lingual menu in the dining saloon but we
were topheavy with nouns and possessed nothing but grunts with
which to tie them together. In a conscience-stricken moment
Ruth and I resolved that we would make it a point to acquire
at least ten verbs a day. The adjectives, adverbs and prepositions
could go jump in the ocean.

We were now steaming in a southeasterly direction down
the long Pacific shoreline of Peru. This is the region known as
the Rainless Coast a narrow belt of desert between the Andes
and the sea extending for fifteen hundred miles from Cape
Blanco to Central Chile. At intervals it is broken by narrow belts
of fertile soil the valleys of the small streams which come down
from the mountains. In them are located the important cities of
the Peruvian seaboard Lima, Callao, Trujillo, Pisco and their
surrounding irrigated fields and vineyards. In the endless miles
between there is empty aridity, and the only life is clustered
in the scattered oil and nitrate camps that dot the coast.

Four days out from Panama our ship's chart told us we were
opposite Salaverry, the port of Trujillo. A few miles inland
from the harbor are the famous pre-Incaic ruins of Chan Chan,
and until recently the Grace Line's steamers used to put in at
Salaverry to afford their passengers a day of sightseeing. But
difficulties arose. It seems that hard by the ancient city was
the flourishing hacienda of a wealthy Peruvian family named
Hererra, and the Hererras were distinguished both by the excel-
lence and potency of the grapes they grew in their vineyards
and by their unfailing hospitality to tourists. The invariable
effect of this hospitality was to divert, the attention of the tour-
ists from archaeology to less erudite matters, with the result that
the ships were often delayed anywhere from three to six hours
while officers and crew collected their errant charges from under

DOWN TWO OCEANS 47

the bushes and tables of the hacienda. The blow-off came when
on one voyage a group of returning archaeologists decided that
the captain's bridge was airier than their own cabins and pro-
ceeded forthwith to move in. Since then the Grace Line has
given Chan Chan and the hospitable Hererras as wide a berth as
if they were quarantined for bubonic plague.

A long, slow swell was under us as we nosed southeastward
toward the land. Desolate rock islands came up and slid past,
white from surf to summit with the droppings of the guano
birds. Soon we were passing through the narrow gate of the
Callao breakwater, and a noisy launchful of generals, admirals
and ministers-plenipotentiary was tootling out to meet us. We
had bequeathed our matches to the steward (matches are a gov-
ernment monopoly in Peru, and the importation of foreign va-
rieties is forbidden, under penalty of imprisonment) and looked
the customs men squarely and righteously in the eye. By mid-
afternoon Peruvian dust was in our eyes, Peruvian smells were in
our noses, and a Peruvian cab driver was letting out his Peruvian
Dodge on the straight macadam highway from Callao up to
Lima.

Ill

"TURISTA"

CALL me a coward and I shall resent it. Call me a liar and I
shall demand a retraction. But call me a tourist and I shall
give you a black eye.

The word tourist (or tourists, or turista) is virtually the same
in all languages, both in pronunciation and connotation, and
surely in none of them is there any other word that can match
it as an epithet of opprobrium. To be a tourist is to live in a
world of bored travel-agents, hostile hotel-keepers, condescend-
ing "old-timers" and a miscellaneous assortment of guides, head
waiters, shopkeepers and cab drivers who half the time laugh at
you, half the time snarl at you and all the time consider you
legitimate and slightly feeble-minded prey. You have a reputa-
tion for complaining at everything, understanding nothing, and
being interested only in spurious antiques and bad statuary. You
are accepted, to a degree, for your solvency, and on rare occa-
sions some kind-hearted eccentric may treat you as a mature adult
with a mind and interests kindred to his own. But for the most
part, you are a pariah, a blight and a plague of locusts. You arise
in the morning and complain that the coffee is inferior to that
at the Hotel Stader in Buffalo. You attend formal functions clad
in plus-fours and a checked cap. You fight for half-an-hour with
a hackman over a twenty-cent fare and uncomplainingly fork
over twenty dollars for a two-dollar panama hat. You dislike
crowds, local customs and native cooking, but swoon with
delight at a closeup of La Perrichole's umbrella or Bolivar's
chamber-pot. You tell the few residents you meet that you think
they are doing quite nicely for a backward country, but wonder
if their town wouldn't be improved by the introduction of cen-
tral heating, Post Toasties and Rockefeller Center. You finally

48

"TURISTA" 49

fall off to sleep at night cursing that the bed-springs are made
of discarded railroad tracks and praying that the U. S. Marines
will arrive in a fleet of gunboats and show these lousy foreigners
a thing or two. You are, in short, the lowest thing that crawls
on earth outside of the jails, the asylums and the reptile house
at the zoo. The only circumstance that makes life bearable for
you is the happy fact that it is always the other fellow who is
the tourist never you.

Well, hardly even Naturally we did not relish the brand of
shame on our brows and we dodged the issue whenever possible,
but it was difficult to pose as mining engineers, munitions sales-
men or the new ambassador from Denmark when two out of
three of the party were female and every available inch of
our luggage was plastered with a sinister "GRACE LINE TURISTA/'
When we were met at the dock in Callao by the Grace Line's
Senor Benj. Enriquez, who greeted us with "You're the tourists,
aren't you?" and proceeded to enumerate the museums we would
visit next day, we gave up the fight, Twista we were, tvrista we
would confess ourselves, and the hell with it.

It is impossible for me to compare Lima with other South
American capitals because I have seen no others. Judged by the
standards of North America or Europe, however, it does not
come off so well. Its modernity is still crude and ill-fitting, its
antiquity shabby and ill-preserved. To the visitor or tourist
collecting his first impressions it presents a panorama of wide
plazas, narrow connecting streets laid out rectangularly, heavy
traffic, horns, dogs and, in the dry season, dust. The cathedral,
public buildings and old landmarks are clustered dose to the
south bank of the River Rimac, where Pizarro kid out die origi-
nal city in 1535. North of the river the town peters out in a
mile or so of drab, adobe slums. South from the cathedral, be-
tween the old Plaza de Armas and the new Plaza San Martin, are
the main business thoroughfares Union, Oarabaya and Lampa.
On them are located most of the shops, tffe tourist meccas and
the offices of the big gringo companies. All three are narrow,

50 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

usually crowded, and perpetually the scene of ferocious traffic
snarls. If there is any member of the human race more uninter-
ested in his own life than a Peruvian chauffeur, or any sound
devised by man or nature more violent than his horn, I have
yet to encounter them.

Below the Plaza San Martin, where stand the Hotel Bolivar,
the Metro movie palace and other gaudy monuments to progress,
Lima changes its aspect and becomes a new, building city of
wide avenues, green parks and bright stucco homes. Pushing
steadily south and west, the municipal limits now extend to the
ocean, including the residential suburbs of San Isidro, Magdalena,
Miraflores and Chorrillos. North and south along the coast stretch
a thousand miles of rainless desert, but on the narrow ribbon of
land from Lima to the sea, where the Rimac waters the earth,
there are trees and grass and flourishing crops.

The history of the average New World city is short and
simple. A small group of pioneers build themselves a huddle of
homes, concentrate on the raising of crops and children, and
await the invention of trolley cars and soda fountains. Not so
Lima. Long before the coming of white men its coastal valley
was the site of great Indian cities. And when the Spaniards came
in the sixteenth century, it was not to throw together a clapboard
frontier village, but, consciously and deliberately, to build a City
of the ICings a metropolis worthy of symbolizing the dominion
of Spain in the Americas. Four hundred years is a short span in
the annals of Rome and Athens, but in the New World it is a
veritable antiquity. Lima was an old capital, with traditions and
rats when the Mayflower nosed its prow past Plymouth Rock.

The city's history falls into four periods: die aboriginal civiliza-
tions of the Incas and pre-Incas; the Spanish conquest and the
colonial regime that followed; the Wars of Liberation and the
ensuing republic; and finally the twentieth-century of Fords,
frigidaires and gringo corporations. In Lima's present physical
aspect the four are inextricably jumbled together. On the eastern
outskirts of the town is an American-operated cotton mill with
the most modern machinery inside and a pre-Incaic wall still

LIMAS
BACKDROP:
CERRO SAN
CRISTOBAL

TICLIO: HIGHEST STATION ON THE FERROCARRIL CENTRAL

"TURISTA" 51

standing around it. The aqueducts which carry the city's water
supply down from the Andes were performing the same duty
before the first white man set foot on South America; with com-
paratively few additions and improvements they remain as they
were built by the Indians of a thousand years ago. The hand of
Pizarro and his followers is everywhere apparent: in the layout
and names of the streets, in the relics of the cathedral and
churches, and, significantly, in the surrounding hills, long since
gutted of their former rich lodes of precious ores. Bolivar is
everywhere. You dwell at the Hotel Bolivar. You walk in the
Plaza Bolivar. You visit the Bolivar Museum. You pass a statue
of Bolivar (always he is mounted, and always the horse is rear-
ing) every fifty paces you walk in any direction. I don't think
I have encountered anywhere so ubiquitous a hero as is El
Libertador in Lima. When you pause to consider that he was
the liberator not only of Lima but of all Peru, and not only of
Peru but of a third of the South American continent, the imagina-
tion totters. Many explorers have perished and none has suc-
ceeded in the quest for lost cities of antiquity in the dark heart
of the Amazonian jungles. When the first fortunate one succeeds
in his search, the odds are better than even that his earliest dis-
covery will be a pre-historic monolith of El Libertador, in full
panoply, astride his vertical horse.

As any Broadway musical show laid in the sefiorita belt can
tell you, political strife in South America by no means ended
with the Wars of Liberation from Spain. In fact, so accustomed
are we in the north to hearing of the revolutions, civil wars,
coups-d*etats 9 putsches and purges which seem to constitute
Latin-American politics that we are inclined to minimize, if not
actually disbelieve, them. The stark fact remains, however, that
in Peru, at least, Presidents do not die in bed. The successful Lima
politico must have fire in his eye, chile con carne in his blood
and a steel plate where his fifth rib ought to be.

During the late 1920*5, the nation was dominated by Augusto P.
Leguia, a diminutive but exceedingly high-powered firecracker,

"TURISTA"

standing around it. The aqueducts which carry the city's water
supply down from the Andes were performing the same duty
before the first white man set foot on South America; with com-
paratively few additions and improvements they remain as they
were built by the Indians of a thousand years ago. The hand of
Pizarro and his followers is everywhere apparent: in the layout
and names of the streets, in the relics of the cathedral and
churches, and, significantly, in the surrounding hills, long since
gutted of their former rich lodes of precious ores. Bolivar is
everywhere. You dwell at the Hotel Bolfvar. You walk in the
Plaza Bolivar. You visit the Bolfvar Museum. You pass a statue
of Bolivar (always he is mounted, and always the horse is rear-
ing) every fifty paces you walk in any direction. I don't think
I have encountered anywhere so ubiquitous a hero as is El
Libertador in Lima. When you pause to consider that he was
the liberator not only of Lima but of all Peru, and not only of
Peru but of a third of the South American continent, the imagina-
tion totters. Many explorers have perished and none has suc-
ceeded in the quest for lost cities of antiquity in the dark heart
of the Amazonian jungles. When the first fortunate one succeeds
in his search, the odds are better than even that his earliest dis-
covery will be a pre-historic monolith of El Libertador, in full
panoply, astride his vertical horse.

As any Broadway musical show laid in the sefiorita belt can
tell you, political strife in South America by no means ended
with the Wars of Liberation from Spain. In fact, so accustomed
are we in the north to hearing of the revolutions, civil wars,
coups-ifetats, putsches and purges which seem to constitute
Latin-American politics that we are inclined to minimize, if not
actually disbelieve, them. The stark fact remains, however, that
in Peru, at least, Presidents do not die in bed. The successful Lima
politico must have fire in his eye, chile con came in his blood
and a steel plate where his fifth rib ought to be.

During the late 1920'$, the nation was dominated by AugustoP.
Legufa, a diminutive but exceedingly high-powered firecracker,

52 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

who had exploded his way into the Presidency via a putsch and
whose subsequent administration was one of the most vigorous
and progressive in Peru's history. Under his leadership illiteracy
among the vast Indian and half-breed population was greatly
reduced, army, navy and transportation facilities were modern-
ized, and gringo capital for the exploitation of the country's
natural resources was eagerly sought and welcomed. This was
the heyday of nitrate, copper and sugar along the west coast,
and Legufa's hospitable policy to the big British and American
corporations eventually resulted in strong resentment from
native landowners and business men, who saw no reason why
foreigners should go on forever feeding on the fat of the land
while they took the bones and gristle. A coup fetat resulted in
1930. Legufa was thrown into prison (dying shortly after his
release in 1931) and Luis M. Sanchez-Cerro became dictator-
president. Sanchez-Cerro's notion of vigor and progress, however,
consisted exclusively of shooting anyone who had the bad taste
to disagree with him politically. In a few years he had made
himself universally unpopular, and there was general rejoicing
when his inevitable assassination took place in 1933. The next,
and present, national leader is General Oscar Benavides, an army
man and former supporter of Legufa, who runs Peru under a
mild form of military dictatorship.

Though Peru has come through the world depression rather
well, the political future of the nation promises to be no less
troubled than its past. The first adobe wall we encountered upon
landing in Callao informed us succinctly that COMMUNISMO ES
MUERTE; the second that COMMUNISMO ES INFEERNO; the third
that COMMUNISMO ES BANDERELISMO, and so on, along every high-
way, on every factory wall. It does not require a psychoanalyst
to draw the inference. A community which goes to such lengths
to express its disapproval of something is obviously more than a
little concerned and apprehensive about that something. Subse-
quent conversations with Peruvians and long-resident gringos
confirmed this with emphasis.

The Communist Party is outlawed in Peru, as it is in virtually

"TURISTA" 53

all South American countries. But it is an excommunication in
name only. One sees no red flags, no hammer-and-sickle; one
never hears the "Internationale." But everywhere one sees and
hears of APRA. APRA (its constituents are Aprista) means AKmza
Popular Revolucionaria Americana, which in turn means commu-
nism in its legal South American disguise. It has no direct associa-
tion with Soviet Russia (all foreign propagandists have been
ruthlessly exterminated from Peru) and it does not adhere strictly
to all the tenets of Marxian dogma; but its theories and program
are in essence unrelieved red, and its effect on the Hearsts and
D.A.R/S of Lima is unmistakably the same as elsewhere.

To a North American, familiar not only with the name but
with some of the practices of democracy, it is an almost in-
credible fact that the Apristas have held substantial majorities in
the last two presidential elections in Peru and still have never
had a man in office. After the imprisonment of Legufa they
carried the national vote by a large margin, only to discover that
Sanchez-Cerro had not waited for the formality of an election
to establish himself in the Government Palace. It was the Aprista
who subsequently did away with Sanchez-Cerro, but after his
assassination a state of national emergency was declared, and
General Benavides took over without subjecting the citizenry to
the annoyance of voting. Again, in 1936, APRA led at die polls,
but the election was disallowed (because of fraud, or inclement
weather, or something), and Benavides remained in office. In
Peruvian politics it is always nice to have votes on one's side,
but it is far nicer to have the army.

How long the radicals will allow themselves to be hornswog-
gled in this manner it is hard to say. They lack a dominant leader,
they lack funds, and most decidedly they kck the support of the
powerful English and American corporations in Peru, who fore-
see a sudden end to their easy pickings if ever the red shadow of
Marx falls across the Andes. TTieir leading spirits come from the
professions and the universities (San Marcos, oldest seat of learn-
ing in the New World, is closed down on an average of once a
month because of radical activities); their mass of votes from the

54 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

cholos and peones, the great class of half-breed workers who have
been listening to the promises of the Catholic Church for four
hundred years and are about ready to listen to someone else.
Neither group is as yet powerful or cohesive enough for them
to gain joint control of the government. Whether they eventu-
ally will or not, I shall leave to others to predict and time to tell.
One thing, however, is apparent even to the casual observer: the
political and social future of Peru will be determined on the
battleground of communism versus fascism. And whichever wins,
there will be a dictator. There always has been, whether he bear
the name of Presidente, Libertador or Inca.

Sightseeing in a strange city is easy to revile, but hard to avoid,
especially when you are in the power of as ferociously deter-
mined a mentor as the Grace Line. Willy-nilly, we saw the
churches, the public buildings, the monuments, the museums,
the spots-where and the houses-which. In our Senor Benj.
Enriquez's ponderous wake we encountered the geography, his-
tory, architecture, restaurants and waterworks of the City of the
Kings* Say what you wish against the "conducted tour," it at
least enables you to dispose of what you have to do in quick,
methodical fashion and leaves you free thereafter for what you
'want to do. In two short days we had conscientiously inspected
and checked off:

1. The cathedral. A vast adobe structure on the Plaza de
Armas, housing several impressive altars, two or three good
paintings by Murillo and others, and the mummy of Pizarro
plus a few of his selected entrails in a glass jar.

2. The Government Palace. A rambling, one-story fortress,
also on the Plaza de Armas. Guarded day and night. In the court-
yard X marks the spot where Pizarro was slain by his disaffected
followers.

3. The Torre-Tagle Mansion. The most elaborate and best pre-
served example of colonial architecture in Lima, a few blocks east
of the plaza. Formerly the residence of a Spanish viceroy; now
used as office for the foreign department of the government.

"TURISTA" 55

Susceptible turista are said to tremble with excitement at sight of
its richly carved woodwork.

4. Inquisition Palace. On the Plaza Bolivar, formerly known as
Inquisition Park. Once the seat of the high tribunal of the Church,
it now houses the Peruvian senate during its infrequent sessions.

5. The House of Congress. Also on the Plaza Bolivar and also
in infrequent use. (The comparative success of President Bena-
vides' regime is largely attributable to the fact that he is one of
the best congress-dissolvers in the history of Peru.)

6. University of San Marcos. It was more than a century old
when Harvard was founded. Its traditions and buildings are
ancient, but its students constitute the most radical element in
present-day Peru.

7. Palace of Perrichole. Remember "The Bridge of San Luis
Rey"? This is the estate built for the dancer, La Perrichole, by
her viceregal admirer. It is now used as a barracks for the Presi-
dential Guard, and a very fancy barracks it makes, too.

8. Parque de 1'Exposicion. The site of an international exposi-
tion and fair held in Lima some years ago. Now an attractively
shaded public park.

9. The National Museum. Comprising the second floor of
Lima's city hall* Houses countless paintings all bad of Peru's
national heroes, plus all the guns with which all the Presidents
have been shot.

10. Bolivar Museum. Complete from equestrian statues to
toothbrushes.

11. Archaeological Museum. Houses the most interesting of
Lima's collections: mummies, artifacts and other relics of Inca
and pre-Inca civilizations.

12. Italian Art Museum. We drew the line here.

By this time even the indefatigable Benj. Enriquez could prod
us no farther, and our thoughts turned to the more mundane
matters of food and drink, We proceeded to investigate what
El Gudad de los Reyes offered the animal appetites.

The only first-class hotel is The Bolivar, new and imposing on
the Plaza San Martin. Its lobby at tea-time, and its grill at night,

56 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

are the center of the city's social life. The food is good, though
imitative of European fare rather than native Peruvian; the rooms
are large; the running water runs. But if you really want that
scotch and soda don't try to order it on the telephone.

Other places to eat are the Maury, which is good, but not as
good as its reputation; Leon's, boasting a modernistic dining
room; La Cabana, in the Parque de ITLxposicion, which features
dancing and the only first-class jazz-band in Lima; and the Coun-
try Club ("Cawntree Cloob" to your cab driver) in the suburb
of San Isidro, which is the favorite resort of resident gringos
and the more affluent natives. Most of these places, like The
Bolivar, present European menus, but if you possess a turn for
adventure, native dishes may be had for the ordering. Peruvian
food is very rich, and a small portion (though they never are
small) will go a long way. The shrimps (camarones) are delicious
and likely to turn up in anything from soup to ice-cream. Palta
(alligator pear to you) is a part of practically every meal and
is served in a bewildering variety of forms and dressings. The
corbina, leading citizen of the Humboldt Current and a close
relative to our northern halibut, is ubiquitous, and we seldom
sat down to a Peruvian meal without encountering him. Highly
recommended are conchitas, a small shellfish which seems to be a
cross-breed between a clam and a mussel, and pastel de choclo,
which is not, as you might expect, chocolate cake, but an in-
genious and usually delicious corn souffle. And when the exotic
pales and the palate craves the old familiar, there is always
lomito hamburguesa con salsa de tomato Heinz to fall back upon.
In the realm of beverages, the turista will encounter the same
difficulties as in Europe in his eternal quest for ice water. It can
be secured, however, if one has patience and the courage of his
convictions. The Peruvian, as a matter of fact, does not greatly
favor ice in any form, and such drinks as beer, ginger ale and
highballs will arrive at the table lukewarm unless specifically
ordered-and usually re-ordered fora hekdo. The most common
alcoholic beverages are beer, manufactured locally; Chilean wines,
which at their best are almost indistinguishable from the better

"TURISTA" 57

French and Rhine vintages; and fisco, the native grape-brandy,
pure Mickey Finn taken straight, but delicious in a cocktail or
sour. The old argument about the quality of the local drinking
water rages violently and eternally in Lima, as it does in every
tropical city in the world. There are gringos who drink the tap-
water regularly and swear it is as pure as the fountains of Pencils,
and there are others who would rather shake hands with a leper
than even brush their teeth in it. The Peruvian bottled waters
are Chuquitanta, which is stale and flat, and Aqua Jesus, which
is Pluto-esque both in taste and effect. Having tried them both,
I soon determined to throw in iny lot with the bacteria at*
naturelle as the least of three evils.

The turista, if he takes his calling seriously, is called upon to
face many travails of the flesh and the spirit. Worst of all per-
haps is that blank, barren hour that arrives at the end of the
day's stint when your appointed sights have been seen, your
feet ache from endless miles of museum corridors, and your
Senor Enriquez leaves you alone and helpless in the hotel lobby
to face die evening as best you may. It is the day's dark nadir.
You stall for rime with a cocktaiL You think of the letters you
should write, but won't. You see the lights of the Metro Theater
across the Plaza San Martin grimly beckoning you to Shirley
Temple in "Pobra Nina Rica." You shudder at the possibility that
life could come to that. And then, if you are as lucky as we
were, Jerry Blanchard will suddenly appear in the lobby and
say, 'What the hell are you doing here?"

Jerry (Andover '25, Princeton '29) was theoretically in Lima
in the service of W. R. Grace & Co., but it was not five minutes
from the first greeting that he was officially enrolled as social
director of the Ullman Lima Expedition. A casual acquaintance
in the busy routine of life at home can easily and immediately
become a blood-brother when encountered in a distant place, and
in a week in Peru I came to know Jerry better than in seven
years of prep school and college. A foursome, particularly when
of equally divided genders, is far more congenial than a three-

58 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

some. Edna no longer was the third wheel on the social bicycle,
and it was as a properly balanced quartet that we subsequently
stepped forth. Strangely enough, however, it was we who showed
him the town, rather than he us. Like many travelers abroad
on business rather than for travel itself, he had confined his orbit
almost entirely within the bounds of his work, and it remained
for us to escort him on his maiden visits to the cathedral,
museums, Incaic ruins and other non-Grace enterprises. He, for
his part, introduced us to many of his associates in Grace &
Company (Casa Grace to the initiated) and other of the gringo
companies. They showed us the bars and we showed them the
sights, and it was a highly satisfactory arrangement at least
for us.

Time, I suppose, may be said to exist in Peru as elsewhere.
Night follows day, and vice versa, in the usual rotation, but there
any kinship with our northern calendar or clock ceases. Each
morning you awaken the odds are only two to one against its
being a holiday; an American with a statistical bent recently
computed that of the year's 365 days, 103, including the 52 Sun-
days, are full fiestas and another 70, including the 52 Saturdays,
are half fiestas. Added up, the result seems to be that the Peruvian
business man and the visiting gringo, whatever their other perils
from occupational diseases, are in no danger of collapse from
overwork. Just what causes all the holidays no one seems to
know. The bulk of them, of course, are the Sundays and half-
Saturdays; the numerous feasts, fasts and saints' days of the
Catholic Church constitute another large block. Beyond these,
however, the calendar is out in no-man's-land and no holds barred.
During 1936, for example, Lima officially observed the American
Independence Day, the French Bastille Day, Thanksgiving Day,
and a day of mourning for the late King George V of England.
Bolivar, of course, has his birthday, death-day, victory-day and
other days, as have a host of other national heroes. In the latter
case, however, observance is apt to vary with the sentiments of
the political party in power. The illustrious late hero of one

"TURISTA" 59

administration will probably be just a dead chump to the next.

As goes the calendar, so goes the clock. Most business houses
open at nine, close at noon, reopen at three and carry on dog-
gedly till five, when the working day ends. Until recently the
noonday siesta lasted for only two hours, but by government
decree this had just been lengthened to three. Nobody knew
why. Thanks to the Humboldt Current, Lima has a temperate
climate, the sun is seldom out at midday, and when it is it's a
flicker compared to, say, New York's in July. But everybody
likes the three hours for lunch. Perhaps it's ^ust an old Spanish
custom.

Technically a siesta is supposed to be devoted to rest; actually,
in Lima, it is consecrated almost wholly to eating. The Peruvian
breakfast is scant, after the continental pattern, and by the time
lunch arrives the citizenry are ready to do it full justice. Tea
comes along between five and six, terminating in time for the big
event of Lima's social day: the six-thirty movie show, known
locally as the vermouth. Add the vermouth movie to death and
taxes as the third great inevitable of Lima. Try as you will^ you
cannot keep out of it no matter how manfully you grit your
teeth and remind yourself that you did not journey six thousand
miles to the west coast of South America to see Joan Crawford
in "The Gorgeous Hussy." "Hoy!" the marquees shriek at you
in beckoning familiarity. "Hoyl-Clark Gable,*' "Hoy!-Laurd
and Hardy," "Hoy! Mickey Raton." (Hoy, you subsequently
discover to your disappointment only means "today.") The
crowds pour in, and if you don't pour too you will find yourself
alone in a deserted city. This might be endurable were it new: for
the fact that no amount of money, influence or graft can buy
you a dinner in Lima earlier than nine o'clock. From six-thirty
to eight-thirty Lima is at the vermouth, and those few unfortu-
nates who have already seen all the pictures remain at tea until
well past eight. In our eight days in Lima the earliest we suc-
ceeded in sitting down to dinner was eight-forty-five (the head
waiter thought we were coming in for a late tea, but we fooled
him) ; the latest was ten-thirty, and even then there were fellow-

60 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

diners in the restaurant who were at soup when we had reached
dessert. To anyone planning to visit Peru who dislikes retiring
immediately after a heavy meal I can offer only two suggestions:
go hungry or stay up all night.

Hollywood has Lima pretty well by the throat, but there are
occasional stage-plays to be found if you search diligently. Our
only encounter with the Peruvian "legit" was at the Teatro
Campoamor, where a Spanish troupe called the Qa. De Comedia
Moderna Prodillo-Soria were holding forth in a season of stock.
The opus we encountered bore the tide of "Maria de la O," and
though we understood only about five words an act, the general
idea seemed to be that a wholesome country girl had fallen in
love with an unwholesome city slicker, etc. We didn't need
Spanish to carry on from there. The acting was of the declama-
tory variety, hurled forcefully into the teeth of the audience,
and the scenery swayed like the Santa Rita in a blow off Hat-
teras. The spectators what there were of them sat on their
hands and restrained their emotions admirably, and the carefully
compressed features of some of my neighbors would have done
justice to a Gilbert Gabriel or a John Mason Brown. It was all
far too reminiscent of recent havoc to be much fun for Ullman.

There are two vantage points, I believe, from which the life
of a city may best be seen and felt: its bars and its surrounding
hills. Space and a decent reticence forbid a detailed chronicling
of my pisco-sovrs and whiskies con hielo, but Cerro San Cristobal
deserves mention. This isolated bump of the westernmost Andes
(Cerro meaning hill) rises on the far side of the River Rimac,
just north of Lima, and from its summit the eye can encompass
the whole city and its surrounding terrain from the harbor of
Callao to the distant purple mountains in the east. It was Christ-
mas Eve when I made the ascent. The shops were just closing,
and the streets and squares of the city were a bedlam of crowds,
cars, soldiery, dogs and pealing church bells. All Lima, it seemed,
was engaged in the single, concerted occupation of noise making,
and the din, growing fainter with distance and altitude, fol-

"TURISTA" 61

lowed me up the slopes of the hill to its very summit. Around
San Cristobal's base are clustered the most desolate slums of the
city, where the cholos with their hundreds of children and
thousands of dogs live in a poverty so absolute that it seems
scarcely poverty at all, but a separate, sub-human plane of exist-
ence. Yet not one person accosted me for alms as I made my way
through the wretched, unpaved streets, nor did my passing cause
any noticeable curiosity among the idlers in the doorways, al-
though a gringo with knickers and a camera could not have
been a common spectacle in those parts.

Beyond the last adobe hovels at the very foot of the hill was
a barren half-mile of sloping ground which served as Lima's
hoboville. A few gaunt specters were foraging about listlessly
among newspapers and tin cans; some sat still and stared at the
sky; most were stretched on the earth asleep. One shriveled old
man, prone beside the path I followed, had a small bell tied by a
cord around his wrist. I recalled the stories of the medieval lepers
in Europe and the bells they were compelled to wear to warn
men of their approach. Could this man be a leper? I passed within
a yard of him, but any lesions he might have had on face or
hands were obscured by layers of hair and dirt. He lay there
unconscious on the littered earth; vermin crawled on him and the
stench of his own foulness rose from him; and whether or not
he had leprosy seemed to make little difference. And I, with
knickers and camera, with express checks in my wallet and a hot
bath awaiting me at the hotel, passed him by and climbed the
hill before me, from which the city of Lima spread out, twin-
kling and vibrant on Christmas Eve.

On the summit of San Cristobal are the skeleton remains of a
former wireless-sending station and a huge cross, which is elec-
trically illuminated at night and can be seen for miles around
Lima. Its concrete base bore the usual scrawled animadversions
anent commumsmo, plus a boldly inscribed APRA, plus the
initials of what must have been virtually the entire population
of Peru. To the west the city and its suburbs were vague in mist,
through which its clangor of bells and horns rose faintly and

62 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

diffused. Hard against the eastern cliffs the new concrete motor-
road to the sierra cut its authoritative way; then swerved off
abruptly toward the mountains. The foothills of the Andes them-
selves, brown and forlorn, reached endlessly eastward behind
San Cristobal, in ever-rising tiers, and a cool wind blew over
diem toward the Pacific. I remained on the summit for an hour,
and in that time no other person appeared. The lights of the cross
flashed on, blotting out the Andes with their glare, illuminating
the carved initials and APRA and COMMUNISMO ES MUERTE. And
they helped light my path down the hill, through the gathering
dusk of Christmas Eve, to where the old man with the bell was
stirring from his sleep and looking toward me with eyes that
could not see.

From Jerry we learned much about W. R. Grace & Company
and the other American and British corporations in whose hands
is so large a part of the commerce and industry of Peru. The
mining companies mine, the railway companies run trains, and
the banks bank; but the general trading concerns such as Grace,
Milne & Company and Wessel-Duval have their finger in prac-
tically everything. The Grace people, for instance, in addition
to operating a freight and passenger steamship service, run a
bank, several cotton mills, many sugar plantations and a machin-
ery plant* Jointly with Pan-American Airways they operate the
West-Coast Panagra Air Service, and in their spare time they
sell Goodrich tires, Quaker Oats, Royal typewriters, Johnnie
Walker whisky, Hempel paints, Gordon gin and Atlas diesel
engines. They are "importers of naval stores and general mer-
chandise, 5 ' conduct a shipyard for the construction of launches
and yachts, and maintain a tourist travel bureau. They can also
tell you the way to the post office.

Tlie size of South America is so great and the amount of capital
required for its commercial exploitation so large that only the
biggest corporations have been successful there. For a hundred
years and more individuals and small groups of colonists have
gone to the west coast in quest of their own private El Dorados,

"TURISTA" 63

but their ventures have almost invariably come to grief. Some-
times it may have been the shifdessness or unscrupulousness of
the people themselves; sometimes it may have been old devil
tropics: whisky, coca leaves, Indian wives. But more often their
failure has been due to simple economic rules. You can raise the
best bananas in all Colombia, but it won't do you any good if you
can't get them to market. You can stake out the richest lode of
silver in the Andes, but you won't make a dollar from it if you
haven't a smelter and a railroad to go with it. South America
offers little in the way of manufacturing and transportation facili-
ties, and the man with a load of raw material be it copper, rub-
ber, sugar, cotton or whatever must be prepared to transport,
refine and market it himself. The individual obviously cannot do
this; the corporation can. That is why the corporation has the
field of South American plant and mineral resources pretty much
to itself.

Through Jerry, as well as other channels, we soon met and
learned something about the west coast gringos. They are divided
pretty much into two groups: the old-timers, who have been
there practically since Kzarro and consider Peru their permanent
home, and the younger men, who are down for two- or three-
year terms with their companies and then plan to go home and
become chairman of the board. Of the older generation many
originally arrived as fortune-hunters on their own; many more
first came down in the heyday of the nitrate fields, only to have
the post-war invention of synthetic nitrate knock their industry
and livelihood out from under them. Almost without exception
they are now working for one or another of the big corpora-
tions, side by side with the youngsters who yearly arrive fresh
from Yale, Princeton or Oxford with ambition, wanderlust and
two years of prep-school Spanish. The younger and older gen-
erations of gringo are vastly different in experience, personality
and purpose, but on three points they are solidly united: they
all are extremely race-conscious, they all drink scotch, and they
all hate tourists.

64 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

On Sunday afternoon the band plays, the sun shines (optional),
and Lima turns out for the bullfight. In point of fact, it is about
the only South American city that still does, for the sport has
been banned in most of the Latin Republics. Peru, however, still
has her plazas de toro y and Lima's is reported to be one of the
largest and finest in the world. Well laden with cushions,
cameras and qualms, we followed the crowd to see what we
should see.

I suppose everyone has his own preconceptions of a bullfight
before he has seen one. Mine were a badly jumbled mixture of
Ernest Hemingway and lady-tourists' horror-stories, with a slight
garnishing of Rudolph Valentino in "Blood and Sand." The first
view of the ring as we entered did little either to confirm or
dispel them. Rickety wooden stands plastered with ads for Stude-
baker cars, Remington typewriters and Jantzen bathing-suits
surrounded an oval dirt enclosure perhaps a hundred yards in
diameter at its widest point. The crowd was eating peanuts and
stamping impatiently for activities to begin; two uniformed bands
were playing hell with last year's Broadway song-hits. From .
long instinct I measured with my eye the distance from where
home plate should have been to the right-field bleachers. Soon
the Yanks would be piling out of the dugout

Before going any farther let me point out that the sport of
bullfighting is possessed of a highly intricate tradition and tech-
nique; that this was my first and probably last bullfight; and
that therefore my description of it will be highly uninformed,
except as concerns my own reactions. There are six bulls on the
usual program, and each fight is divided into four parts: the
tiring of the bull by the matadors' capes; the goading by the
lances of the mounted picadors; the insertion of the barbed darts
by the banderilleros; and, finally, the slaying by the matador.
Ordinarily each part of the fight lasts about five minutes, for a
total of twenty, but this can vary with the matador and the bulb

Both bands began blaring at once. The crowd yelled. The
gates at one side of the arena swung open, and the bullfighters
entered in dress parade cocky, colorful and a little bedraggled.

TXJRISTA" 65

There were bows, cheering, hand waving. Then, suddenly, the
parade was gone, and Bull No. i was in the ring, head down
and looking for trouble. Three matadors, their pink capes ex-
tended, advanced to meet him, and the fight was on.

Senor Luis Gomez, Grace Line *rata-warden and first aficio-
nado of Lima, has told me it is not good when a bull is too
rambunctious at the outset; he tires himself too quickly and is
easy pickings for the matador later on. By the connoisseur's
standard, therefore, Bull No. i was perhaps too willing, but to
the tyro he was impressive. The men twirled their capes and
pirouetted on their toes; the animal charged and countercharged.
Sometimes he caught the cape on his horns, but never the men.
Time and again he would go for them, bmt always there was
only the cape when he arrived, and the man elusively to one side.
On some charges the margin of the miss was a yard or more, on
others but a few inches. Matador twirled, cape fluttered, and
each time a ton of beef went slamming by. At this stage of the
fight one's sympathies were all with the men. They were un-
armed, looked small and fragile. In comparison, the bull was an
express train with spikes, wide open and off the tracks.

Presently a trumpet sounded round 2 coming up. Two pica-
dors on their hide-and-bone nags entered the arena. This was the
part of the fight we were not looking forward to. Ruth and
Edna put their programs in front of their faces, occasionally
letting an eye roll over the top. The horses were ancient and
rickety, better dead; but not necessarily this way. Each had one
eye bandaged, and their riders maneuvered to keep the bull
always on the blind side. Thus the horses never knew what was
coming; they simply stood and took it. We were at least relieved
to see that they wore heavy leather shields across their chests as
protection.

The bull eyed them and seemed glad of their appearance. Here
at last was something more substantial than a fluttering cape into
which to sink his horns. Down went his head, and he charged.
The picador guided his horse with one hand, not to avoid the
bull, but to receive the full impact of his rush. With the other

66 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

he held the blunt lance with which he must try to hold the bull
off. Contact! Horse and man were high in the air, the bull under-
neath them, goring. Then a writhing tangle of bodies, legs, hoofs,
horns, lance. The picador leaped clear. The horse was down
kicking, with the bull on top of him. The matadors rushed in,
waving their capes, and lured the bull away. The horse staggered
to its feet, and the picador remounted, to loud boos from the
crowd. At the time I did not know the reason for their dis-
approval. Perhaps the picador had managed badly; or were the
spectators resentful of the horse's plight? Later Senor Gomez
enlightened me they disapproved of the protective leather across
the horse's chest, which resulted in the bull's merely throwing
him, but not piercing him. Your true aficionado likes his arena
well smeared with entrails.

The next horse and the next charge gave better satisfaction.
The bull rushed, the picador maneuvered, and the horse, though
its blindfolded eye was toward the bull, seemed to know what
was coming. It lifted its feet gingerly, gave a convulsive start,
shook so that its rider's lance trembled in his hand. This time
the horns came in lower, caught the horse not on the chest, but
underneath, on the unprotected belly. Up they went again, then
down again this time in blood and guts and salvos of applause.
When the bull was finally lured off the horse was hoisted to its
feet and led away. Outside its intestines what was left of them
would be stuffed back inside, plus several handfuls of sawdust to
sop up the hemorrhage. He would be back later to let another
bull try his luck. I looked at the girls and was glad they were
doing all right. They were reading their programs as they had
never read before, but they had not lost their lunches.

On one of his charges the bull did not get to the horse at all.
The picador lunged with his lance, caught him in the hump
where the back of his neck met his spine, 'and leaned with all his
strength. Horse and rider went up in the air, the lance swayed
and bent, but held. The bull was stopped dead in its tracks, and
the fight stopped entirely while the picador took his bows. It
had been an impressive exhibition of strength and skill.

"TURISTA" 67

When the second horse had been led away to his surgery and
sawdust, the banderilleros appeared, and die fight entered its
third stage. The banderillero comes out afoot and alone, and his
object is to insert four tinseled darts, two at a time, into the bull's
back near the hump of the neck. The purpose of this is both to
goad the now tiring beast to further belligerence and to sever a
group of nerves controlling the neck muscles, so that he will be
unable to toss his head when the matador comes out for the
killing. Its actual performance, however, is usually the high point
of the fight, both in skill and excitement.

The first banderillero had difficulty in attracting the bull; after
the capes and the horses the man was not so attractive a target.
But when finally it came on, it came with a wilL Poised on tiptoe,
his darts held high above his head, the man waited motionless
until the horns were a yard from his chest. Quickly he side-
stepped, leaned far over the bull's head as it went past and
brought down his arms. The two darts swayed in the animal's
back, and the crowd cheered. Then one fell out, and it groaned,
The banderillero tried again and got it in; then his partner
appeared and, to the crowd's vast approbation, drove home both
his darts on the first attempt. By this time the bull was no longer
enjoying the fun. He tried to lift his head, but could not, and
twitched his back violently in an effort to rid himself of the darts.
But they held fast, and die more he shook himself the diicker
was the stream of blood diat poured from his wounds.

Another trumpet fourth and final round. The matador crossed
to the center of the ring Mancho Martinez, a young Mexican
bearing the formidable sobriquet of "The Aztec Lion/' He took
his bows, threw his cap over his shoulder into die stands, and
unsheathed his sword. Then, covering it with his scarlet ma-
tador's cloak, he approached die bull. I saw now what Gomez
meant when he said it is bad if a bull is belligerent too soon. This
one had worn himself out. Weak with fatigue and the pain of
die swaying darts, he was wandering aimlessly about the arena.
"Hey, toroP called die matador. The bull paid no attention.
Matador followed bull around the ring, cornered him, con-

68 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

fronted him with his scarlet cloak. "Hey, torof" No response.
He extended his sword and nicked the bull's snout. "Hey, toro
torohey!" The crowd was stamping and hooting for action.
The bull pawed the ground, seemed to hunch himself for a
charge, then turned his back and trotted away. Eloquent razz-
berries came from the bleachers. The Aztec Lion extended his
hands to them and shook his head. What could he do? "Kill
him/' yelled the crowd, "kill him!" Whether they were referring
to the bull or The Aztec Lion was not clear.

At all events The Lion went after his prey again, cornered
him again, and this time succeeding in eliciting a half-hearted
charge. As the bull came in he whirled, passing his cloak-sheathed
sword an inch above the lowered horns. On the next rush he
repeated the performance, his body and the bull's almost touch-
ing as the beast tore past. The crowd appreciated this applauded
him. As the bull squared off again he extended his sword, stand-
ing on tiptoe and sighting along its blade. But again the bull
walked away, and the crowd hooted. Exasperated by their taunts,
the matador ran after the bull, confronted him, and while it
stood stock-still, leaned over its horns and plunged his sword
deep between the shoulders. The animal shuddered but did not
fall. Blood streamed from its mouth and nostrils and bubbled
over the hilt of the sword embedded in its back. It trotted once
around the arena, and back across the center, as if quite unaware
that a yard-long steel blade was sawing through its vitals. Then
suddenly, without warning, its front legs crumpled. It tried to
rise, failed, and sank to its knees. After resting thus for a moment
it rolled slowly over and lay on its side in the dust, twitching.
The fight was over. A man ran out and drove a dagger into the
bull's spinal cord, below the skull. Another pulled out the mata-
dor's sword and wiped it. The Aztec Lion himself walked around
the ring bowing to very moderate applause and searched for his
chosen senorita to reclaim his hat. A team of horses had been
brought in and hitched up to the dead bull. Now they started
galloping. Once around the arena they went; then off. The band

TURISTA" 69

played "Yessir, That's My Baby," and all that was left of Bull
No. i was a wide swathe in the dirt, flecked with blood.

Fight followed fight there were six in all and each was dif-
ferent from the others, and yet the same. Sometimes the bulls
were rampaging at the outset and docile at the end like No. i.
Sometimes they started slowly and had to be pursued all over the
ring by the matadors, only to finish in a blaze of rage and glory.
One animal would not fight at all and was butchered sloppily
amid jeers from the crowd. Another, as soon as he entered the
ring, was adjudged too young and sent back to the corral. And
as the animals' performances varied, so did the men's. In one
fight the banderilleros would insert their darts gracefully and
precisely in one attempt; in the next they would have to try again
and again before the barbs held. With one bull a matador would
effect the death-stroke cleanly, with immediate effect; with an-
other he would blunderingly make thrust after thrust, until the
creature finally died from loss of blood. Yet in this variety there
was a monotonous sameness; the sameness of routine, of blood,
of the inevitable outcome. However gallantly he may fight, how-
ever many horses he may gore and swords he may defy, the bull
cannot win. His death sentence goes into operation the moment
he steps into the ring, and there is no reprieve. The issue in the
fight that ensues is not who will be the victor, but how long the
foredoomed victim will endure. If, by definition, a sport is a
contest in which either side can conquer, bullfighting is not a
sport. It is a planned and ordered exhibition of killing.

The average American usually reports his first bullfight as a
pretty unpleasant experience. Mine was no exception. A good
bull and a good matador can between them make a stirring,
colorful show and let no one disparage the courage and skill
of the bullfighters but always there are the gored horses and the
blood and the foreknown outcome, And if, as sometimes happens,
the bull is docile and Tinwilling to fight, the proceedings de-
generate into a pointless butchery. It is hypocrisy to say that a
bullfight is not exciting. Combat, blood and death are always
exciting. But it is the spurious excitement of the spectator, the

70 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

noncombatant, the fellow who sits securely in his grandstand
seat and knows he himself is safe.

The bull is killed, the matador runs great risks, but I think it is
the spectator at a bullfight who comes off worst of all. Vicari-
ously he revels in blood and dust and glory. Behind stout
barriers he sits in judgment and shouts for action. He is the
human animal at his most secure, most critical, most cruel. Death
in the afternoon costs ten soles, and he wants his money's worth.
Tell me the bullfight's exciting, friend aficionado, and I shall
agree with you. I was excited myself. But when you leap to your
feet shouting for blood please don't expect me to think very
highly of you as a human being. "Kill him! Kill him!" Why
don't you go out there and kill him yourself, you big stiff?

After some five days in Lima I learned how to pronounce
Pachacamac and CajamarquIUa and could therefore mention
them with impunity. They are not soft-drinks but ruins, both
located within a short distance of Lima and both well worth a
visit if one's fancy runs to archaeology, skulls, and the imper-
manence of the works of man. Jerry had been in Peru for six
months without encountering a ruin, which is tantamount to
crossing the River Styx without encountering a dramatic critic.
He was proud of his unique record, but consented to accompany
us on our investigations. As a result he is still picking pre-Incaic
dust from his ears.

Oajamarquilla, the more ancient of the two ruined cities, is
perhaps seven hundred years old and was built by the Indian in-
habitants of the lower Rimac Valley in the days before they fell
subject to the conquering Incas. Most of the records of their
civilization- even their tribal name are lost in the blank pages
of time. Only their city remains, roofless and half-covered with
the drift-dust of centuries, but with massive adobe foundations
and walk still intact. These Indians, like their Spanish conquerors
after them, seldom used stone in their building, and in a rainy,
or even moist climate, Oajamarquilla would long since have been
obliterated. But here on Peru's west coast, where it has rained

"TTJRISTA" 71

perhaps a total of seven days in seven centuries and the air itself
is virtually an embalming agent, the walls and stairways remain
almost untouched by time since the days when a forgotten
people built them, moved among them and called them home.
The city is located about twenty miles east of Lima, at a point
where the last spurs of the Andes fall off into the coastal plain.
High on these spurs, on either side, can be seen the remnants of
watchtowers, and the flanks of the surrounding hills are still
scalloped with the contours of their old terraces. Once watered
and fructified by irrigation, these terraces have not been used
for agriculture since the coming of white men and have returned
to their natural rugged aridity. But farther up the Rimac Valley
the prehistoric irrigation ditches are even today used as part of
Lima's system of -water supply. The ruins of the city itself were
among the first in Peru to be discovered and investigated by
archaeologists. Some artifactspottery and crude implements-
have been discovered, but for a ruin so accessible and carefully
combed, Cajamarquilla is jealous of its secrets. Some authorities
believe it was built by the Qiimus, whose great capital city of
Chan Chan has recently been discovered farther north near
modern Trujillo. Others think it was the home of a still earlier
people, subsequently conquered by the Chimus, who in turn fell
prey to the conquering Incas from the mountains. In any event,
many conquerors, as well as many years, have come and gone in
the valley of the Rimac since the day of its foundation.

Cajamarquilla is pre-Incaic. Pachacamac, on the other hand,
dates from the great years of the Incas and was probably still
inhabited when Pizarro founded Lima in 1535. It is situated
thirty miles south of the capital on one of a thousand barren
sand hills that rise and fall along the Pacific coast. Motoring
down along the new asphalt highway that extends to Pisco and
its vineyards, we were, within fifteen minutes from the hotel, out
of sight of any life or habitation on a forlorn desert of flats and
dunes. To die west was the ocean, broken here and there by the
gray outlines of guano islands; north, south and east, was brown

72 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

desolation; the sky was without color or cloud, as empty and
barren as the earth. It was a place of mirages; constantly as we
sped forward we seemed to be heading directly for the sea. We
could see it stretched out ahead, between the dunes and beyond
them, its rippling surface alive in the sun; and off to the east
there was a ship, clear in its outline, sailing upon it. But as con-
stantly as we approached it the water receded. When we should
have been in its midst we were still on the same brown sand;
and when we passed the ship it was no longer a ship but a jagged
rock. At one point suddenly and quite startUngly we crossed
a stream. It trickled thinly down from the foothills to the ocean,
and along its banks grass and a few shrubs made a tiny green
thread, sharp and startling in a world without color or change.
Then sand again, and the sterile dunes, and the sterile sky. We
knew that the sea to west of us was real and the sea ahead- was
not, but in the world through which we now were moving
reality and unreality had lost their differentiation. A phantom
fleet might have corne up over the horizon and sailed into the
hills. A long-dead Indian king, with all his ancient retinue, might
have passed us silently on our endless road. Lima, men, the time
and space in which we lived were somehow gone and lost, as by
the turning of a corner. Reality was here, but another reality-
one we did not know and shrank from knowing. Our breathing,
the ticking of my watch, the steady purr of the car's motor
were suddenly sounds we had never heard before.

Presently there was a dune among the many ahead that seemed
different. The outline of its summit was sharper, darker against
the empty sky. Another mirage, perhaps? Or nothing? Or some-
thing for which we had no name? As we moved forward, how-
ever, it did not vanish, but grew clearer. Its lines took form,
solidified into walls and battlements, assumed the planned, famil-
iar symmetries of structures built by men. It was the citadel of
Pachacamac. High above its summit three buzzards were circling.
At the foot of its nearest slope was a parked Ford and near it
a group of men with picks and shovels, digging. These were the
first living things we had seen since leaving the suburbs of Lima,

"TURISTA" 73

and even the buzzards were welcome. We had reached the dead
city of Pachacamac, but simultaneously we had returned to the
world we knew and belonged in.

The archaeology of Pachacamac is better known than that of
Cajamarquilla, largely because it dates from more recent rimes
and its remains are less deeply buried in the drift-dirt of the
years. It is built about the four sides of a great, irregular dune,
the summit of which was formerly the palace of the priests and
the Temple of the Sun. Judging from its extent, it must once
have held a vast population, and from its innumerable chambers
and tunnels have been excavated many of the most important, as
well as best-preserved, relics of Inca civilization. The Incaic
people, like the Egyptians, mummified their dead and interred
beside them the most precious and useful of their worldly posses-
sions. Incaic mummies, however, are not in erect posture, but
doubled over in a sort of squatting position, their knees drawn
up to their chins and their arms pressed tightly against the sides
of their heads, as in attitudes of lamentation. Also, they were
not sealed in coffins, but in rough-spun sacks, into which, beside
them, their possessions were placed. The opening of the sack
was then sewn tightly, until the whole resembled a bulging load
of potatoes, and the corpse was ready for the grave. Several
mummies from Pachacamac are on view in the Archaeological
Museum in Lima and are probably better specimens scientifically
than esthetically. Inca royalty was buried in an upright sitting
posture, and the few royal mummies I saw had weathered the
centuries with dignity. But the rank and file considerably in the
majority in the museum, as in lifewere invariably compressed
in death into the traditional cramped squat, and die results, five
centuries later, are apt to display a crude, often gruesome, humor.
The buried possessions pottery, trinkets, tools, weapons are, on
the whole, far better preserved and easier on the eye than their
former owners.

In size, variety and perfection of stonework Pachacamac is
reputed not to compare with the vast Incaic ruins of Cuzco and
Macchu Picchu, but it has its compensating attractions for the

74 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

visitor and particularly the amateur archaeologist. In the eternal
dryness of the climate little has been weathered away, and one
can pass through the rooms, corridors and doorways of many
dwellings that lack only their original bamboo roofs and simple
furnishings to make them exactly as they were when occupied
by their long-dead tenants. And in Pachacamac, too, you don't
require a steam shovel and a Ph.D. degree to engage in a bit of
excavation on your own. Our dependable Sefior Enriquez had
supplied us with pick and shovel, and, digging at random for
perhaps an hour in the loose, dry earth, we uncovered a half-
dozen skulls, many fragments of pottery, part of a burial sack
(but no mummy), and several lengths of qidpus cord, the
knotted strings by means of which the Indians did their only
known recording of figures and words. Nothing of intrinsic
value or scientific interest, to be sure, but considerably more
satisfying than someone's else exhumations behind a labeled glass
in a museum. The only thing I should have liked to keep was
a quipuS) but they crumbled in my fingers. Edna, however, in
whom ruins bring out unfortunate ghoulish tendencies, carried
off an assortment of jawbones, mummy-sacks and such, which
would give the customs inspectors a good workout on her re-
turn to New York.

Pachacamac has its own odor and its own sound. The odor is
hard to define a faint, acrid tang of decay. The sound magni-
fied out of all reality by the vast silence in which it exists is the
thin whirring of the wings of buzzards and condors as they
wheel endlessly above the summits of the dunes. The buzzards,
which are greatly in the majority, are at home on this bleak
coast; but the condors are victims of an unhappy fate. Native
to high altitudes of the central Andes, an occasional two or three
venture, or are blown, down to the low plains of the Pacific.
There, in the unaccustomedly heavy atmosphere, they are unable
to fly with their natural power or to gain sufficient altitude to
enable them to return home. Prisoners to the ground and the
heavy air of sea level, they perch sorrowfully upon the ridges
of die dunes or launch desperate, straining flights toward the dis-

"TURISTA" 75

tant mountains. But always they fall back, and soon they die,
and their carcasses become part of the charnel ground of Pacha-
camac. I think I shall never recall the still, dead city in its still,
dead desert by the sea without bearing in my mind the whirr
of the wings of the great condors trying to live.

Judging from bookstore displays, Lima's reading tastes are
catholic. "Don Quixote" is leader on most shelves, but there are
Dantes, Voltaires, Hugos, English classics, Gorlds, Dreisers,
paper-back detective stories and pretty nearly everything eke.
Religious treatises aboundj also pamphlets on "How to be a So-
and-So," "What to do about Such-and-Such," unds&weiter.
Looking through the modern Spanish authors I recognized
Unamuno and came to an abrupt halt. I confess myself a bit
appalled when I considered that I did not know the name nor
had I read a book of a single South American writer.

The leading Lima newspaper is El Ccmmercio, conservative
and pro-gringo corporation. The leading (and only) English
language paper is The West Coast Leader, published, edited,
written and probably linotyped weekly by one Mr. Griffis, a
tall, ageless American who apparently far antedates Pachacamac
as a Peruvian landmark. The favorite moving-picture actor, at
the time of our sojourn, was Shirley Temple; the favorite fic-
tional character (no competitors) was Tarzan. The favorite
magazine (at least my favorite, although I've never got farther
than the cover) was simply and beautifully Sexo.

Next to dogs, Lima was fullest of policemen. There was not
only one, but usually three, at every corner, not to mention the
middle-of-the-blocks. Solving crimes, apprehending thieves and
similar strenuous activities are said not to be their forte, but they
were polite, helpful and marveloudy adept at not being extermi-
nated by Lima's ferocious traffic.

What with the police force, the army and navy, every third
man in the city seemed to be in uniform. The rank and file were

76 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

practically all cholos (Indians) or mestizos (half-breeds); the
officers were all white and most of them pretty spiffy.

Like those of most of the Latin-American republics, the
Peruvian armed forces are trained by foreign officers. In Peru's
particular case the army enjoys French sponsorship, the navy,
American. Military service is compulsory, and an army career is
almost de rigueur for the not too bright sons of the better
families. There, however, the donning of a uniform does not in-
volve the loss of many civilian liberties and prerogatives which
it does in the United States. Quite the contrary. South American
Presidents run things pretty much the way the army likes them
to be run, or they aren't President very long.

Once you have your passport, visa, certified certificates from
police and health authorities, and are safely in the country, Peru
is not bad, as small countries go, about papers, documents and
such. The police take your passport when you land, keep it a
few days and return it with an identification certificate. That is
all you need if you remain in Peru for two months or less. If you
stay longer you require a super-identification certificate, or
cornet, and life grows more complex. Ggarettes may be brought
into Peru in moderate quantities, but there is a strict embargo
on foreign matches and lighters. The government operates a
match monopoly, has been losing money on it, and doesn't like it.
Not only are the customs officials hawk-eyed after contraband,
but any citizen in the street is supposed to and often will-
report you if he sees you using a foreign match. Reward to him,
twenty soles. Penalty to you, plenty. Better be caught with a
dismembered corpse in your trunk than a Dunhill lighter.

Favorite street-signs in Lima:

CAJA D'AHORRAS not the Chamber of Horrors, but the Savings
Bank.

ESCUELA INTERNACIONALE DBS COBKESPONDENdAOUT old friend,

the LCS., of Scranton, Pa.

"TURISTA" 77

On the morning of our ninth day at the Gran Hotel Bolivar
the rooster which inhabited the roof across the street crowed as
usual. Presently the phone rang, the cafe-complets came up and
the taxi horns yelped outside, all as usual. It was just another
day for Lima, just another sailing for the Grace Line, but it was
separation for Ruth and me.

The battle of True Love vs. The Amazon had been going on
ever since our arrival in Lima. A dozen times I had been on the
point of renouncing my proposed trip across the continent and
returning home with Ruth; and a dozen times she had been
perilously near consigning herself to three months of mud,
mosquitoes and misery in the tropical jungles. But sober counsel
had at last prevailed. On the one hand, if alligators and dysen-
tery were what I needed to make me forget my good friends
of the dramatic page, there was no reason why I should not seek
them out. On the other hand, there seemed no compelling neces-
sity for Ruth to abdicate her status as a normal, civilized woman
simply because her husband had suddenly gone slightly insane.
It had therefore been decided that Ruth and Edna would return
home direct from Lima and that I would proceed across South
America in such fashion as my psychopathic interests directed.
Riding down to Callao in the cab that morning I'm afraid we
both felt the decision left something to be desired.

When we reached the pier the Santa Clara was alongside
steam up, stevedores shouting, hawsers and winches creaking her
cargo into her holds. She was due to sail at ten, but at ten she
was still there. At ten-thirty she was still there. She may still
have been there at eleven, but I wasn't. I rode up in the cab
from Callao to The Bolivar, went into the empty bar and ordered
a pisco-sonx. When that was gone I ordered another.

That night was New Year's Eve, and there were highjinks at
the Country dub in celebration thereof. We attended en masse
Jerry and I and an assortment of young blades from Casa
Grace, to whom I was blood-brother for the night and never
saw again. I looked vaguely eccentric, but at least got by die
gate in my borrowed plumage Senor Gomez's too-small dinner

78 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

jacket and Jerry's too-large dress-shirt, collar, shoes and socks,
plus my very own underdrawers. Everyone says it was a fine
party. There was plenty of whisky and plenty of champagne,
and the chivalry of all Lima was there: gentlemen in dress uni-
form and gentlemen in tails, hundreds of lovely women in lovely
gowns, and more ambassadors than head waiters. There were
even, I was told, two or three Peruvians.

At precisely one minute of twelve the orchestra, in accordance
with old Latin tradition, began playing "Auld Lang Syne." The
lights went out, and the men who were dancing kissed their part-
ners. Happy New Year! I found a bench on the lawn just big
enough for my highball and myself and sat looking at the moon.
I had a pretty good idea how H. G. Wells's old Dr. Cavor felt
when his companion sailed away in the rocket and left him there.

IV

MOUNTAINS AND MEN

NEW YEAR'S DAY, 1937, in Lima not unlike other New
Year's Days in other climes dawned heavy with head-
aches and vain regrets. This particular hangover, how-
ever, had one paramount virtue it enabled me quite successfully
to forget the pangs of loneliness in favor of the pangs of the
flesh. I have a recollection of several theoretically beneficial gii*-
and-gingers, a Laurel and Hardy vermouth and a pretty strong
conviction that life left much to be desired. The next day Jerry
and I went up to Chosica he for the week-end, I for an indefi-
nite term.

Going up to Chosica you travel on the Central Railroad of
Peru, and traveling on the Central Railroad of Peru, you experi-
ence a trip such as you will not have had anywhere else in the
world. At the risk of sounding like a booklet advertising special
holiday rates, I herewith go on record that I cannot imagine a
more interesting or exciting journey.

The Central (Ferrocarril Central del Peru in its native habitat)
runs from Lima due east into the Andes as far as the mountain
mining-town of Oroya. From Oroya, the main line cuts south to
Huancayo and Huancavelica, while a branch extends north to
Cerro de Pasco. There are a few other branches and extensions
to Callao, to the seaside resort of Ancon, to the copper mines of
Morococha and that is all. Total mileage less than three hun-
dred. Through passenger trains per day one in each direction.
Industries served Cerro de Pasco Copper Company and three
or four smaller mining outfits. Profit to stockholders damned
little. In size and commercial importance, the Central is assuredly
not among the world's great railroads. Compared to the huge

79

80 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

systems of the United States, it's practically the Toonerville
Trolley, but in boldness of concept and ingenuity of construc-
tion, it stands by itself. Puffing and tooting in their far-away
Andean pockets, its trains bear cheering witness to the fact that,
even in the machine-world of the twentieth century, a thing
does not always have to be big to be magnificent.

The Central owes its existence to the genius and perseverance
of one Henry Meiggs, an American who seems to have been
quite as remarkable as his railroad. As a young man in the States,
before and during the Civil War, he engaged in a variety of
occupations without success. He first came to South America
by sailing around Cape Horn to the west coast with a cargo of
lumber. Realizing a substantial profit from this venture, he settled
in Chile and engaged in a series of spectacular promotion and
exploitation schemes in the new and rapidly developing country.
Some were successful; most were not, and at one time he was in
debt for over a million dollars. Though not an engineer, and
having only a layman's knowledge of surveying and construction,
he supervised the building of many bridges for the Chilean gov-
ernment, became interested in railroading, and presently moved
on to Peru to direct the building of her lines. His first job was
the Southern Railway from the Pacific up to Lake Titicaca and
Cuzco and he took it in stride. Next came the Central, and in
its building Meiggs had full opportunity to exercise his ingenu-
ity and tenacity. Begun in 1869, the work dragged on year after
year. There were few trained engineers or mechanics in Peru.
Funds were always low, and the materials of construction had
to be brought from thousands of miles away. And, most formid-
able obstacle of all, there were the Andes themselves a vast
continental barrier rising twenty: thousand feet above sea level,
blocking die line of track at every turn with precipice and gorge,
hurling down avalanches and floods upon the work already com-
pleted.

"You'll never ky the tracks through those mountains," they
told him.

MOUNTAINS AND MEN 8 1

"All right, then," was his now famous answer, **we'll hang *em
up on balloons."

Balloons, as it turned out, were about the only devke known
to man that he didrft have to employ in the building of his road;
but slowly the line crawled up and on, and by the time of
Meiggs's death, in 1877, it had crossed the continental divide at
the unheard-of altitude of 15,665 feet higher than Mont Blanc,
higher than any mountain peak in the United States, and still,
in 1937, the highest standard-gauge railway in the world. It was
not until 1893, twenty-four years after its inception, that the
road was carried through to Oroya and finally thrown open to
traffic. But the worst of the obstacles had been conquered during
Meiggs's lifetime and by Meiggs's genius.* The snow-capped,
granite mountain through which the track tunnels at its highest
point has been named Mt. Meiggs by the Peruvian government as
a memorial to his achievement. But the Central Railroad of Peru
is a better one.

The daily train from Lima to Oroya leaves Desamparados
Station at 8.05 in the morning and reaches its destination at 4.30
in the afternoon. Sounds like a long trip? Better take a magazine?
I give you my personal guaranty you won't get past the table of
contents.

For the first hour the going is comparatively safe and sane.
Leaving the city behind, the train skirts the eastern flank of
Cerro San Cristobal and follows the valley of the River Rimac
through wide, irrigated fields of sugar and cotton. The new
government-owned tobacco factory slips past; then Grace's
Vitarte cotton mills. (Beware Vitarte, O timsta y for there, with
the most modern American machines, are manufactured most of
the fabrics which you will buy from cholo women in Huancayo
or Ayacucho as products of tibe native Indian crafts.) A few
more factories, haciendas, fields then brown hills come up on
either side; at first low, isolated humps along the valley, presently
connected by ridges, coalescing, climbing. The green fields be-
side the river narrow to a ribbon of half a mile in width. Outside
the car window the earth still looks flat, but up ahead the loco-

82 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

motive squat, pot-bellied, brass-bandedhas begun to labor. A
new ridge of bare, brown earth springs up on the left, just in
time to shut off a view of Cajamarquilla in its dusty valley. Then
its twin appears on the right, and gradually the two converge,
pressing fields and railroad even closer to the river. Suddenly
you find yourself leaning out the window to see their summits.
Then the train stops, gurgles, pants, and you are in Chosica.

Of Chosica more anon. Beyond it, Andes and Central Railroad
stop teasing each other and come to grips in earnest. The hills
on either side are no longer hills, but mountains; their faces are
no longer earth, but rock. Ahead is a vast granite wall, appar-
ently shutting off all farther progress; but the train twists, dodges,
maneuvers and is somehow past it, only to enter another valley
and encounter another wall. On the thin green strip beside the
tracks, cane and cotton fields have given way to orchards. At
San Bartolomae, the next station, cholo women in their white
panamas and gay Vitarte skirts besiege the train with limones,
citrones, mansanas. The locomotive growls, clangs, toots (the
Central's engines are probably the most voluble in the world),
and the enclosing granite walls hurl back the sound. After San
Bartolomae, they close in tight, and the train goes off on the
first of innumerable switchbacks up their precipitous sides, as if
literally squeezed upward by pressure from below. For fifteen
minutes now there is nothing but the river, the track and rock
walls, with perhaps a strip of distant sky overhead if you can
lean far enough out of the window to see it. Then momentarily
the pressure relaxes and spits the train out into the valley of
Surco.

At Surco there are more Indian women, only these carry
flowers for sale instead of fruits enormous bouquets of pansies
and violets from the mountain meadows round about, still
dripping with their natural moisture. Buy them by all means
they are beautiful and last for days-but be sure to put them on
the rack above your neighbor's head and not your own. Other-
wise you will enjoy a private shower-bath all the way to Oroya.

Matrcana-lnndb and beggars. Tamboiaque-old Spanish gold-

MOUNTAINS AND MEN 83

diggings. San Mateo llamas beside the track, noses high, lower
lips protruding, a dozen Mussolinis in high disdain contemplating
us Abyssinians in the coach. Rio Bl^co CHck-Casapaka
Ticlio.

From Surco to Matucana the precipitous mountain slopes are
zigzagged wit k stonewalled terracesrelics of the Inca's strenu-
ous agriculture. Modern economy has made them no longer
practicable; it is many years since maize has grown on these tiny
level steps, and their one-time fertile greenness has long since
faded to mountain-brown. But their outlines, carved in earth and
granite, remain distinct a vast, bewildering pattern of platforms
rising from the valley floor to the very summits of the peaks.

Beyond Matucana, however, even the Incas were licked. The
terraces disappear as slopes bristle into precipices, and on their
sheer crags even the ubiquitous Andean cactus can rarely claw
out a hold. All vegetation dies; the stream of the Rimac has
dwindled to a thin, hissing thread; the mountains have shed the
last friendly mask of life and stand out bare in savage desolation.
The train seems to shake itself as it climbs among them, engine
panting, whistle tooting. The track wrestles with die earth rather
than passes over it. It is no longer a path of sted and wood, but
a living thing, cunning and untiring, in combat with a gigantic
living opponent. Cautiously it advances up a gorge, seeking a
way through at the farther end. The mountains throw a preci-
pice in its path, and quickly it scuttles backward up the gorge's
side. A moment's rest, a gathering of strength, then forward it
goes again along the self same gorge, but five hundred feet higher
than on its previous try. A huge granite shoulder springs out to
block it; it pierces it, howls through the inner darkness of the
mountain, emerges on the other side, only to be conf ranted by a
thousand foot abyss direcdy in its path. It bridges it. Steel roars
on steel, slender in hanging space, and the rock roars back its
echo. From the coach window is seen momentarily a vertical,
scrambled world without planes, without poles, with only
height and depth. Thai, as suddenly as it appeared, it fa blotted
out as the next mountain rushes in and the train borrows again

84 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

into darkness. As soon as one gorge is conquered, there is another
higher, deepen New cliffs rise up to overwhelm the intruder,
fall away to engulf it. Again the switchbacks, tunnels, bridges.

For upwards of three hours this amazing battle goes on. Time
and again the mountains seem to have the train so hermetically
pocketed that there is no further progress possible. But each time
the train miraculously finds a way, or, if there is no way to be
found, makes it. All told there are sixty-seven bridges, fifteen
switchbacks and sixty-five tunnels on the ascent. Leaving Rio
Blanco, the little mountain town beside the tracks remains in full
view for a half-hour, while the train zigzags laboriously up the
mountain walls that hem it in. Looking down on it for the last
time, just before the final ridge blots it out, the passenger can
count five parallel lines of track, one above the other, over which
he has successively passed* in his ascent. At Infernillo Bridge
(infernillo means "little hell," and is accurate except for the
"littie") the train plunges out of a tunnel, spans an abyss so deep
that it is in twilight even at noon, and burrows again into dark-
ness on the other side. The most accurate impression I can con-
vey of the unreal, appalling scene is one compounded, in jumbled,
supernatural fashion, of equal parts of Dante, a welsh-rarebit
nightmare and the Dragon's Gorge at Coney Island. I should not
have been in the least surprised if a scarlet hobgoblin had sud-
denly appeared in die window and pulled my nose.

All things must have an end even, though you are inclined to
doubt it at the time, the Central Railroad of Peru. The train has
finally attained an altitude of over fifteen thousand feet; six hours
have passed since leaving Lima, and you have thoroughly for-
gotten that the world once contained such phenomena as a level
plane or a straight line. The track squirms through its hundredth
canyon, by its hundredth precipice, through its hundredth shoul-
der. Then again it reaches the ridge, and suddenly, incredulously,
you discover it is the last ridge. Ahead, instead of another gorge,
there stretches to the horizon the forlorn expanse of the moun-
tains' summit plateau the prmo, or altiplano, of the Central
Andes. The train still climbs but at an easier grade; the rolling

MOUNTAINS AND MEN 85

earth is covered with moss and sparse, tough grass; to right and
left are the snow-capped peaks of the continental divide, but
between them the valleys are broad and undulant. Two lakes
appear ahead, twin sheets of living color in a world of brown
and gray. Though separated by less than ten feet of earth, one
lake gives back in pure reflection the thin, clean blueness of the
sky, whereas the other, heavy with mineral deposits, is dull
copper-red. Beyond them bulks Mt. Meiggs top of the world.
There is snow on its saw-toothed summit and in the snow a
cross. The locomotive whistles triumphantly its blast no longer
hurled back upon it by enclosing walls, but free in the thin,
clear air and plunges into the mountain's granite base. For a few
moments in the sooty darkness, you can feel the engine strain-
ing, the train still climbing. Then, strangely, up ahead there is
silence. The engine is no longer laboring. The coupling-blocks
between the cars are rattling freely. Halfway through the Galera
Tunnel, in the black innards of Mt. Meiggs, the line has reached
its highest point 15,665 feet above the sea and when it emeiges
again into daylight, it is on its way down the eastern "slopes of
the Andes.

From the summit to Oroya the train descends some 3500 feet,
but it takes them leisurely and without struggle. All around, die
lofty snow peaks bite into the horizon. Their lower slopes, how-
ever, are gentle and clothed in the pale, grudging green of moun-
tain vegetation, for we have at last passed out of the world where
rain never falls. Where, before, the earth was heavy brown, it is
now gray with limestone; the high shoulders of the cliffs .above
glisten with rain-washed smoothness; and the sky has turned
from empty gray to rich, cloud-hung blue. Then presently the
blue ahead darkens. Its white clouds are heavy with soot. Sud-
denly the stern outline of a tall chimney cuts the skyline. The
mining town of Oroya slides up on either side, and tie odyssey*
is over.

We shall get back to Oroya in due time, but for the moment
our journey and the Central Railroad's is done. Before turning
about, however, and scooting back to Chosica on the wings of

86 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

literary license, it is only fair to record that in return for its
scenic splendor and thrills, the journey often charges full price.
For every person who swears by the trip as the greatest experi-
ence in the world, there is one who swears he would rather
cross the Atlantic in a canoe. When you board your coach at
Desamparados in Lima, your chances are about fifty-fifty that
you are about to spend (a) the most enjoyable or (b) the most
miserable day of your South American junket. The nigger in the
Andean woodpile is soroche.

Soroche is mountain-sickness, Peruvian variety, and we began
hearing about it aboard the Santa Rita before Sandy Hook was
well out of sight. It is the worst affliction in the world, they
assured us. Your blood-pressure doubles, your head splits open,
your last five meals come up, your ears and nose bleed and your
eyes pop, your heart forces its way out between your sixth and
seventh ribs and you wish you were dead. Finally, if you are
lucky, you do die, or at least pass out and spend the trip in en-
forced, but fairly comfortable, unconsciousness.

One expects exaggeration in shipboard stories, but in point of
fact soroche can affect the human body in weird and woeful
fashion. On my four trips up and down "the hill," I have seen
people suffering from one or another of all the ailments
chronicled above, except actually dying, and on rare occasions
undergoing practically all of them simultaneously. The effects of
altitude, like the income-tax adjuster, operate mysteriously and
usually strike when least expected. Some are hit going up, some
going down, some both ways, and some escape altogether. There
is no rhyme or reason about it. A turista who has never in his
life been higher than the observation platform of the Empire
State Building will come through unscathed, while in the next
seat a native sierra Indian will bleed profusely from nose and
ears, give up his lunch and eventually pass out cold. On one trip
up there was a Peruvian woman with her three children in the
same car with me; at 15,000 feet, the mother was unconscious
and die children were munching sandwiches and playing hide-
and-seek in the aisle. Another time this was a descent all the

MOUNTAINS AND MEN 87

children in the car were taken violently sick, whereas none of the
adults seemed to be affected at all. The only rule that seems at
all applicable is the old prize-fight saw the bigger they come,
the harder they fall. On paper, at least, it sounds reasonable. The
heftier a man is, the greater his lung-capacity; the greater his
lung-capacity, the more oxygen he needs to fill them; the less
oxygen he gets, the more poorly his body functions. Q JLD. This
theory, at least, piled up substantial evidence not long ago during
the visit to Peru of an American warship. During their shore
leave, more than a hundred gobs presumably husky specimens
of young American manhood were taken for an excursion on
the Central to Rio Blanco. They left the up-bound train in fine
fettle, but half an hour later, when the descending train pulled
in to pick them up, there were less than twenty of them still
conscious. It was the greatest mass-catastrophe in the annals of
soroche and the U. S. Navy.

We ourselves, in our Andean ups and downs, were Fortune's
favored children. In their only ascent-to Rio Blanco, in the
Navy's footsteps-Ruth and Edna both felt poorly when leaving
Desamparados, and it looked like a day of spirits of ammonia
and unmitigated woe. But the higher the train climbed, the better
they felt, until at 11,000 feet they were in top spirits and de-
vouring a multi-course Peruvian lunch. For myself, the only
discomfort I experienced in the mountains was at the end of
an auto-trip down from Oroya to Choaca. When I stepped
from the car my ears were singing loudly and my head was
spinning; but after an hour's rest both symptoms were gone, and
that was the end of it. The Andes-f or me, at least-proved a far
easier barrier to hurdle than, say, New Year's Eve at die
Country Club.

The week-end over, Jerry returned to the long ledgers of
Casa Grace, and I was left on die terrace of die Qwnttt Morris,
with Chosica below me, die Andes above me, and three diousand
miles of beckoning South America stretched out before me to
die east.

88 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

First, as to Chosica.

It is an attractive village of some thousand inhabitants, thirty-
five miles up the Rimac from Lima, at an altitude of 2800 feet.
In winter (July and August in Peru), when the winds blow in
from the Pacific and Lima oozes fog, it is a popular vacation
resort, but at the rime of my visit it was quiet and almost de-
serted. The valley in which it is situated is perhaps half a mile
wide. Below, to the west, it opens up rapidly into the coastal
plain; immediately to the east it narrows and climbs abruptly,
as the Andes begin to grow and overpower it. Situated almost
exactly at the point where the foothills may be said to become
mountains, Chosica's enclosing ridges are perhaps two thousand
feet above its streets; farther back are peaks which look to be
about twice as high; and at the head of the valley, seeming to
close it tight as one comes up from below, is a still larger, pyra-
midal mountain that rears to some ten thousand feet above -the
sea. It looked like good climbing.

Now, as to the Quanta Morris.

Quinta means pension, and Morris means the name of the lady
who runs it, and it was not at all by accident, but by long and
deliberate plan, that I found myself there. It began back in the
Manhattan Matto Grosso of Reading Up and Making Contacts.
I had been referred to Mr. George O'Rourke, at Thomas Cook &
Son, as the man in New York who knew most about the terri-
tory I vaguely proposed to cover in my trip eastern Peru and
the valley of the Amazon. Most travel agents are affable, but
Mr. O'Rourke was also honest. He knew nothing whatever of
eastern Peru or the Amazon, he assured me, but he knew some-
one who did. She was Mrs. Hope Morris, an American widow
who operates a pension in Chosica, Peru. And there I was, and
she did.

Hope Morris's has been an unusual and interesting life. Born
in a small town in Virginia, she married a Standard Oil engineer
when she was twenty and almost immediately thereafter sailed
with him for South America, where he had been dispatched by
his company to survey and investigate new oil lands. During the

MOUNTAINS AND MEN 89

next ten years their travels took them into the wildest and most
inaccessible parts of the continent along the Amazon and
Madeira rivers and their tributaries; across the Gran Chaeo of
eastern Bolivia, which Julian Duguid traversed several years later
and wrote about in "Green Hell"; and no less than three times
up and down the Pichis Trail and Ucayali River, which join the
Peruvian Andes with the Amazon and on which this fugitive
from Times Square had set his eye and heart. Most of the
gringos in Lima had not even heard of the places she had been
tomuch less been there. Many of the regions through which
she not only passed, but in which she lived for months (such as
the Gran Chaco), have subsequently been made the locale for
sensational "exploration" stories. Pick at random almost any spot
on the blank, green map of South America's tropic interior, and
Hope Morris will probably have lived there at one time. I hope
that in the ensuing record of my excursion down die Pichis
Trail and the tributaries of the Amazon when stupendous ad-
ventures befall me and the temptation waxes strong to picture
myself as a cross between Marco Polo and Tarzan the Untamed
I shall have the good grace to recall that, some ten years before
me, an American girl in her twenties made the selfsame trip, not
once, but three times, came out very much aHve, and miracu-
lously refrained from writing even a Sunday Times Magazine
Section article about her experiences.

In the late 1920*5 Mrs. Morris's husband left Standard Oil and
formed his own small company. It fared badly, and soon he
and his wife were back in the States, broke and at scratch. Soon
after that he died. Having to support herself, she got a job at
Macy's, worked there a year, and was pretty unhappy about it.
She had lived almost all her adult life in South America; her
friends were there and her interests were there. She wanted to
go back and, after a year, she did.

In Arequipa, Peru, there has lived longer than anyone can
remember a person half-woman and half-institutioncalled Tia
Bates. She was once an American, they say, and she is reported
opee to have had a husband an engineer, or prospector, or

90 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

something. But he is lost in the dark fog of time, and not even
the oldest west coast gringo can recollect Arequipa in the days
before Tia Bates, as a widow, opened her quinta there. In the
past twenty years every American or English visitor to the city
has eaten and slept at the Quinta Bates the Duke of Windsor,
when he was Prince of Wales, President-elect Hoover, General
Pershing, Noel Coward, visiting diplomats, turista and beach-
combers. If they are solvent they pay. If they aren't they are on
the cuff, provided the old lady lies them. But then, if she doesn't
like them, she doesn't take them in in the first place solvent or
otherwise.

It was to the Quinta Bates that Mrs. Morris went when she
returned to Peru, as housekeeper and general assistant, and it was
from Tia, she says, that she learned (a) how to run a pension and
(b) how to swear. After two years, at all events, she apparently
was adept enough at both arts to shift for herself. In 1930 she
opened a house in the outskirts of Lima and in 1933 another in
Chosica. By now, at forty-odd, she is fair on the way to becom-
ing an institution herself. She considers Peru her permanent
home, has not been to the United States in seven years and has
no intention of ever returning here permanently. Her friends,
she argues, are there, as well as her livelihood. In New York she
would probably have to go back to Macy's, but in Lima she is
comparatively wealthy. She writes regularly once a month to
her mother in Warrenton, Virginia, speaks Spanish as if she had
been in Peru two weeks, and claims to be a distant cousin of the
Duchess of Windsor, but doesn't hammer the point.

"Is it true what they say about Dixie? " inquired Chosica's
municipal loudspeaker every morning at nine, and thereupon
settled down to a day of broadcasting old phonograph records.
Phonograph and loudspeaker were located in the village plaza,
and both were good and rusty, and good and loud. They seemed,
however, to be Chosica's pride and joy, and a policeman was
stationed in the plaza apparently for the sole purpose of making
the music go 'round. Every hour or so the church bells rang

MOUNTAINS AND MEN 91

they too were good and rusty, and good and loud and when
they and "Dixie" got together, even the stolid Andes quivered
along their rugged spines.

Otherwise Chosica was a pleasant place for loafing, for writ-
ing, for tramping the hills, for chewing the contemplative cud.
Once I had learned to step over, instead of into, the asequis (the
stone irrigation ditches which line every street), walking was a
delight, either through the tree-shaded town itself, or up the
valley to where the mountains begin to bristle, or down the
valley to the neighboring village of believe it or not Moron.
There were a hundred dogs to every human inhabitant, but even
the oldest resident did not recall having ever seen one of a recog-
nizable breed They were all loose, all ferocious-looking, and
all barked at you as you passed; but they didn't bite, apparently,
unless you bit them first. Soon after my arrival I took to walking
out with Mrs. Morris's bitch-dog. Her name was Sally, her dis-
position gentle and charming, her coat black and white, her
ancestry unmentionable. The household called her a "poiot-
setter." She was good company and acted as a fine decoy for
the other dogs, who lavished their attention on her instead of
on me.

There was horseback riding in Chosica. It seemed a fine way
to spend a morning, but was not as easy as it sounded. As in
most Peruvian ventures, there were negoriacwnes to be made
first.

Mrs. Morris knew of a hacienda a few miles up the valley
where they had horses to hire, but a half-hour's amkable chat
with Chosica's switchboard operator finally disclosed die fact
that the hacienda had no phone. We walked down to the Hotel
Estacion, by the railroad tracks, to make inquiries.

"&', senor. Si, sefiora-Jiorses there are at the hacienda."

"Is there any way we can get word there that we want three
horses for tomorrow?"

"Alas, no, senorano one ever goes up there from here, and
the owner never comes down."

92 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

"No one ever goes there? "

"No, senoraonly Roberto. He goes there every night."

Roberto, it developed, was the proprietor of the general store
down the block. Arriving there, we found a China-boy behind
the counter and a customer at a table drinking beer through a
mustache; but no Roberto. The China-boy said he didn't know
where he was.

"Haven't you any idea?"

"Sf, senora he is in his house across the street."

"We want him to get us three horses for tomorrow from the
hacienda."

The China-boy wasn't interested, but the customer with the
mustache and the beer raised his head.

"They have good horses at the hacienda," he said.

We crossed the street, knocked at a doorway and waited. The
inevitable dog barked at us, but no one came. We returned to
the store, and as we entered, a fat, old Chinaman appeared from
the back-room. He was yawning and looked sleepy.

"We are looking for Sefior Roberto," Mrs. Morris ventured.

"&', senoral am Roberto*" Neither the China-boy nor the
mustachioed beer-drinker batted an eye.

"We understand you go to the hacienda every night. Could
you tell the owner we want three horses for tomorrow?"

"Si> senorI always go there at night. But I cannot tell him
about the horses."

"Why not?"

"I would forget," he said.

"Como?"

He smiled ingratiatingly, but shook his head. "I always forget."

Ten minutes of argument were of no avail. He knew he would
forget, and nothing could shake him. Beaten, we were about to
leave, when a new customer entered the store. Seeing the man
with the mustache drinking beer, he greeted him effusively.

"Ha, Julio!" he cried. "And how are things at the hacienda?"

The mustached one grunted something. We looked at Roberto.

"Did he say hacienda?"

MOUNTAINS AND MEN 93

"Sf, senora-Smor Julio there, with the beer, he owns the
hacienda. To him, perhaps, you might speak about the horses."

Strange to relate, we did go ridingalong the foaming Riirac
stream; then off up the Santa Eulalia Valley between narrowing,
steepening walls. Great dust clouds rose from our horses* feet,
but on either side of the twisting road the irrigated fields were
fresh and green. We passed trees heavy with f altos and mango
fruit, rich patches of cotton, cane and maize, and thick clumps
of the castor-oil plant, plain enough in appearance until you
knew what they were, whereupon they assumed a sinister aspect.
A little up the slopes were grazing lands dotted with cattle, sheep
and goats; then abruptly the earth's green vanished into the
brown sterility of the mountains, and we were conscious of the
thinness and tenuousness of the little winding Eden through
which we rode. Our horses (their size and their ears were sus-
piciously mulish, but I shall give them the benefit of the doubt)
had in their repertory a walk, a canter and a copyright gait of
their own that was halfway between a legitimate trot and an
Argentine tango. But, of the three, they vastly preferred the
walk, and, except for occasional short-lived spurts, our progres
up and down the Santa Eulalia was a deliberate and stately affair.

It was Sunday the day we rode out, and the road was filled
with cholos, coming and going from church, or maybe just
coming and going. The pure-blooded, or nearly pure-Wooded,
Peruvian Indians have definite and seldom varying racial charac-
teristics, and for a gringo they are almost as hard to distinguish
one from another as, say, a group of Chinese coolies. They are
all short, stocky, square-headed and square-featured and they aU
dress alike the men in denim pants, store shirts and faded,
woven ponchos, the women in shirtwaists, voluminous colored
skirts (usually red), and wide-brimmed panama hats. Of the two
sexes, the women are by far the more prepossessing especially
when they are still young and time has not yet drained away the
red-brown glow of their skin and the rich, black luster of their
eyes. As among most primitive people, they, rather than the men,

94 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

cany the loads when there are loads to be carried, and each one
whose hands are free carries a small spindle and ball of wool and
knits as she walks along. Usually she has a bundle on her back*
Sometimes it contains provisions; more often a baby, swaying
and bobbing as she walks, staring at the passing world with
solemn, patent-leather eyes.

With few exceptions, the Peruvian cholo is fabulously poor.
He dwells in a hut of mud and bamboo, eats rice, corn and black
bread, earns perhaps the equivalent of two or three dollars weekly.
But the poverty of the Andean Indian is vastly different from
that of his cousin in Lima* Although he has no more, even fewer,
material possessions, he is living in a society in which most such
possessions are not essential indeed, are scarcely even known.
His poorness is not of the grindihg, degrading sort. It is absolute,
not relative a result, it seems, of the economics of nature rather
than the economics of man. He is not the pauper before the gates
of the rich man, but the man who has little because the world he
inhabits has litde to give.

Nor has the average cholo either great desire or great oppor-
tunity to better his state. The tradition of serfdom is heavy upon
him. Long before the formation of the Peruvian Republic, long
even before the Spaniards came to the New World, when the
dynasty of Incas ruled the Andes, he was the peon, the fetcher
and carrier, the one of many who was ruled by the few. Prescott,
in the "Conquest of Peru,** ascribes the almost fantastic ease
with which Pizarro overthrew the Incas principally to the weak-
nesses in the Incaic form of government under their benevolent,
but ironclad, autocracy, power was completely centralized, the
masses of the people were given litde opportunity to exercise
their own discretion or initiative, and once their leaders were
overthrown they were demoralized and helpless. In psychology,
as in condition of living, they were serfs long before the white
man came with his own particular brands of political and eco-
nomic slavery; and serfs they have remained, unchanging and
unchanged, while the rulers, the governments and the revolutions
of five centuries have come and gone about them.

MOUNTAINS AND MEN 95

What APRA, or communism, or whatever form of govern-
ment the future holds in store for Peru will do for the cholos
it is impossible to say. Anything at all resembling true democracy
is far off in a nation in which only a fraction of the population
is literate or generally informed. Communism has both the prob-
lem of the Church to contend with, as it has in all Latin countries,
and the far more serious and deep-rooted obstacle of Peruvian
family solidarity. The Peruvian Indian is a man of many brothers,
sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts. Socially and economically they
comprise the permanent foundation of his life, far more than
either Church or State, and any new social order which would
embrace him must take this situation into consideration. This,
and his ignorance, and his long centuries in the tradition of
slavery. "Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!" cries the Interna-
tionale. But before a man can arise he must know how to stand
and walk.

In the evenings we sat out on the terrace of the Qutnta Morris,
our feet on the stone wall that enclosed the swimming pool below,
our eyes on the towering Andes behind Chosica as they red-
dened softly in the fading sun. Light plays games of its own in
the mountains and valleys. Now it was dark where we sat, but
the ridges three thousand feet above were still bright with sun-
light; now the ridges too had darkened and night has fallen on
Chosica, but in the next valley to the west, which opened straight
and wide to the Pacific, the sun was not yet below the horizon,
and it was still day. All week it had rained farther up in the
mountains in the late afternoon, but never here. We sat in cloud-
less sunlight, watching the long sheets of rain in the east and
hearing die distant thunder ricochet from peak to peak. In its
tight little valley Chosica was a tight little world. What happened
in the next vaUey or beyond the nearest ridge did not greatly
affect us were it weather, or politics or the fluctuations of the
soL

It was the rarest of luxuries to live in a world without news-
pipers, without radios not to know how many bombs had just

96 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

fallen on Madrid, or that last night's Broadway opening was the
worst failure of the season since "Stork Mad," or what Mrs.
Roosevelt had for lunch. True, Lima with its ships and planes
and telephones was only thirty-five miles away, and El Cam-
mercio arrived in Chosica each morning with the sun. But there
was nothing peremptory in their availability; they did not force
themselves upon you, bully you, regulate your life. For a full
week I did not handle money, use a telephone, ride in a mechani-
cal conveyance, or write a letter.

If the mountains shut out the world they also shut us in and
made of our little community of the quinta a compact, ingrown
group. In "season," which is Lima's winter, Mrs. Morris has
many Peruvian guests; at the time of my visit, however, we were
all gringos some English, some American, some weirdly involved
mixtures of Nordic and Latin. Pre-eminent among the mixtures
was a family named Harrington. Max Harrington was British,
but had lived in South America for ten years, working as an
accountant for Milne and Company. His wife had been born in
Iquique, Chile, of a German father and a Chilean mother. Their
three children, aged five to eight, were indefinable according to
English law they were English; according to Chilean law they
were Chilean, having been born there; and according to Peruvian
law, Chosica being their permanent home, they were Peruvian.
Their parents invariably spoke English, but they, brought up by
native nurses, knew only Spanish. Esperanto would seem to be
the family's only hope. Another linguistically scrambled family,
though without benefit of offspring, were the Fishers. Jack
Fisher, who was in South America with International Petroleum,
was English and spoke practically no French; his wife was French
and spoke practically no English. They compromised on very
bad Spanish while taking Berlitz courses in each other's languages.

Racially unscrambled, but of interest among the quintets ha-
bitues, was Bryan Fawcett, son of the well-known Colonel Faw-
cett who disappeared into Brazil's Matto Grosso some ten years
ago and has never been heard of since. The younger Fawcett
lives in Lima permanently, working as a commercial artist. Even

CHOSICA AND THE RIMAC VALLEY

A MOUNTAINEER AND A LADY

MOUNTAINS AND MEN 97

today, he said, he is approached regularly by individuals or groups
who want him to lead or, better, finance expeditions in search
of his father. But he is convinced his father is dead and turns
them all down.

Others of Mrs. Morris's brood included the wife of a Grace
Line executive, a young Virginian from the Cerro de Pasco
Copper Company, and two English engineers employed by the
Central Railroad, who were currently engaged in the construc-
tion of a bridge at Verrugas, about twenty miles up the line.
In addition to these, stray transients occasionally came and went,
and for days before each scheduled arrival the quinta was agog.
Would he (invariably it was a "he") be handsome, charming,
amusing? Or fat and feeble-minded? Which room should he
have? With whom should he sit at table? How was his ping-pong
game? Trivial, ridiculous excitement, yet natural and under-
standable in view of the smallness of the community, die inter-
dependence of its members and the isolation of their lives. Each
new visitor's appearance was awaited with as much breathless
expectation as if he were a solar eclipse.

I soon became quite friendly with one of die English engineers.
His name was Ted Waters, he had lived in Peru for practically
all his adult life, and he was the star boarder at the qumtm bath
in length of service and prestige. Our titanic ping-pong struggles
daily shattered the peace of the terrace, and his immense knowl-
edge and love of gardening almost educated me to die point
where I could tell a radish from a nasturtium. On one occasion
he took me with him to the bridge at Verrugas. We went up die
line on his private aiitocarril* Chevrolet coupe from which the
regular wheels had been removed and to which had been attached
steel wheels for running on the tracks and reached the scene of
construction in about an hour. The new bridge was being built
at a point where the Central pops out from one of its innum-
erable tunnels to span one of its innumerable gorges and was to
supplant an old one, currendy in use, which had developed a
wayward tendency toward swaying in the breeze. Waters and
the other Englishman were the only engineers on die job, aided

98 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

and abetted by a hundred-odd cholo laborers and a weekly dele-
gation of brass hats from Lima who would come up for an after-
noon of kibitzing. Judged by New York standards, whereby one
is accustomed to see last week's vacant lot turn into next week's
skyscraper, the work was progressing with fabulous slowness.
Machinery and construction materials had to be brought all the
way from England, usually managing to be delayed in transit;
the available labor was unskilled and undependable; and the
Andes themselves contributed their tithe of woe with landslides,
washouts and other unco-operative tantrums. When I visited
Verrugas the job had already been underway for six months, and
the steel work had not even begun; only two great blocks of
foundation concrete, bulking white and symmetrical in the wild
disorder of the mountain gorge, presented tangible evidence of
man's battle with nature that was going on here. The engineers
estimated that another year would be required to complete the
construction, provided the Peruvian holidays were kept down
to an irreducible and rigid minimum.

At some time I must inadvertently have let slip some hint as
to my dark past, for in the steel-shod Chewy coming down from
Verrugas Waters suddenly turned to me and said:

"I had a letter this morning that I think might interest you.
It's from my niece."

"In London?" I inquired.

"No, New York. She's an actress. Only a kid, really, but doing
damn well, I hear. Just had a bad break, though." He took a
letter from his pocket and handed it to me. "Here read it. Say-
come to think of ityou might know her, mightn't you?"

I opened the letter and read:

"DEAR UNCLE TED:

"Fve just had an awful disappointment. A few weeks ago I
got a job in a new show-die best part I've had yet and I felt
sure I was set for a grand season. Everything went fine right up
to the opening night, but then the 'critics just tore it to pieces,

MOUNTAINS AND MEN 99

and it ran only two and a half weeks. The name of the play was
'The Laughing Woman,' and**

"Ever hear of the play?" asked Waters.

"Uh-huh."

"Bad break for the kid, wasn't it?"

"Uh-huh."

During the remainder of the ride down to Ctiosica the con-
versation languished. The bombs on Madrid, Brooks Atkinson
and Mrs. Roosevelt's lunch no longer seemed so exquisitely
remote. On either side the Andes still hemmed us in, but
suddenly they were menacing, heavy with foreboding of what
lay beyond. Two peaks, especially, seemed possessed of this
quality: a twin-mountain high above and behind Chosica's shel-
tering ridges. That day, and ever since, they have held for me a
strange, sinister power: high, grim, implacable against the sky.
I have named them Mts. Lee and J. J. Shubert.

I have spoken of ping-pong, but I have not mentioned swim-
ming, tennis, contract bridge, cocktails, dice. There were all of
them at Chosica far too much of them, in fact; especially the
last two. They are inseparable in Peru, the cocktail being used,
as elsewhere, for drinking, and the dice to determine who pays.'
You can tell a block away when you are approaching a bar by
the ratde of dice from inside; not even the most microscopic
cordial is permitted to go down the hatch without the accom-
panying ritual. The games played vary greatly, but all of them
have a single purpose to consume as much time as possible.
That's the one thing the Peruvian, the resident gringo and the
turista have plenty of Time. And the Great Statistician will not,
I think, be pleased if He ever computes the amount of it which
clicks by daily to the rhythm of galloping ivory.

Incidentally, "cocktails," as used above, are something of a
misnomer. Before meals they are called "cocktails," but they
never are. They are always whisky-0ff-soda or whisky-sm-soda,
and genuine cocktails are universally frowned upon. They are

IOO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

effeminate, or unPenivian, or perhaps the bartenders just don't
know how to make them. Ambrosio, majordomo of the Quinta
Morris, with whom I enjoyed the finest international relations,
would shake his head disapprovingly when I ordered my daily
ration of Martini.

A mountain, says Webster, is "an elevation of land high enough
to be very conspicuous in its surroundings."

The world, I am afraid, is full of good people to whom such
a definition is quite adequate. They are the ones who would
rather ride than walk, who would rather be comfortable than
uncomfortable, and who would consider a funicular up the Mat-
terhorn or an airplane service to the summit of Everest admirable
human achievements. In sober fact, there can be no argument
with them. All the sound reasons, all the facts, are on their side.
But the mountain climber has something better than reasons and
facts. For him a mountain is no mere protuberance on the earth's
surface. It is an itching of the feet and a lifting of the heart.
It is ambition and struggle, skill and courage, labor and fulfill-
ment. He raises his eyes and sees its peak against the sky. He
climbs its steep sides and learns what his legs are for. He walks
its thin ridges and learns what his lungs are for. It hurls a preci-
pice at him he scales it. Then a chimney he follows it. Then a
glacier he outmaneuvers it. And when he has won his good fight
he sits on a bald bleak knob in the sky, looks down at the world
from which he came and the long path by which he has ascended,
and finds out things no other man can know about a cheese sand-
wich and a canteen of water. The mountains are barren. They
are tall and cold and can hurt a man. From their forlorn heights
they stretch immensely to the horizon gigantic, while he is very
small and very far from home and bed. With the flick of a stone
they can crush him; with the tremor of a snow patch they can
annihilate him. He will find no shelter, no warmth, no comfort
in their loneliness and desolation. But, if he is lucky, he may find
himself.

The Andes round about Chosica, through which I tramped,

MOUNTAINS AND MEN IOI

were by no means formidable specimens mere foothills compared
to the snow-capped peaks of the high sierra to the east. The tall-
est of them was perhaps seven thousand feet above the village, or
about ten thousand above sea level, and any of them within
range of sight could be reached by a day's steady climbing. No
inaccessible pinnacles, these. No virgin summits or wild perils.
But on their modest scale they were good, sound mountains,
none the less. They had sweep and dignity, hazard and surprise.
They seldom presented an insurmountable obstacle, but they
always provided a hard day's work. They tired the body and
refreshed the spirit.

There are two ways to climb mountains with and without
objective. Pursuing the first method, you pick your peak and go
after it, following as nearly as possible the most direct line to its
summit. Adopting the second, you proceed where inclination
leads you, and your exertions and maneuvers are not the means
to an end, but an end in themselves. The first day out from
Chosica, I employed Method No. 2 to reconnoiter and become
acquainted. The path I followed zigzagged up a sixty-degree
slope north of the town to a ridge about 1500 feet above the
valley. Every Andean town has its guardian cross somewhere on
the encircling hills, and here was ChosicaV- a huge, wooden
crucifix set on a stone base and loaded down, in Latin-Catholic
fashion, with all manner of symbolic trimmings. Nailed or tied
to it in such profusion that they almost obliterated its form were
several yards of white sheering, stalks of dried maize, a crown
of thorns, a miniature ladder, an enormous pair of pliers, an old
straw hat and a weathercock. But strangest of all in their in-
congruity, though most obvious in their symbolism, were four
flat squares of whitened wood nailed in pairs to die upright and
painted in the facsimile of dice. One pair showed "seven, 7 * the
other "eleven."

Ascending to the cross I had my first lesson in the subject of
Andean distances. In the qumta the day before I had estimated
it would take me about fifteen minutes to reach it; actually it
took three-quarters of an hour. During subsequent climbs I ia-

102 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

variably made similar miscalculations persistently underestimat-
ing distance and time until I arrived at the method of making
my own guess and then doubling or tripling it to arrive at the
correct figure. Accustomed to the compact masses of such moun-
tains as the Swiss Alps or, on a smaller scale, our own White
Mountains in New Hampshire, my eye required much practice
before it could adjust itself to the far greater distances of these
sprawling Andes. I have never seen false perspective or the
phenomenon of foreshortening so startlingly illustrated as in these
hills. From the bottom of a slope looking up, or from the top
looking down, I would time and again pick out with my eye a
boulder, cactus-plant or other landmark that appeared to be situ-
ated half-way, or two-thirds of the way, to my goal, only to
discover when I reached it that I had completed only a quarter,
or less, of my climb. This foreshortening is caused partly, of
course, by an unpracticed eye; but much of it, I believe, is
created by the nature of the mountains themselves. If the Andes
are vast in size, they are immeasurable in monotony. On their
western slopes there is no rain, therefore no streams, no trees, no
snow, no life. Unbroken by variety of color or shape their great
brown flanks lean into the distance like so many miles of veined
and scarified sandpaper. Here and there a cactus clings to its
patch of earth; occasionally a boulder stands out larger or dif-
ferently shaped than its neighbors. But there is no real variety-
no sudden, vivid transitions from forest to rock, from earth to
snow, from green to blue to brown to white, such as distinguish
the uplands of the Alps to parcel off the endless march of space.
Like the desert and die sea, the Andes have no bounds but the
horizon. Trigonometry can tell you the distance to the horizon,
but it cannot help you to reach it.

In five full days of tramping through the Andes I never en-
countered a human being, but the relics of men are everywhere.
First, there are the paths themselves vast tangled networks
spreading over virtually every summit and along every ridge. And
along them are the ruins of old forts rough breastworks of loose
rock, built in the iSyo's during the War of the Pacific, when the

MOUNTAINS AND MEN 103

Chileans captured Lima and drove the Peruvian army up into
the hills. Going higher, history unrolls itself farther in reverse
sequence. Atop the group of hills immediately to the south of
Chosica are the long-abandoned diggings of an early Spanish gold
mine. No gear or machinery remains, but here and there beside
the trail there yawns a black pit from which the Conquistadores
once filched die treasures of the mountain. Across a deep valley,
on the opposite slopes, are the relics of still earlier dwellers in
the Andes the high-piled terraces of the Incaic farmers, tiered
one above die other in rocky patchwork to the very peaks diem-
selves.

Griffis, publisher-editor-copyboy of The West Coast Leader?
whom I had met in Lima and who probably has done more
tramping in the Andes than any gringo in Peru, is convinced
there are still rich gold deposits in the mountains south of
Chosica.

"It's there all right," he told me. "Those old Spaniards barely
scratched the surface. They hadn't the machinery to go deeper;
but push a tunnel four kilometers into the base of those lulls and
you'll strike ore that's dripping gold. I know. IVe been nosing
around those hills for twenty-five years, and I know."

I inquired why nobody had bothered to make sure, Griffis
shook his head sadly.

"Ever since I can remember," he said, "I've been trying to
finance an outfit to go after those hills, It'd only take twenty or
thirty thousand dollars, but nobodyll go for it; they all say it's
too near home."
I asked what he meant.

"Well, you know how it is widi gold, or anything precious
and rare. You generally figure you have to trek halfway across
the earth to get it. Like to California in die old days, or die
Klondike, or Rhodesia. Here in Peru now it's die Maranon way
the hell up diere in the bunghole of nowhere, where a million
little streams start turning into the Amazon and there isn't a
road or a steamboat in a thousand miles. There's a new company
being formed pretty near every damn week to mine for gold up

104 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

there. But Chosica? No, sir! There couldn't be any gold there,
one mile from the railroad tracks, thirty-five miles from Lima.
That's what they say, and I've tried twenty years to convince
'em."

He shrugged discouragedly.

The wealth of human relics and human history which this
section of the Andes holds only serves to accentuate its present
loneliness and desoktion. The gold mines, long abandoned; the
fortifications, crumbled and in ruins; the Inca terraces, sterile and
uncultivated for four hundred years, lie untouched and unremem-
bered. No life stirs within them; no traveler pa^es them by.
Even plant and animal life shun these rainless, streamless heights.
Dry clumps of maguey cactus, a snail clinging to a rock, a sudden
scuttling lizard, no bigger than a mousethat is all. High in the
thin air a condor circles, peering, sees nothing in the way of
provender, and flies away. Perhaps in some remote future these
mountains will again be green with irrigated crops, or bristling
with cannon of another war, or swarming with seekers after
Griffis' gold. But todayonly a few thousand feet above the busy
valley of the Rimac and the embattled Central railroad they
seem as desolate and remote from men as the snow caps of Ant-
arctica.

I was not long in finding an enthusiastic fellow-climber among
the menage at the quinta Sally, the "pointsetter"~bitch. A model
of tropical indolence when in her usual lowland haunts, she
would undergo a startling metamorphosis as soon as she felt
mountain rock beneath her paws and smelled mountain air in her
nose. Up went tail and pointed ears. Her legs took on spring and
her body power. The blood of her questionable ancestors seemed
to stir with fresh life in answer to the challenge of obstacle and
hazard. The second day I went climbing she trotted out after me,
without invitation, and thenceforth she never missed an expedi-
tion. However exhausted she was at the end of a stiff day though
her tongue was dragging the ground like a fifth leg and I would
have to spend half die evening extracting cactus spines from her
ragged paws she was always ready for more the following morn-

MOUNTAINS AND MEN

ing. And she was the best possible climbing-companion. She liked
a sporting chance but would have none of unnecessary dangers.
She knew her capabilities and limitations with unfailing instinct
which rocks she could climb and which she could not, which
gullies she could leap and which she must circumvent and she
never once miscalculated a height or a distance. She could smell
out an ill-marked trail with her nose better than I could locate
it with my eyes. She was patient in difficulty, resourceful in
emergency. She didn't indulge in small talk and she didn't borrow
cigarettes. I'm afraid I fell a little in love with her.

Twice during our outings she got into trouble, but neither time
through any real culpability of her own. The first occasion was
at the site of the old Spanish gold diggings. Our route passed the
opening of a deep mine shaft, and Sally, with a true explorer's
instinct, decided to investigate. Her reconnoitering carried her
down the sloping edge of the pit to a point where the shaft fell
away perpendicularly into the depths of the mountain. Sbt
stopped and tried to get back to safety, but found that she was
unable to turn herself around on the loose earth of the steep slope,
A slip would have meant annihilation, and unfortunately dogs are
so constructed that they cannot climb uphill backwards. The
earth she had loosened in her descent was rapidly slipping oet
from under her feet into the shaft, and the situation called for
emergency measures. Fortunately she was not of that fashionable
class of canines whose tails are clipped; hers was waving above
her, erect and agitated. I lay flat on the ground beside the pit,
reached down and lifted her out by it.

The second misadventure involved me as well as Sally. We
were performing a horizontal traverse of a steep scree slope high
on the side of a mountain I in the lead, Sally following. The
path was very faint and tilted off precariously with the dope of
the earth; the footing was so insecure that, as I advanced, I had
been pressing my body close against the slope above me and
clinging with my hands to whatever support it offered. Presently
the path before me disappeared altogether a false trail obliterated
it in the mountain side. It was obviously impossible to continue;

106 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

the feet could not have held a grip on the loose debris of the
sixty-degree slope, and in no time we would have been sliding
toward the valley some two thousand feet below. There was
nothing for it but to turn around, retrace our steps to the last
ridge, and search for a better route. This was easy enough for
me, but when it came to Sally we were confronted with a major
problem. The architecture of dogs is on horizontal rather than
vertical lines, and Sally was no midget of her species.

It was immediately apparent that she could not turn herself
about on the sloping four-inch path without precipitating herself
off into the valley. Nor could I get past her, or over or around
her, without leaving the path and inviting almost certain disaster
for myself. It was a rather bad moment. Sally knew what was
required, but after a cramped, hazardous effort at turning, real-
ized she couldn't do it. I was faced with the alternatives of
staying where I was indefinitely, leaving the path for the steep,
slippery slope, or unblocking the return route by pushing Sally
off the mountain. None of these appealed to me greatly, and for
perhaps ten minutes dog and I stood motionless looking at each
other, while loose earth slipped away beneath our feet and the
two thousand feet to the valley below seemed to stretch itself
to two miles.

Finally an idea came. Digging in my feet as securely as I could
and bracing myself back against the slope above me, I leaned
over and grasped the scruff of Sally's neck with one hand and
her ever-handy tail with the other. Whether or not she under-
stood what I was trying to do I don't know, but the animal was
magnificent. She did not struggle not even a muscle twitched
as by tail and neck I lifted her an inch off the path, swung her
around over a two-thousand-foot drop and set her down facing
in the opposite direction. Within two minutes she had led the
way back to the nearest ridge and safety.

This incident ended our mountain misadventures, but our big-
gest Andean junket was still to come. A few miles north of
Chosica the Rimac Valley splits in two. River and railroad follow
the right fork; the left forms the fertile Santa Eulalia Valley

MOUNTAINS AND MEN 107

through which one day we had ridden our horses. At the apex,
splitting the two, is a fine, solitary peak which dominates Chosica
and the countryside around for many miles, It is no giant, cer-
tainly, as Andes goI doubt if it exceeds ten thousand feet but
its commanding and isolated position gave it real magnificence,
and an inspection from the quanta, through my field-glasses
promised some first-class rock climbing. It was to be my only
fling while in the Andes at the aforementioned No. i method of
climbing with a set objective and I was in a fine mountaineer-
ing glow of anticipation.

I set out for it at seven-thirty in the morning, with Sally at
my heels, and was scarcely out of Chosica when I discovered
I had badly miscalculated the distance to the base of the moun-
tain. What I had estimated to be three miles rapidly grew into
six, and by the time we reached the first scree slopes Sally's
tongue was already perilously near the ground and my knapsack
was gaining weight at what seemed a pound a minute. We also
had die misfortune of having chosen a brilliantly sunny day for
our foray, and a brilliant sun in the Andes is no joke. Its heat
although mitigated for a while by die fresh mountain air is
tropicd with a vengeance, and there is no shade or dicker from
it anywhere on the hills. In the temperate zone, where the sun
strikes slantingly upon the earth, a small rack or bush will often
throw a shadow long enough to give protection to a man or dog;
here, however, within a few degrees of the equator, k was almost
direcdy overhead, and the whole ascent before us offered no
tree or shrub large enough for us to crawl under. It was climb
and sweat, or dig a hole in the mountain and crawl in. By mid-
afternoon Sally was literally trying the second alternative.

Looking upward as we began our ascent I discovered that the
mountain of our choice was not really a single mountain at all,
but a series of steep hills placed one on top of another. An hour's
climbing brought us to the first peak, perhaps two thousand feet
above the valley. Beyond it a ridge descended for a distance,
then rose again until it reached another summit some two thou-
sand feet higher than the first. Beyond that die same process was

I08 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

repeated again and then againthe whole mountain building
itself up in a series of ascending waves. Up and down we went
along the ridge but mostly up now following a well-beaten trail
of unimaginable antiquity, now beating our own way over virgin
rock and earth. The third summit I recognized as the spot which
Editor Griffis had mentioned to me as an old burial ground of the
Incas. To an eye unschooled in archaeology it was impossible to
tell whether any relics remained. Great boulders were piled high
in fantastic design about me, but I could not tell whether they
were the work of man or erosion. I could find no carvings or
inscriptions.

Beyond the burial ground the ridge dipped away again, then
rose again to a fourth summit, the next-to-last. As we ascended,
the boulders and loose debris of the lower slopes gave way to
solid rock. There were ledges, chimneys, cliffs the sort of climb-
ing in which a man must use hands as well as feet and for which
a dog is not equipped at all. By the time we reached No. 4 peak
Sally's legs were trembling, her feet were bleeding, and she was
obviously exhausted. I was at a loss as to what to do. Stubborn
physical courage is not uncommon among mountain climbers.
Wisdom is rarer. The wisest and, in a sense, the most courageous
thing I have ever seen a man do on a mountain occurred on
Alt. Olympus, in Greece. A member of the party with whom I
was climbing, feeling himself becoming exhausted when about
two-thirds of the way up and realizing that any heroics in
attempting to continue might injure him seriously, simply sat
down by the side of the path and waited for the rest of us to
reach the summit and return. Just that! Now Sally was faced
with the same problem, and she solved it in the same way. There
was no whimpering, no barking, and no admonitions needed
from me. Down she sat herself on Peak No. 4, looked at me as
much as to say: "Go on, you damn fool climb it!" and settled
herself to await my return. Sally, my friends, was a mountaineer
and a lady.

The three thousand-odd feet above No. 4 was laborious rock
climbing. In the Alps the same rocks would have been dangerous

MOUNTAINS AND MEN 109

because slippery from rain or snow; but here where no moisture
falls there was always a sound, dry foot- or hand-hold at die time
it was needed. The only hazard was from soft and crumbling
stone, but there was not much of this. I was careful, however, to
test the soundness of a ledge or hold before trusting my whole
weight to it and on one occasion dislodged a boulder that must
have weighed a ton by the easy pressure of one foot. At two-
thirty in the afternoon I reached the summit, only to find, of
course, that it was not the summit at all, but merely a stepping-
stone to loftier peaks beyond it. It was, however, the peak I had
picked as my objective from Chosica it hides the mountains
beyondand, pinnacle or no pinnacle, it damn well was as far as
I was going that day. It had not been the longest or the harden
climb of my life, but I think, in that broiling tropical sun and
without moisture of any kind between heaven and earth, it was
probably the most grueling, My soggy cheese sandwich and my
beer-botde of water were caviar and champagne.

Unable to satisfy my ego by taking a picture of myself (how
do lone travelers succeed in getting themselves photographed in
the most isolated spots?) I laid out my handkerchief on die top-
most rock and snapped it, lest like Marco Polo and Captain Cook
I should meet die unhappy fate of public incredulity. Like prac-
tically all my photographs of the Andes like practically all of
anybody's, for that matter it turned out badly. The mountains
are so devoid of color, there is so little light and shadow in Ada-
monotonous expanse, and the sky is so cloudless and texturdess
that even the most sensitive camera will usually produce only a
gray and washed-out likeness. A Panagra pilot in Lima told me
he had been taking aerial photographs of die Andes for five years
and hadn't got a good one yet. Widi my five-dollar box I might
as well have been taking pictures of Morningside Heights.

After about half an hour on die summit I began the descent.
Going down a mountain is always a less laborious business than
going up, but, in compensation, it is usually more dangerous.
Old Man Gravity, your relendess enemy through all your up-
ward march, is now suddenly your ally, and life is much the

110 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

pleasanter for the association. But he is a treacherous ally at best,
liking nothing better than to lull you into a sense of false ease
and then betray you. A human body descending carries far more
weight and momentum than the same body ascending. Ledges
that supported you on the way up will crumble beneath you on
the way down; loose rock will slide away beneath your feet;
shallow holds on a cliff wall that gave purchase to your hands
when you scaled it will now evade or prove too small for your
foot as it searches for them from above. It requires less effort to
descend than to ascend a mountain, but it should take more care
and almost as much time.

By the time I had come down to Peak No. 4 the ferocious
heat of the day had passed and the sun was sloping off into the
west. Sally's barking welcomed me as I approached, and she rose
to greet me from a shallow hole under a boulder which she had
dug herself for shade. I was not surprised to see her. It had not
occurred to me for even a moment that she might leave while I
was gone nor, apparently, had it occurred to her either. We
continued the descent together down a mountain no longer ash-
gray but richly red in the soft light of early evening. As we
neared the ancient burial grounds on the third summit Chosica,
in its far-below valley, was already in shadow, and the dark band
of night was slowly climbing the slopes below us. We sat down
for a moment to rest.

With the scuffing of my boots and Sally's paws silenced, a
monstrous stillness had suddenly taken being about me. In all
the world there was no sound and no motion; only the endless
barren mountains and fading light and the red sun sinking. Then,
as I watched, a dozen yellow pin-points pricked the shadows in
the valley far below. They were the street lamps of Chosica,
being lit against the night that was already closing in. Soon night
would close in on the mountains too, and they would be dark
and cold in their awful desolation. There were warmth and kind-
liness in the tiny lights. Far up through the great gorges they
brought a friendly message of shelter, supper and bed.

Beyond the town the hills fell away in endless, seamed mo-

MOUNTAINS AND MEN III

notony, and the valley of the Rimac broadened out toward the
Pacific. I could faintly discern the winding gleam of the Central
Railroad's tracks, on which, two weeks before, I had come up to
Chosica and the Andes. Unnumbered thousands of men, I thought,
had come up that valley before me. For more than four hundred
years they had come soldiers, priests, merchants, prospectors,
adventurers, fugitives, men in rags. Some had come on armored
horses, some on mules, some afoot, some in latter day mag-
nificencein swift sedans and the Central's coaches. Some had
brought with them death by the sword, some merchandise to
trade, some salvation, some mining machinery, some schemes of
empire, some only a camera and a resdess heart. They had scaled
the mountains, followed the rivers, hacked die jungles, tunneled
the earth. They had come from the great cities and civilizations
of the world and each of them according to his own thinking and
desire had penetrated the unknown wilderness in pursuit of what
he sought. And now I too had coine

My eyes swung slowly from the valley to the reddening hills;
then east to where the darkness of night was already piled high
upon the Andes. What was it that all these men had wanted?
What was it that had drawn them from the familiar routine of
their lives into these desolate, distant mountains? What did they
hope to find on the other side? El Dorado, perhaps the Gilded
Man. But what was that? To some a handful of gold dust, to
others a mine or a plantation, to others fortune, conquest, adven-
ture, escape. For each a different purpose and a different goal;
for each a different magic that beckoned from beyond the
ancient hills. But for each die same fair, far prize die body's
fulfillment, the soul's peace, the heart's desire.

For four hundred years they had passed beneath the ridges of
this Rimac Valley hungry, restless, feverish, eager men from
distant continents. Carelessly and ruthlessly they had extermi-
nated the weaker men who were diere before diem with the
sword, with gunpowder, with disease, with poverty and gone on
to their farther horizons and their higher mountains. And for
four hundred years these crude, weathered stones among which

112 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

I sac had loomed above them one of a thousand graveyards of a
civilization they had killed. Among their red-brown, scarified
shapes there was no sound or movement; in the high, forgotten
desolation of that mountain side only one thing lived and brooded
Time. Time alone had survived the invasion. It had seen them
all as they passed below the conquerors and the conquered, the
seekers and the fugitives, the liberators and the enslavers. It had
seen their victories and defeats, their wealth, their poverty, their
wars. It had seen their hopes, their struggles and their fears.
Through the long valley each one had come and gone, and each
had sought the Gilded Man of his own heart's desire. Some had
sought him in these very hills; some on the great peaks beyond;
some in the dark jungle to the east. But Time marked them all
as they passed. And all of them failed, and all of them died, and
none of them mattered.

Now the long red rays of dying day streamed horizontal from
the west. The jagged line of a distant ridge cut the lower arc of
the sun. Its glow was in the texture of the mountains; its fire was
in the gleaming of the peaks.

The men among whose graves I sat had worshiped the sun.
By day they flourished in its life-giving warmth; at night they
built fires, and muttered incantations to bring it back. There was
no fever in their blood, no far and fabulous El Dorado they must
seek. Their Gilded One was not remote beyond peak and horizon
but bright and living in the sky above them. Man's life was a
passing from darkness into darkness, and his brief light was the
sun's fight. But the sun's light was its own, and was everlasting.
In it they lived and worshiped. In its contemplation they found
fulfillment and peace.

These men are long since dead. For four hundred years the
men toiling up the Rimac Valley have been of other breed and
other faith. No longer is the sun a god to be worshiped, but only
a flaming planet in the sky to warm us and light us on our way.
Our gods are elsewhere behind the mountains, beyond the jun-
gles, in the remote darkness of the unknowable. Through this
valley we have come in our search, and passed beyond it, un-

NAT WRITTEN

THE CHURCH
AT TARMA

MOUNTAINS AND MEN IIJ

appeased and unsatisfied, and in our passing we have made extinct
the race of men who thought the sun was God

But have we found a better one?

Presently I arose. The red glow had drained from the stones
about me, from the peaks, from the sky* I called to Sally, and
together we descended the mountain into a valley grown dark
and cold, from which the sun had gone.

V

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS

"MR. JAMES ULLM AN, of New York, is a visitor in
Lima at the present time. He is planning to make the
overland trip to Iquitos via the Pichis Trail at an early
date and would like to hear from anyone also contem-
plating this trip. He may be addressed, care of The
West Coast Leader, P.O. Box 531, Lima."

Thus The West Coast Leader of January 16, 1937.

It was Editor Griffis' idea and I was a bit squeamish about it at
first, it being my maiden appearance in the Lonely Hearts'
Column of a newspaper. Heretofore I had never considered these
-doubtless worthy departments in anything but a stricdy humor-
ous light: u Young man, graduate of four colleges, speaks seven
languages, will go anywhere, do anything." "Single lady, vi-
vacious personality, highest character and intelligence, desires to
correspond with gentleman of same qualifications." I hesitated
to throw in my lot with those accomplished but thwarted souls.

"What the hell?" argued Griffis. "You don't want to go alone.
Maybe there's another damn fool hanging around Lima who'll
go with you. What have you got to lose?"

So I l#t him put the squib in the Leader and dismissed it from
my mind.

In case you've forgotten, the idea of this trip of mine was not
to settle down in Chosica for the rest of my life, but to cross
South America from the Pacific to the Atlantic, preferably by a
little frequented route. Both in New York, before sailing, and
during the month I spent in Lima and Chosica I had been reading
up and asking questions of practically everyone I met, with this
objective in view. At home I found no one whose first-hand

114

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 115

knowledge of South America extended beyond Buenos Aires,
Rio, Santiago and Lima, and even in Peru itself astonishingly few
of the resident gringos had ever penetrated farther than fifty or
a hundred miles from the coast, Almost all, of course, had in-
formation or advice to impart, but it usually turned out to be
something that someone had told someone who had told them,
and it had always been at least ten years since the someone had
been there, and it may not have been there at all, but two other
places. Few people were as forthright and honest as the Grace
Line passenger agent who said to me: "Sefior Ullman, for Casa
Grace the interior of South America does not exist."

In point of fact, this is just about the truth of the matter and
not only as it concerns Casa Grace. Over eighty percent of the
total population of South America live within a hundred miles
of either the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, and virtually all the large
cities are on the seacoast. (The few exceptions La Paz, Bogota,
Quito, Asuncion, Caracas are none of them more than a few
hundred miles inland.) Most of the railroads run either parallel
to the coast or merely a few miles into the interior as an outlet
for nearby mines or plantations, There are three transcontinental
rail routes all of them out of Buenos Aires, and all of them
crossing the continent in its southern half, where it tapers off
greatly in width. The first runs from B.A. southwestward across
the Argentine pampas to the Chilean lake district at Osorno,
where it connects with Chile's coastal system; the second, sod
best-known, connects B.A. with Santiago and Valparaiso in an
almost direct line; the third, the final links of which have but
recently been completed, crosses die northern Argentine, cuts
through Bolivia to La Paz, and connects with the Southern Rail-
way of Peru, which reaches the Pacific at Mollendo, North of
this there is not a transcontinental railroad in the Western hemis-
phere until one reaches the United States if one excepcs the short
lines across the Ithmuses of Panama and Tehuantepec.

Though airplane travel has developed more rapidly than other
means of transportation in South America, it too has as yet
scarcely penetrated the interior of the continent. The big com-

Il6 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

mercial lines, Pan-American Airways and Panagra, operate almost
exclusively between the coastal cities. Most of the individual
republics have their own aviation companies, but these too hug
the seaboard closely and when they do venture inland almost
invariably reach their terminus at some border town of their
own and provide no means of farther progress. The only trans-
continental air route follows the line of the Buenos Aires-
Santiago railway, far to the south where the distance from ocean
to ocean is less than eight hundred miles. The nearest approach
to a through airway in the tropics is along the course of the
Amazon and its tributaries. The Peruvian army runs a weekly
plane (sometimes more in theory than in practice, as we shall
see) from Lima to Iquitos, and Brazil has a weekly service from
Para to Manaos; but between Iquitos and Manaos, there is a
thousand-mile gap that has not yet been spanned. Over the rest
of the continent's vast interior the jungle silence is unbroken
either by puffing locomotive or droning propeller.

All this was perfectly satisfactory to me. It was neither my
plan nor desire to cross South America in a Pullman compart-
ment or a tri-motored Sikorsky. But the problem remained how
to go? The only thing of which I was pretty certain from the
outset was that my route, for the greater part of its extent, would
follow the course of the Amazon. This would be so both by
choice and geographical necessity. I was a long way from being
an expedition equipped to penetrate virgin jungle and would
have to use such means of transportation as the country afforded.
Then, too, neither the time nor the cash at my disposal were of
expeditionary proportions, and it was not among my plans to
reach journey's-and pocketbook's end in a crocodile swamp or
up a rubber tree in the center of Matto Grosso. Most potent of
all, however, were the claims of the Amazon itself. It would be
a geographical impossibility to cross South America near the
equator and not make frequent contact with the great river that
flows to the Atlantic from within a hundred miles of the Pacific
and drains an^rea of over three million square miles. Once I had
crossed the Andes, I might be in Peru or Bolivia or Brazil or

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS llj

Ecuador, but I would also be in Amazonia, and, however I
traveled, in Amazonia I would remain until I reached the eastern
ocean.

There were several possible overland routes from the Pacific
to the headwaters of the river or its tributaries. I could go to
Bolivia and cross from La Paz to the Beni and Madeira rivers,
which flow down to the Amazon. I could head east from Quito,
in Ecuador, to the Napo, another tributary. Or there were three
possible routes in Peru itself: from Paita to Piura to die Maranon;
from Lima to Cerro de Pasco to Huanuco to the Huallaga; and,
finally, from Lima to the Chanchamayo Valley and thence by the
Pichis Trail to the Ucayali. Maranon, Huallaga and Ucayali, the
three great rivers of Peru, eventually meet near Iquhos, forming
the Amazon proper, and from that point on my way would be
along the main stream itself. Tentatively I had selected the Pichis
as my route, partly because it seemed both the shortest and most
varied and partly because it was the only one concerning" which
I could secure even the vaguest information.

Early in the game I learned not to waste my time on maps.
For information, that is; for fantasy and humor they were in-
exhaustible. Each South American republic, in its own maps,
invariably assigns about two-thirds of the continent's total area
to itself and grudgingly leaves the remaining one-third to be
divided among its sister nations. Thus the Peruvian maps show
that fair land extending endlessly northward practically to the
Panama Canal, leaving to Ecuador and Colombia tracts about Ac
size of Central Park; whereas the latter countries, in their own
geographies, sweep so far southward that poor Peru is all bat
shoved off the continent into the Antarctic Ocean. The neutral
maps play safe: almost every international boiindary line in South
America is discreetly labeled: UNDETERMINED.

In the matter of cities, the cartographers incline toward opti-
mism rather than accuracy. Let a lone explorer or prospector
build himself an overnight lean-to in the jungle, and it promptly
becomes a flourishing metropolis on the maps. The sites of
former haciendas and rubber stations, long abandoned and obHt-

II 8. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

crated by the forest, are still duly recorded as busy centers of
population. On my particular route through Amazonian Peru and
Brazil, I was to discover, not more than two-thirds of the towns
indicated on the maps existed at all, and half of those that did
consisted of only one building, or a fraction of a building.

But where your South American adas attains true imaginative
genius is in the realm of transportation. Glance at a native-made
map of Peru, and for a moment you will think you are looking at
the suburbs of Chicago. The countryside is black with lines of com-
munication. Express trains roar from city to city; broad concrete
highways cover the countryside like a spider's web; interurban
electric trams dart about like mosquitoes. It is magnificent. Pres-
ently, however, the Explication in the lower right-hand corner
catches your eye:

FERROCARRELS IN EXPLOTACION:
" IX PROJECTO:
" IN ESTUDIO:

And, looking back at the map, you discover that for every

half-inch of there is a foot of and

about ten yards of At the present time there are

2600 miles of railroad and 1500 miles of paved roads in Peru, but
if ever the projectos and estudios come to fruition, the whole re-
public will be virtually one vast grade-crossing.

No, maps were not the greatest help in the world; but Mrs.
Morris was. Her enthusiasm for the Pichis trip was unbounded,
and her description of it, though she had not made the Journey
in ten years, had an authentic ring. Every day for three weeks
she decided she would go with me, and every evening she
changed her mind. Meanwhile she had introduced me to one
Colonel Lembke, prefect of Callao, who had surveyed the Pichis
Trail as a possible military highway during the Peruvian-
Colombian dispute in 1933 and was reported to know more about
the region than any man in the country.

Lembke himself was a remarkable man one of those complete

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 119

and unclassifiable cosmopolites whom one is occasionally apt to
encounter in South America. His father had been German and
his mother English, but he himself had been born in Peru, was a
Peruvian citizen and had a Peruvian wife. During the World
War he had served as a major in the British army but returned
to South America as soon as he was demobilized. He spoke Eng-
lish, German and Spanish as well as Frenchperfectly, and told
me that one seemed his native tongue to him no more than
another. And he did know the Pichis Trail. The way for we to
go, he said, was with the Iquitos maU, which was dispatched
fortnightly from Lima. The place for me to make my arrange-
ments was Tarma, a town on the eastern slope of the Andes near
the western terminus of the Pichis. The man for me to see there
was an American called Whitten, who ran the local hotel What-
ever Colonel Lembke's involved nationality may have been, his
command of facts was most un-Larin American. When subse-
quently I discovered that they were not only approximately, but
strictly, accurate he assumed in my mind the stature of a second
Bolivar.

While research and investigation progressed, there had been
happenings back at Chosica. There was an earthquake, through
which I slept, a minor revolution which none of us knew about
until we read the next day's newspapers, and a dintmbi on the
railroad, which we denizens of die quhita attended en masse. A
dlrwnbi is the onomatopoeic Spanish word for a landslide, and
the Ferrocarril Central makes a specialty of them especially at
the beginning of the rainy season in the sierra when the Andean
peaks develop a weakness for sliding off into their valleys. This
particular slide had occurred just a few miles above Chosica and
was discovered by the operator of the handcar -which was pro-
ceeding the daily down-bound train from Oroya. (On the Cen-
tral these handcars or gravity-carsare always sent along the
track a mile or so in advance of the trains corning down for the
express purpose of watching out for landslides or fallen boulders.
The train itself, coasting down the steep grades, would be unable
to stop in time to avoid disaster.) As construction engineer for

120 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

the railroad, Ted Waters was needed at the scene to direct
operations, and the proper quinta spirit moved the rest of us to
accompany him. The triplicate result was that we got in every-
one's way, missed dinner, and got well soaked in the first heavy
rainfall that Chosica's environs had seen in six months. But it was,
nevertheless, a very fine dirwnbi indeed, complete with boulders,
mud, shouting sub-prefectos and indignant passengers with par-
rots. After some two hours a special train came up from Lima to
the downhill side of the dirumbi, passengers and freight were
transferred, and we went home to sneeze. The next morning the
last of the debris had been cleared away, and the morning train
for the sierra snorted uphill as usual. The Central knows how to
take Andean tantrums in its stride.

"From Griffis, at the Leader? said Mrs. Morris, handing me an
envelope. I opened it and pulled out a card which read:

Buttons Work Clothing

PEARLITE PEARLROCK

Trimmings Buttons

HERMAN LORD

Mgr. Export Sales Fresh Water

AUTOMATIC BUTTON CO. ABC

Muscatine, Iowa, U.S.A. Pearl Buttons

And on the reverse side:

MR. JAMES ULLMAN:

I would like to talk to you about your trip over the
Kchis Trail, as I have been studying the possibility of going
to Iquitos. HERMAN LORD, Room 235, Bolivar HoteL

In twenty minutes par for the Peruvian Telephone Corpora-
tion I was speaking to "the other damn fool in Lima."

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 121

"I'm going up to Tarma tomorrow," I said, "to make inquiries
about the Pichis. How about coming along?"

"Where the hell's Tarma?"

"Oh, up the hill and down the other side a way. GUI you make
it?"

"Como noT* he replied

Both his card and he himself said he was Herman Lord of
Muscatine, Iowa, but it was a gross misstatement. His name was
Daniel Boone Rover Merriwell-Quixote, and his home was next
door to Peter Pan^s in Cloud-Cuckoo Land. He was toll and lank
and forty-two; his face was as fresh as a Boy Scout's, and above
it a bang of thinning but unruly hair shot heavenwards. He was
as American as peanuts-at-the-ball-game. I could no more have
missed him as I boarded the Central's crowded coach at die
Chosica station than I could have missed an albino in a crowd
of negro chimney sweeps.

"Hi-ya, Jim!" he roared

"How-do-you-do, Mr. er . How's a boy, Herman!" I
shouted back. And we shook.

For once, on the trip up to Oroya, the wonders of the Andes
and the Ferrocarril Central took a back seat; I was busy becom-
ing acquainted with another and equally remarkable phenomenon.
And the phenomenon being perhaps the most enthusiastic and
communicative I have ever encountered, the process was bewil-
deringly rapid. By the time we were lunching in Matucana, I
felt that we had been the most intimate of f riends since kinder-
garten days, or earlier.

Herman Benjamin Lord (I shall call him by his pseudonym
instead of his real name of MemweU-Quixote) was an Iowa farm
boy. He had run away from high school at seventeen to volun-
teer in the U. S. Army, served on the Mexican border long
enough to lose his illusions about military life, and quit just in
time to be drafted back again for die World War. After the War,
during which he still didn't get out of Texas, he tried his hand

122 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

at several businesses, making a little money at most of them. In
1933, considerably to his own surprise, he was elected mayor of
Muscatine. During his first year in office his life was threatened
for hounding the town's bootleggers and gamblers; during his
second year he was impeached for not hounding the town's boot-
leggers* and gamblers, but was honorably reinstated after two
days and subsequently elected for a second term. He likes com-
pany, drinks moderately ("but no fancy drinks"), and never
reads a book if he can help it. He is a member of (i) the Ameri-
can Legion, (2) the Order of Masons, (3) the Knights of Pythias,
(4) the Muscatine Rotary Club, (5) the Muscatine Kiwanis Club,
(6) the Muscatine Lions' Club, (7) the Muscatine Chamber of
Commerce, (8) the Muscatine Better Business Association and
(9) the Muscatine Wesleyan Sunday School Board. He likes to
make "public addresses" and to call people "folks."

A Babbitt? A Main-Streeter? A solid, stolid burgher from the
Corn Belt? That was my snap judgment, and I couldn't possibly
have shot wider of the mark. For the measure of a man, one is
too apt to forget, is not his face nor his haircut nor his home
town, neither is it his vocabulary nor his clubs no, nor even* his
politics nor his faith. The measure of a man is the fellow who
dwells in the inner darkness behind his cranium and his seventh
rib who thinks his thoughts, who feels his emotions, who dreams
his dreams. And the fellow who dwelt within the cranium and
ribs of Herman Lord bore the proud name of Daniel Boone
Rover Merriwell-Quixote.

"Iquitos hard to get to, isn't it? That's swell! Hot damn I bet
that Pichis is one hell of a tough trek. You know, some day if I
ever make enough money, I'm going to buy a little launch and
sail around Cape Horn. Have you ever been to Africa? Tibet?
Borneo? Boy, I'm going to get to all of 'em before I'm through.
I'll teU you, Jim sometimes I get to thinking how Goddamned
big the world is, and how many people and things it's got in it
that I don't know, but that I want to know. And then I get a kind
of feeling inside me a sort of a pushing, a sort of needing and I

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS

just pack up my stuff and clear out of Muscatinc and go and

g<^"

Babbitt, hell! They've written epics about that fellow.

At Casapalca our mutual life histories were temporarily discon-
tinued A Peruvian family entered the coach to bid farewell to a
departing member, and when a Peruvian family starts saying fare-
well it's to the boats, men, and Hitler take the hindmost! This
particular group was not large, judged by Latin- American stand-
ards (there could not have been more than fifteen all told), but
it made up in demonstrativeness what it lacked in numbers, and
the train, as if in sinister collusion, indulged in an extra-long stop.
We covered up as best we could, while gestures, shouts and
kisses flew madly about the car. At last the whistle tooted, the
relatives departed, and we were alone in the car with the battered
but happy traveler, who was probably going to Oroya for the
week-end,

"As I was saying," continued Herman, gently removing the
newcomer's baggage from his lap

It seems that during the past year he had had the good fortune
to run for Congress on the Republican ticketwhich left him a
free and unencumbered man on the evening of the first Tuesday
after the first Monday in November, 1936.

"The Automatic Button Company wanted a man to establish
South American sales agencies," he said, "and also to muck around
in the rivers down here for shells they can use in the manufac-
turing end. I took the job. So far Fve been in Mexico, all the
Central American republics, Colombia, Ecuador and now Peru*
I don't speak a damn word of Spanish, but I get along fine."

"How about Iquitos?" I asked "Are there supposed to be good
shells there?"

"Millions of them up and down the Amazon, along the
Ucayali, up the smaller tributaries, in die damnedest places you
ever heard of. That's why I'm going there,"

It wasn't why he was going, and he knew it wasn't, and I knew

124 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

it wasn't. But I suppose he had to give his company some reason.
After all, the chap they were employing was named Lord not
Merriwell-Quixote.

Squash Something white and soft and altogether un-South
American flattened itself against the coach window. The train
had stopped at Ticlio, highest point on the line, the puno about
us was covered with two inches of snow, and the train crew was
having a snowball fight. We pulled on our topcoats and watched
our breaths turn to steam in the thin, cold air. A few passengers
were leaving the train to make the connection for Morococha,
for which Ticlio is the junction. Morococha is one of the many
mining properties of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Company, and
in reaching it, the railway attains an altitude of almost 16,500
feet almost a thousand feet higher than the main line. Passengers
are not carried in a regulation train, but in an autocarrilm this
case a station-wagon from which the regular wheels have been
removed and supplanted by steel wheels, in the same way as on
Ted Water's Chevrolet. Train and autocarril moved off simul-
taneouslythe former tooting its whistle, the latter answering
with its horn, and in a moment we were in the darkness of the
Galera Tunnel under Mt. Meiggs. Presently we were on the
downgrade and coasting, hell-bent for Oroya.

The town of Oroya, one hundred miles east of Lima, just over
the crest of the continental divide, is the most American-looking
community I have seen south of the Rio Grande. It is not, how-
ever, American-looking in the better sense. The site of the
smelters and principal mining operations of the Cerro de Pasco
Company, it is what would be known in the States as a company
town. As one coasts down to it from the sierras on the Central,
it announces its approach with a thick smudge of soot against
the sky, and once within its limits one is never out of the shadow
of its tall chimneys and enormous furnaces. Indeed, apart from
the operations of the mining corporation, Oroya cannot be said
to exist. Seventy-five percent of its working population are
employed either in the mines or smelters; they dwell in company-

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 125

built houses, eat in the company commissary, buy from the com-
pany store. By virtue of expert supervision the town, in spite of
its soot, is cleaner and more healthful than almost any other
community in the Peruvian Andes; but to the eye it presents
only that forlorn drabness typical the world over of machine-
made slums. The company-built workmen's homes, stretching
row on row in endless uniformity, are beyond question better
equipped and sanitated than the usual chela's hovel, but these
desirable improvements have been accompanied by the loss of
all color, variety and individuality. A company official told me
that it is often absolutely impossible to induce a peon family to
move from the filth of its ancestral shack to the clean but arid
modernity of those jerry-built boxes.

As Grace dominates the Peruvian seaboard, so does Cerro de
Pasco the sierra. In addition to its main plant at Oroya, it operates
vast properties at Cerro de Pasco, site of its original diggings,
Morococha, and smaller units on practically every ore-bearing
hill in a hundred-mile radius. Like most big and successful cor-
porations, it has, over a period of years, bought out or squeezed
out its lesser competitors, with die result that it now has the
almost undisputed run of the show in the central Peruvian Andes.
In addition to copper, it mines and refines gold, silver, bismuth,
vanadium, and many other metals; it markets chemicals as well
as ores; it runs its own railroad from Oroya to Cerro de Pasco,
and in every community in which it functions operates its own
hotel, store, hospital and power plant. It is far and away the
Central Railroad's biggest customer and virtually stands alone as
the only major industry in its section of the country.

Added to its routine cares and interests, Cerro db Pasco has
one major problem which one would not ordinarily associate
with the operating of a mining company: namely, liquor. By
long and strong tradition, die gringo in die tropics is supposed
to favor the bottle, and I must report that, with a few excep-
tions, he tries to live up to his reputation. In the jungle he blames
it on the heat; in the sierra (Oroya is 12,500 feet above the sea)
on the altitude. Actually he probably drinks because there is so

1 26 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

little else for him to do in his spare time. But, whatever the
reason, the company takes official cognizance of the situation in
an elaborate stagger system of work days and holidays, whereby
its American employees are enabled to spend one or two days
of each week away from the plant. If Johnny Jones is going to
insist on satisfying a penchant for singing off-key or breaking
furniture, Cerro de Pasco much prefers that he do so in the
Bolivar Grill in Lima rather than in its new turbine-shed in
Oroya.

The gringo, of course, is far from being a lone black sheep
in a white flock; though loath to adopt certain other refinements
of civilization, the Andean Indian has taken with enthusiasm to
the white man's alcohol. Like most races accustomed to living in
primitive circumstances, he is not constituted to withstand its
rigors, and drunkenness, in its most stupefying and bestial forms,
is perhaps as common in the Andes as any place on earth. And
as it does with the gringo, so does the company take official
notice of the cholo's vice: the mines are closed the day follow-
ing every pay day and sometimes for as long as a week after
Carnival or other important feast-days. Whereas the gringo
probably drinks whisky, the cholo drinks fisco or chacta, the
latter a strong rum made from sugar cane; and whereas the
gringo says it's the altitude, the cholo doesn't say anything.

From Oroya the Central Railroad turns south for Huancayo
and Huancavelica, and the mining company's line heads north
for Cerro de Pasco. Tarma lies due east, and the thirty-mile trip
is made by car usually by collective The collectiva, a highly
popular Peruvian institution, is just what its name implies a
"coDector." Built most often in the form of a station-wagon, its
function is halfway between that of a taxicab and a bus. It starts
when it's full or as full as the driver thinks profitable and
selects as its route a sort of general compromise between the
destinations of the various passengers. Its waiting capacities are
almost limitless (I have seen one with six passengers aboard wait
at the home of a prospective seventh for half an hour, while that
worthy had a leisurely breakfast and bath), but once under way

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 12J

they are probably the quickest and cheapest means of transporta-
tion in the country. The drivers are experts; on most Peruvian
highways they damn well have to be.

Our particular collection from Oroya to Tarma was a daily
fixture and there was no waiting. In one minute flat it was loaded
to the mudguards with a heterogeneous assortment of humans,
animals and freight, and we were off. Herman was in the from
seat with the driver, two little girls, the twin brother of Maxim
Gorki and a live goose. As my seat-mates in the rear I had pretty
nearly everyone's baggage, an old Indian woman chewing coca
leaves and a solemn-faced boy of about ten, with cross-eyes, a
high celluloid collar and an enormous black homburg hat. Half-
way down the main street our progress was abruptly halted by
the passing of a large herd of llamas, the antique, leisurely dignity
of their procession providing a strange contrast with the bristling
modernity of chimneys and furnaces about them. As we honked
our way through them they contemplated us with supercilious
eyes and minced daintily on their way, their light burdens bounc-
ing to the rhythm of their gait. For die llama (pronounced
"yaim/* please) is the original mde-muonist of die animal king-
domhe will accept a load of almost exactly one hundred
pounds, but if another ounce is added will promptly lie down
and refuse to budge. The mule, on the other hand, is an open-
shop worker though half the llama's size he will carry four
times as heavy a burden without inconvenience or complaint.
It is an obvious, but knotty, labor problem which the Aprista
will doubtless tackle if they ever come into power.

Soon, however, Hamas, mules, smelters and APRA signs cm the
walls were all behind us, and our collectwa was grinding in soli-
tude through the desolation of the high Andes. For die first
half-hour, the road ascended, then leveled off to cross die sum-
mit plateau before descending on the other side to Tarma. Half-
way across the plateau it began to snow at first lightly, but soon
in great, heavy flakes that blanketed die windows and reduced
die world's horizon to a radius of six feet about the car. It
suddenly became penetratingly cold, a thick mist rolled in from

128 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

the surrounding peaks and mingled with the snow, and for an
hour we crawled along over what seemed the surface of an un-
known and lifeless planet. By what psychic perceptions our
driver followed the twisting road I do not know, but eventually
we found ourselves on the down grade and fogbound winter
was receding behind us. By this time, however, as if through
some sinister prearrangement, everyone in the collective with
the exception of the driver, the cross-eyed boy, Herman and my-
self, decided to have soroche simultaneously, and throughout the
last lap of our journey the air was rent with unceasing moans,
retchings and worse. Night and exhaustion were both closing in
on us when at last we floundered through Tarma's muddy streets
to the hotel and heard a hearty voice shouting: "What ho,
gringos!"

If Oroya is a town of one industry, Tarma is one of none. In
a fashion it serves as clearing-house and transshipment point for
the produce of the fertile Chanchamayo Valley to the east, but
in essence it is simply a quiet village smokeless, machineless, and
almost tradeless. We made our descent upon it at a bad moment
heavy rains of the week past had transformed its unpaved
streets into almost impassable swamps but its attractiveness was
none the less apparent and genuine. Situated at an altitude of
about ten thousand feet, it enjoys a climate midway between
the extremes of the bleak pzmo above and the tropical jungle
below. Maize, cotton, oranges and grapes flourish in the sur-
rounding countryside, and every road is bordered by endless
rows of majestic eucalyptus trees. The air is clear and keen; the
cattle sleek and well-fed, the inhabitants rosy cheeked and not
too dirty. Altogether it was by far the most prepossessing
Andean town which I visited.

Inasmuch as the local hotel (called The Bolivar, of course) was
operated by a gringo, it was reasonably clean and comfortable,
but already we were presented with indications that we were
nearing the frontier of civilization and its gadgets. Instead of
opening off corridors the rooms surrounded an open patio in the

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 12$

center of the building; napkins had disappeared from die scheme
of things in the dining room, to be supplanted by the ancient
Latin institution of the edge of the tablecloth; and water no
longer came out of pipes, but out of pitchers. Not only that,
but it came out cold, and neither pleas, threats nor moans of
distress could alter its temperature. After one attempt at shaving
in the thirty-degree cold of early morning we took die pth of
least resistance. We stopped shaving.

Our host, Nathaniel C Whitten, was a man of leisurely habits,
but in effecting arrangements for our prospective trip he was
positively Napoleonic. Scarcely had we established ourselves in
our room when one Senor Deludighi, the local mail-ccwritractor,
made his appearance, The overland mail for the tn&msim, he
informed us, was dispatched fortnighdy, and the next mule-train
would leave Tarma on January 2<Sth, about ten days hence, He
suggested we engage three mules between us two for riding and
one for our combined baggage. We must let him know at least
four days before the twenty-sixth whether or not we were going,
so that he could have the mules ready for us. The cost for Ac
three of them for the week's trip, including their food and die
services of an arriero, or mule-driver, would be fifteen Peruvian
pounds about diirty-eight dollars. "Buenos noches, srn&rs?

The whole thing was most un-Peruvian. We had come to
Tarma anticipating at least three days of guerrilla warfare with
uninterested clerks, misinformed guides and village idiots, and
here we had been in Tarma for about fifteen minutes and already
were supplied with all the information we wanted. Lembke,
Whitten and Deludighi had between diem f ormed a triumvirate
which, within twelve degrees of die equator, had to be seen in
action to be believed. The rest of our time in Tarma we spent
examining die town and surrounding hills, largely in die com-
pany of Host Whitten, who encountered precious few gringos
in his Andean retreat and treated us throughout our sojourn as
long-lost brothers. In his decrepit Dodge brakdess, but with the
hand of God protecting itwe drove out into the countryside,

I JO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

between soaring eucalyptus" and cactus fences into sloping pas-
ture lands fresh with rain and abundant with life. It provided a
startling contrast to the arid desolation of the western Andes,
where rain never falls. On our way we passed perhaps a dozen
streams, hardly more than mountain freshets, chattering downhill
to the east. It was strange to realize that, although a scant hun-
dred miles from the Pacific, they were headed for the Amazon
and the Atlantic, four thousand miles away. Already we were
in the vast drainage basin of the Great River.

At nighty in what passed for The Bolivar bar, liquor and con-
versation flowed. Oroya marks the frontier of the gringo whisky-
belt, and in Tarma and beyond it was native concoctions or
nothing. Pisco we were already familiar with, but now we made
its acquaintance as chuch<r&assi y a beverage in which the brandy
is mixed with the bark of a local treewith supposedly aphro-
disiac, and definitely vigorous, effect. Then there is chacta, a
sugar-cane rum drunk universally in the montma which is guar-
anteed to pin your ears back and make you sing the Peruvian
national anthem. The only care to be taken here is to be sure you
order chacta and not chacra; the latter signifies a farm, and a re-
quest for it will result either in general consternation or a visit
from the local real-estate agent. Rural Peru also provides a variety
of beverages of more exotic fabrication, but the Grand Prix
winner is a concoction whose name I never have been able to
discover. Recipe:

1. One quart fisco.

2. One live snake, preferably poisonous.

3. Place snake in pisco; let him drown.

4. Seal bottle and put on shelf for one year.

5. Shake well and serve.

Somehow I was never quite thirsty enough to try it.

If the drinks at The Bolivar bar were colorful, so was their
dispenser. Nathaniel C Whitten was one of the old-school South
American gringos, rapidly disappearing before the present-day
influx of Fords, Frigidaires and turista. His father, though a

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 13!

Yankee, had been a rubber planter in the Fiji Islands, and it was
there that Nat was born. When in his late 'teens, he came to the
States, studied mining engineering at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, and subsequently worked for Anaconda Copper
at its main plant in Montana. When the World War came, he
enlisted, and in 1918 was one of the American force of occupa-
tion sent to Vladivostok in Siberia* It was so cold there, he de-
clares, that he firmly resolved to spend the rest of his life, after
demobilization, in die tropicsto compensate. Sure enough, in
1920 he secured a job as engineer with the Cerro de Pasco Copper
Company and was sent to Peru, where he has been ever since.
In 1930, when the world depression struck at copper, as well as
elsewhere, Cerro de Pasco let him go, but instead of returning
home he moved thirty miles down the hill to Tarma, bought Ac
local hotel, and dug in for keeps. He has a wife and grown son
in Arizona (at least he thinks they're in Arizona), whom he has
not seen in seventeen years. He doubts if he ever w3L "They
like it there and I like it here," he says.

At fifty he is gray haired, ruddy, and at peace with die world,
He seems to know practically every inhabitant of Peru, but sel-
dom leaves the vicinity of Tarma and in recent years has had so
little occasion to speak English that he often has to stammer and
grope for words when speaking his native tongue. An expert in
photography, he has taken many magnificent pictures of the
nearby Chanchamayo Valley and the montma beyond, some of
which he has sold to American and Peruvian periodicals. He
talks constantly about approaching Grace, Thomas Cook's and
other travel agents with plans for developing Tarma as a tourist
attraction, but has done nothing about it and probably never
will. Life in his Andean metropolis does not have to be pro-
gressive to be pleasant.

In die evenings we heard long yams from Whitten about the
ancient brotherhoods of beachcombers and tropical tramps. The
distinction between the two orders is hazy, but corresponds
roughly to that between tramps and hoboes in die States a tropi-
cal tramp will work here and there if he has to, a beachcomber

132 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

never. There was a time when the American tropics swarmed
with both species particularly during the years following the
war when so many young men were coming out of the army,
jobless, rootless and with a craving for adventure. In recent years
they have dwindled greatly in number; the depression, the grow-
ing mechanization of industry and agriculture, police regulations
have made it almost impossible for them to scrounge a living from
the casual job, the cocoanut palm or the handout. But, according
to Whitten, there are a few still roaming the continent, and
though their ranks are decimated, their lore and traditions re-
main alive. Over a period of three days, he pieced together for
me the words of a rambling jingle, indigenous to the tropical
tramps, which he said he had picked up bit by bit from a hun-
dred men over a period of some fifteen years. He believed that
a few scattered lines have been published in an American collec-
tion of tramp and sailor ballads, but as far as he knew and as
far as I know it has never before been set down in its entirety.
Here it is, as I jotted it down from his dictation:

RHYME OF THE TROPICAL TRAMP

Well, son you've come to the tropics and heard all you had

to do
Was sit in the shade of a cocoanut glade, while the pesos roll

in to you.
You got your dope at the consul's. Did you get your statistics

straight?
Well, hear what it did to another kid before you decide your

fate.

You don't go down with a short, hard fall; you sorta shuffle

along, ,
Light'ning your load of the moral code, till you can't tell right

from wrong.

I started in to be honest everything on the square-
But a man can't fool with the Golden Rule when his own crowd

don't shoot fair.

It's a case of playing a crooked game or being an also-ran;
My only hope was to steal and dope the horse of another man.

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 133

I was running a deal in Guayaquil an Inca silver mine,
And before they found it was salted ground I was safe in the
Argentine.

I made short wait on the River Plate, while running a freighter

there,

And cracked a crib on a large estate and never turned a hair,
But the thing that'll double-bar my soul when it flaps at heaven's

doors

Was selling booze to the Santa Cruz, and Winchester 44*5,
Made unafraid by my kindly aid, the drunken mob swept down
And left in a hell of a quivering blaze a flourishing border-town.

I was then in charge of a smugglers' barge off the coast of

Yucatan,

But she went to hell off the Cozumel one night in a hurrican*.
I made ashore on a broken oar in the measly, shrieking dark,
With the other two of the good ship's crew converted into shark.
I flagged a skiff from a limestone cliff with my salt-soaked pair

of jeans,
And made my way, for I couldn't pay, on a fruiter to New

Orleans.

It's a sorta habit, the tropics; it gets you worse than mm.

You get away and you swear you'll stay, but she calls and back

you come.
I stuck a while with the rank and file, but soon I was back on

the job-
Running a war in Salvador with a barefoot, black-faced mob.
I was General-Commandante then at the head of a nigger revolt,
But my only friend from beginning to end was a punishing army

Colt,

I might have been Presidente now a flourishing man of means,
But a gunboat came and blocked my game with a hundred and

ten marines.
And then I woke from my dream, dead broke, and went f rom

worse to worse,
And sunk as low as man can go, when he walks with an empty

purse.

134 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

But stars, they say, appear by day when you're down in the deep,
dark pit.

My lucky star found me that way when I was about to quit.

On a fiery-hot, flea-bitten cot I was down with the yellow-jack,

Alone in the bush and ready to die, when she came and nursed
me back.

There was pride and grace in her brown young face, for in her
was the blood of kings;

In her eyes there shone dreams of empires gone and tales of old-
world things.

We were spliced in a Yankee meeting-house in the land of your
Uncle Sam,

And I drew my pay from the U.S.A. while I worked on the
Gatun Dam.

Mind you, I take no credit for coming back to my own;

Though I walked again an honest man, I couldn't have done it
alone*

Then the devil sent his right-hand man I mightVe suspected he

would
And took her life with a long thin knife, because she was straight

and good.

In me there died hope, honor, pride, and all but a primitive will
To chase him down on his blood-red trail, find him, and kill and

kill!
Through mahogany-swamp and chicle-camp I traced him many

a moon,

And found my man in a big pit-pan on the edge of a blue lagoon.
The chase was o'er on the farther shore it ended a two-year

quest,
And I left him there with a vacant stare, and a supittote in his

chest.

There's a homestead down in a blue-grass town, and there's roses

'round the gate,
And the northers whisper, "It might have been," but the truth

has come too late.
For whatever the way, whatever the pay for stakes that are

great or small,
The Spell of the Tropics gathers your pile, and the Dealer takes

it all.

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS IJ5

"You know," said Whitten, "there were two lines in that
thing the ones about the Cozumel and the hurricane that were
driving me nuts for years, I'd heard them once, way back whan
I first got down here, but they slipped my mind, and in fifteen
years I couldn't find a tramp or beachcomber who knew diem.
Then less than a year ago one blew into the hotel here and asked
for a hand-out-chap named Barnes, an Englishman. He was a
college graduate, played the piano like Paderewski, and was the
worst drunken bum IVe seen in my life. He was only about
thirty-five, but he'd been on the beach in pretty near every
country in the world, and in jail in half of them. But he knew
those two damn lines! I was so glad to get them I kept him
here on the cuff for a week, until he busted up some China-
man's store and was jugged When he got out he started off for
Iquitos. Just like you or Fd start for the drugstore. No inaney,
no mule, no food, no shoes nothing. And twelve hundred miles
of jungle ahead of him. I hear he made it, too. Maybe you'll
see him around when you get there."

Tarma's proudest boast is a nK>ving-picture theater, and well
it should be, for it is probably unique among the movie-temples
of the world. The policy is to show, of a given evening, not
one complete picture, but one reel from each of five different
ones. Thus, the performance we attended began with Richard
Dix in "The Arizonian," moved on to Harold Uoyd in "The
Milky Way" (my past still pursued me), and was in Ac midst
of "The Gay Desperado," when weariness and dizziness forced
us to beat a retreat. Whether or not they followed tip the next
evening with the second reds of all five pictures, and so oa, I do
not know; but the audience on the n^ht we attended seemed
to find nothing unusual in the proceedings and clapped, wept
and laughed at the proper moments. Could it be that their re-
action points a pretty moral about the Art that Comes in Cans?

On die way home from the big show we had our first, and
only, experience with the major vice of the Andes chewing
coca leaves. Since long before the Spanish Conquest, the
Peruvian Indian has used this narcotic, and in every Andean

136 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

village it is a common sight today to see men and women with
cheeks distended with thick wads of leaf. (The coca plant is
often confused with the cacao plant. The latter provides cocoa,
the former cocaine, of which the leaves chewed by the Peruvian
cholos constitute a mild form.) Fantastic stories are told of the
drug's marvelous powers how with its aid the couriers of the
ancient Incas would run seventy-five miles a day with their
messages; how a man chewing coca leaves can work for twenty
days without food or drink. Folklore, of course. But long experi-
ence has shown that coca leaves chewed in moderate quantities
undeniably do increase the energy and endurance of the user
at least for a short period of time. Taken in excess, however,
it produces the same results as any drug loss of memory, loss of
will, stupefaction. As for myself, I reached neither Stage No. i
nor Stage No. 2. Coca is usually chewed mixed with lime, to
flavor it, but on our night of dissipation there seemed to be a
lime-shortage in Tarma, and we took ours straight The heavy
black leaves slithered about in my mouth, grew soggy with saliva,
and gave off a vague bitter taste; but I felt no irresistible impulse
to climb a mountain, run a mile or pick a fight with a policeman.
The most enjoyable part of the experience was to spit the whole
mess out as we reached the hotel and rinse the palate with the
more familiar stimulant of a pisco nightcap.

The next evening, sitting out in Tarma's tree-shaded plaza, the
conversation skipped from this to that:

"Is that the Southern Cross?" asked Herman, pointing in the
general direction of heaven.

'There is no Southern Cross," replied Whitten morosely.

We protested violently. "Why, it's been pointed out to me
dozens of times," said Herman.

"Then why don't you recognize it?"

There was a moment's silence.

*WeU-er-there always sort of seemed to be a little confusion.
Everyone I asked always pointed it out to me, but it was always
something different Nobody ever agreed."

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 137

I thought of Dr. Jackovics on the Smts Rite, Enriquez in
Lima, Hope Morris and Ted Waters in Chosica. All of them had
showed me the Southern Cross, and each time it had been a
different constellation.

Whitten nodded* "The first year I was down here I must have
spent six nights a week trying to locate the damn thing. For
the next sixteen IVe refused to recognize its existence. It's a
washout when you do find it anyhow."

The conversation had somehow veered to Peruvian policemen.

"Either of you ever been in jail?" asked Whitten suddenly.
A bit surprised, we both assured him that the traffic court had
thus far been our nearest approach to the hoosegow.

"I have," he said meditatively. "In Ecuador. It was lots of fun
too, except for the lice. They always treat political prisoners
fine, because they figure they haven't got long to live anyway.**

Whitten looked neither like a Trotskyist propagandist nor an
E, Phillips Oppenheim spy. We asked for details.

'Well, Fm not sure that IVe got it all straight yet,** he said.
"About two years ago a chap I know up at Cerro de Pasco and 1
decided to take a vacation. We chartered a little launch and
cruised up to the Cocos Islands, off the Coast of Ecuador, For
some reason I don't know why yet we had an American flag
in the boat, and when we pitched camp on one of the unin-
habited little islands we raised it over our tent. No particular
reason; it just seemed like a good idea at die time.

"As it turned out, though, it wasn't such a good idea. The
next morning we woke up and found the whole Ecuadorian navy
parked on the beach and pointing guns at us. They told us we'd
have to go back to Guayaquil with them and go to jail. And
we did. It took the American consul three weeks to get us out.
Seems the boys thought we were the U. S. Marines trying to
grab off a few Cocos for Uncle Sam."

Lord speaking: Ever get lonesome, Whit?
Wbitten: Sure sometimes.

138 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

Lard: Boy I sure would. 'Way the hell off from everything,
tucked away behind these mountains with a bunch of spiks.

Whltten: The spiks are aU right. When they wash,

Lord: It must be a funny life. All kinds of things could be
going on back home, and you wouldn't know a damn thing
about it,

Ulhnan: Do you ever see the American papers?

Whltten: Not often. They're three weeks old when they get
here, and if they come by plane they cost almost a buck.

Lord: I'll bet there're times you get kind of homesick; wished
you knew what was going on.

Wbittm: Once in a while.

Ulhwm: If you'd like me to send you some papers from
Lima

Whltten: No thanks just the same. I get along all right.

Ulhnan: Or if there's any information you want

Whltten: Say, come to think of it, there is. Maybe you can
help me out.

Lord and Ullmm (leaning forward): Sure. What?

Whitten: I've got a bet with the Chink down at the store.
He says Ross is sure to beat Canzoneri tonight at the Garden,
and I say he's nuts. How are you boys betting?

We traveled all the way from Tarma back to Chosica by col-
lectiva and by the time we arrived, after seven hours' steady
going, were punch-drunk from curves, if not soroche. The roads
from Oroya down, which in its new macadamized form has been
open to traffic for less than a year, is a feat of engineering com-
parable to the Central Railroad itself. For most of its course it
follows the line of the tracks closely, but at certain points soars
or dips a thousand feet above or below it. Its chief disadvantage
in comparison with the railroad is in its curves. A train, by virtue
of its size, needs space and sweep to round a corner; an automo-
bile does not. Seven hours of hurtling from one side of the car
to die other as it swings around five hundred hairpin turns are
wearing on even the staunchest of anatomies.

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 139

The next day I left Chosica and joined Herman at The Bolivar
in Lima. We had what seemed like a thousand things to do before
setting out on our junket and five days in which to do them
five days which in point of fact added up to little more than
one, for Lima had, in our absence, adopted its summer schedule
of business hours: 9 to 12 A.M.; 5 to 7 P.M. Between noon and
five the march of progress-as well as our frenzied preparations
came to a daily halt. You took your siesta and liked it, or you
stamped the floor and didn't like it. But you didn't get anything
done.

There was our equipment to buy boots, breeches, ponchos,
duffelbags, tinned foods, whisky, cigarettes, knives, blankets,
mosquito-netting, what not. Herman, being on an expense ac-
count, felt that the Automatic Button Company would not want
their star salesman to travel in shabby style, and his outfit, when
complete, was undoubtedly the most stupendous assembled for an
expedition since Byrd visited Antarctica. Unfortunately, having
no sponsor myself (outside of the Society for the Promotion of
More and Worse Travel-Books, which is insolvent) I was, per-
force, a bit more conservative in my purchases; but between us
we made a brave show and wanned die hearts of many of Lima's
shopkeepers.

After equipment there were the inevitable "Papers.** The
identification cards we possessed were valid only for Lima and
environs, and it was necessary to secure new ones for die
montma, the Ucayali, Iquitos* um&weiter. It sounded difficult,
but was remarkably easy. A day after making application to tbe
police I was the proud possessor of a document stating that
"Gems Olin" had a week previously sailed from Cuzco on a
Grace Line steamship, bound overland for Brazil. Coupled with
my Brazilian visa, which still stated that I would enter that
country through Rio de Janeiro, this made an impressive "Garnet
d'Identificacion." I might be attacked by Indians, swallowed by
a crocodile or get a stomach-ache from unripe bananas, but at
least my "Papers" were accurate and in order.

Then there was a veritable welter of lesser chores laundry,

140 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

city-clothing to be sent home, cashing express checks, repairing
cameras, letters, cables. (You can be quite certain that any
writer who speaks of the sweet indolence of tropical life is not
possessed of a family who expect detailed weekly tidings.) In
the midst of it all I indulged in a wild, but attractive, extrava-
gance: I telephoned Ruth in New York. The connection was
excellent, the conversation stumbling but exciting, the allotted
three minutes (overtime and I would have joined the beach-
combers) brutally short. The after-effects were bad, and I was
homesick, or rather Ruth-sick, with a vengeance. To have her
brought momentarily so near, then snatched away again six
thousand miles. * . .

Night-time most certainly did not bring solace, but at least
k brought amusement. Directly across the street from my room
in The Bolivar was an establishment of ill repute but flourishing
trade, and the girls, unlike most Latins, apparently doted on
fresh air particularly when engaged in the active conduct of
their trade. All night long the windows were open, and business
went on with a fine disregard of Lima's official working hours.
Between customers the girls would come to their balconies,
smoke cigarettes, and frequently favor me with a cordial come-
hither. It was a bit disconcerting while one was in the midst of
an airmail letter to one's grandmother.

Prostitution in Peru, as in most Latin countries, is considerably
different from the institution as we know it in the United States.
It is both more and less commercial more because it is legal and
therefore more highly organized; less because the profession
has developed traditions and standards of conduct which make
the sub-equatorial muchacha a far more human and companion-
able creature than the familiar five-dollars-in-advance, extra-for-
overtime strumpet of the north. To be sure, the prostitute's
Social Register listing is no higher in Lima than elsewhere; but
she is at least a member of a recognized trade and is vouchsafed
a certain degree of protection and security. She is not a criminal
and an outcast in the sense that her North American sister is,
and she is never subjected to the furtive, hole-in-the-wall exist-

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 141

ence to which our prostitutes are inevitably doomed- The
brothels are licensed, each inmate must undergo regular examina-
tions, and she is strictly forbidden to solicit on the streets.
During my ten weeks in Peru and during them I managed to
get into some of its odd and unsavory comers I was not once
accosted by a woman.

r

Through Herman I had been making the acquaintance of a
third class of gringos in Lima, distinct from the tourists and die
permanent residents: namely, the commercial travelers. The
United States, accustomed for years to a home market capable
of consuming all it produces, has lagged far behind the other
great nations of the world in the development of its export trade,
and its depression-bom crop of South American salesmen, far
from their usual Atlantic Seaboard or Mississippi Valley haunts,
are woefully handicapped when they find themselves in com-
petition with the experienced, cosmopolitan representatives of
British and German commercial houses. For the most part die
Yankee ctmmercientes I met in Lama were a friendly, but baffled
and homesick, loc Asixrashingly few of diem spoke Spanish
(they transacted their business through interpreters), and with
few exceptions their interest in Peru and Peruvians was stricdy
limited to what they could sell them. One of the exceptions was
a woman, Yvonne^Aubert by name, who owned a small Madison
Avenue dress shop in New York and was touring South America
with a line of ready-to-wear women's clothes. She spoke Spanish
perf ecdy, had a vivid interest in new people and scenes, and had
visited many of the more remote corners of the continent, selling
apparel to die wives of planters, mining engineers and other iso-
lated gringos. As far as she knew, she said, die was the only
salesperson of her kind on the west coast. A Madison Avenue
dress even last year's model was something of an event, say, in
Huancayo, Peru, or Potosi, Bolivia, and so far she had enjoyed
bodi a cordial reception and good business wherever die went.

It was among the salesmen at The Bolivar that I first heard of
die sskmsrk. I could tell at once, from die tone of voice used
in ref erring to it, that k was something unpleasant and sinister,

142 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

but for the first day or so I hadn't the least idea whether it was a
tropical disease, a Communist leader, or cockroaches. Finally I
inquired and was enlightened. The askimark is a note issued by
the German government for the use of German commercial
houses in foreign trade, and ever since its origin it has been a
thorn in the side of practically all other nations. The askimark
differs from the reichsmark in that it is not a unit of currency,
but a unit of credit. Its function in foreign trade is to obviate
the necessity of money passing back and forth from one country
to another. If a merchant in a nation recognizing the askimark
sells merchandise to a German firm, he is not paid in cash, but
receives credit in askimarks; if he buys merchandise, he is debited
in askimarks. Thus unencumbered by the complexities of money-
exchange and cash transferals, Germany is able to undersell the
world-market in most commodities by a sizable margin and also
to pay higher prices for what it buys. Virtually all the South
American republics make wide use of the askimark, and as a re-
sult Germany's trade with them has increased enormously. The
gamble the other nation must take, of course, is that Germany's
credit remains good; if she should go to war or undergo a radical
change in government the askimark would be worthless. But
meanwhile that twenty percent surplus on sales and twenty
percent discount on purchases looks pretty good to the Latin-
American merchant* The American and English cvmmerciente
is not happy about it at all.

Herman and I, however, were not long in being confronted by
a far more serious menace than the askimark. His name was
Enrico Sims, half-English, half-Peruvian in nationality, but all-
wool Peruvian in mind and temperament. He was a polished
gentleman, a delightful companion, and the best reason I know
why the United States should immediately declare war on the
whole of South America.

It all began in The Bolivar lobby on the first day after our
return to Lima. Herman had an airmail letter from the Auto-
matic Button Company, bestowing its official blessing upon his

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 143

Pichis-Amazon venture, and in celebration thereof was conduct-
ing a one-man rodeo among die pisco-sours. Presently m dis-
tinguished-looking gentleman approached

"Senor Lord," he said, and bowed.

"What-ho, Senor Sims!" replied the rodeo. "Jim I want you
to meet mi amgo buenissmw. I've only known him a week, but
he's the swellest guy in Peru!"

By the end of the afternoon my vote for the swellest guy in
Peru would have duplicated Herman's. Senor Sum, it developed,
was the former police-chief of Callao, but pro-tern a gentleman
of leisure, and he appeared to have no other interest in life save
to make himself agreeable and helpful to us. He went shopping
with us for our equipment, ferreted out the artkles we wanted,
haggled for us with the shopkeepers. He accompanied us to die
police-station, gave orders like a fascist dictator, and had our
"Papers" for us in no time flat. He was cheery, omnisciem, inde-
fatigable, and in our round of chores must have saved us a good
five hours and twenty dollars. By die time we were back among
the palms and ptscos of The Bolivar, he had assumed in my eyes
the aspect of a superman.

"Where was it you said you were going?" he inquired.

"To Iquitos, By die Pichis Trail"

"The Pichis, did you say?**

"Como no?"

"But it's ridiculous, impossible, out of the question!"

"Wh-what do you mean?" we ventured timidly.

"In the first place, it's suicidal Mud up to die neck mosquitoes
by the million snakes no dickers no anydiing "

"But er the government sends the mail by die Pichis Trail,
doesn't it?"

"The government bah! Their mail contracts are all graft.
Someone has a brother or a cousin" Then, wheeling on Her-
man, "In the second place, Senor Lord, you search for sheik,
do you not?"

"Uh-huh," feebly.

"There are no sheik on die Pichis Trail, none hi die Pichis

144 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

River, none in the Pachitea River, none in the Ucayali River
anywhere along that route! "

"But I'd heard-" began Herman.

"Heard, nothing! My dear chap, I have spent twenty years
of my life in the Peruvian montma, and I know! If it is shells
you want if it is a fine, pleasurable trip you want" sudden
inspiration shone in his eyes "I shall be back in five minutes.
Wait here!"

We were far too paralyzed to do anything else. We had
scarcely moved a muscle when he returned accompanied by a
ponderous and perspiring old gentleman.

"My cousin, Senor Hernandez," he said. Then to Hernandez:
"Tell them about the Via Pichis."

"It is impassable, senors. You would lose your lives."

"Are there shells there?"

"Absolutely none."

Sims turned to us with a gesture. "Gentlemen, my cousin
owns a large hacienda on the Alto Ucayali River, near its con-
fluence with the Tarnbo River. There are hundreds of thousands
of shells in the lakes there, and a foreman with assistants who
will be at your service in finding and collecting them. The jour-
ney there is over excellent and interesting trails, and from the
hacienda there is a daily boat to Iquitos. Your problem is solved!"

"But we know nothing of the route."

"I shall map it all for you."

"But we wouldn't know whom to look for or"

"I shall give you letters."

"But-"

He had all the answers.

Through dinner, through the evening, until -well past mid-
night the discussion continued. And the more Sims and Hernan-
dez talked, the more persuasive were their arguments. True,
much of what they said about the Pichis Trail contradicted the
information I had previously been given, but, after all, neither
Hope Morris, Lembke nor Whitten, my principal authorities,
had actually been over the route for several years past. These

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 145

two men obviously knew the country under discussion, they
made frequent trips to their hacienda and to Iquitos, and Acre
could be no possible ulterior motive in their advice, other than
the legitimate one of interesting Herman in the shells on their
property.

When they finally left we were in a quandary. It was the
twenty-second of January four days before the mail left Tarma
for the Pichis and if we were going with it we should already
have wired Deiudighi about the mules. We decided to wak over-
night.

Sims arrived while we were breakfasting next morning with
maps, with schedules, with helpful suggestions. We told him
about the required four-day notice to the mail contractor at
Tarma.

"Forget it," he said, and proceeded forthwith to map out our
new route in detail. We would leave Lima cm such-and-such a
train, pick up our mules at such-and-such a place, follow this
trail, dine at that monastery, find our canoes waiting for us at a
particular spot on the River Tambo. At the hacienda the fore-
man and his assistants would provide us with food and shelter
and conduct Herman in his search for shells. It was all as detailed
and complete as a Cook's Tour.

Questions and answers for another two hours. IndedskHi-Hmore
questions and answers more indecision. Finally Ac shells decided
the day. Herman, after all, was in South America for the express
purpose of looking for them, and here was the first definite in-
formation he had as to their whereabouts in the Peruvian interior.

"I ought to go after them, Jim," he said. "How about h?"

I had planned for a long rime on the Pichis, and k was hard to
give it up. But the weight of evidence seemed all against it.

"All right,'* I answered.

Sefior Sims beamed upon us. The nest morning, he said, he
would bring us letters of introduction to everyone along the
way: the mayors of the towns, the prefects, the sub-prefects, the
commandantes, and the foreman of the hacienda. We shook
hands, we celebrated over a round of drinks, ami we again went

146 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

shopping under our mentor's helpful surveillance. And we did
not send the wire to Tarma*

I shall set down the last episode of this story without attempt
at explanation or interpretation. Here it is, and I solemnly swear
to its authenticity. Anyone who wishes to may go on from there.

The next morning, as per his promise, Sims appeared at the
hotel. We asked if he had the letters of introduction. He ex-
plained he had not had time to write them the night before, but
would do so immediately, and, borrowing Herman's typewriter,
he set to work. Occasionally he interrupted his typing with a
pleasantry. He was in his usual friendly, jovial humor.

After perhaps ten minutes he pulled the paper from the
machine, signed it carefully, put it in an envelope and handed
it to me with a smile.

"Who's it to?" I asked.

"You," he said.

I opened it and read:

"Srs. Herman Lord & James Ullman,
"Hotel Bolivar, Lima, Peru.

**SENORS:

"After careful consideration I would recommend a slight
change in your plans. I find, upon discussion with my cousin,
Senor Hernandez, that he does not own the hacienda of which
we spoke, but once knew some people who owned one in that
vicinity. Unfortunately he has forgotten their names. Also, it
seems "that the route to the hacienda, which we discussed, has
been abandoned for several years and is not passable.

"I therefore suggest that you make your trip to Iquitos by
way of the Pichis Trail. This is a most attractive route, easy to
traverse and with many shells to be found along . ."

The epilogue to this fantasy is that I phoned Whitten and
received his assurance that, although we were two days late in
giving notification, the mules would be ready for us. This is the
sole reason why the next chapter of "The Other Side of the
Mountain" is laid on die Kdus Trail, and not in Lima's Homicide
Court.

VI

THE BIG PUSH

THE BELATED, but thunderous, coUapse of the House That
Sims Built left us with a myriad of negotiations* still to
be tackled in Lima and Tarma and precious little rime in
which to do the tackling. We decided to split die chores, Her-
man would remain in Lima until the last minute, palavering with
banks, laundresses and similar inanitions. I would go up to
Tanna at once to purchase necessary equipment and make sure
that mules, mail-train and Kehis Trail actually did exist. After
the experience we had just encountered we were trusting nobody
and nothing except our own eyes and ours.

The night before departure was a jumble of duffelbags, mis-
placed clothing, 'phone calk, whisky-sodas and farewells. Jerry
Blanchard gave me his oilskin tobacco-pouch for my cadi and
express checks, to ward off bankruptcy when my mule fdl in
his daily river. Jack Fisher appeared with a perfumed bottle of
Flit and presented it with the compliments of the Intermtkmtl
Petroleum Corporation and himself. Hope Morris and Ted Wttcn
dropped in with Sally in tow. That stout mountaineer had de-
veloped a bothersome case of "Andes feet" on our joint excur-
sions and had been brought to die Lima qumtz to s*cuperate in
grassy luxury. But die bore me no ill will and would, I believe,
have liked nothing better than a farewell tear up Cerro San
Cristobal

There were good-bys, exchanges of addresses, letters of intro-
ductionand whiskys. It was strange and at parting a little dif-
ficultto realize suddenly how intimate I had become with these
people who, with the exception of Jerry, I had known for less
than a month. I had been very much alone when I came among
than, and they had been kind and friendly to me. In retrospect

148 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

I recall the weeks I spent among them in Lima and Chosica as
among the most pleasant of my life.

The following morning, with an assortment of baggage of
which a Peruvian peddler would have been proud, I boarded the
Central at Desamparados and took the fabulous joyride to Oroya
for the last time. By nightfall I was again established in Tarma's
Bolivar and recounting to Nat Whitten the saga of Sims and
Hernandez.

"I don't think anyone's been through that way for ten years,"
said Nat. "There's a rumor that Colonel Fawcett and Judge
Crater are up in there somewhere playing pinochle. And say,
that one about the daily boat from the hacienda is pretty good,
too* There's not a mile-stretch of navigable water anywhere near
it just one damn cataract after another. Oh, yeah, you boys
would have had swell pickings on that little outing."

The next day, after breakfast, he produced a small map on
which he had been working,

"Here's the Pichis, more or less," he said, and together we went
over our prospective route and plans.

To understand the nature of the Pichis Trail and the reason
for its existence it is necessary to know a little of the geography
and climate of Peru. The country is divided into three roughly
parallel belts, which extend from northwest to southeast along
its entire length and are completely different, one from the other,
in almost every respect. Along the Pacific lies the narrow, rain-
less coastal plain, on which Lima and most of the nation's other
large cities are located. East of this rises die sierra, or high ranges,
of die central Andes. In die latitude of Lima and Tarma, where
the Central Railroad crosses them, the mountains reach their
narrowest point. Farther north and farther south they branch
out from die one principal chain into three distinct, parallel
ranges, known, respectively, as die Cordillera Occidental, the
Cordillera Central and the Cordillera Oriental Whether in one
or three chains, however, the entire mountainous region is called
the sierra and the lofty plateaus between the crests the ptmo or
. The entire region east of the Andes is known as the

OCR HABITATION ENFORCED AT Pl'EBLO PARDO

RAPID TRANSIT NEAR LA MERCED

THE BIG PUSH 149

montxnaz confusing name to the uninitiated, in that it has noth-
ing to do with mountains, but is the term for the vast tropical
jungles of interior Peru. The montana contains well over two-
thirds of the area of the country, but less than one-tenth of its
population and a negligible fraction of its commerce and industry.
No railroads or highways anywhere connect the sierra and the
montma. The only overland communication between the two
regions are mule-trails, of which there are perhaps a half-dozen
generally recognized; and among these trails the shortest, most
centrally located and most famous is the Pichis. Situated almost
exactly in the geographical center of Peru, its western end is is
the Chanchamayo Valley, just below Tarma on the eastern slopes
of the Andes. Thence it winds in a northeasterly direction through
the foothills down into the jungle, terminating after a little over
a hundred miles at Puerto Yessup on the Pichis River. The
Pichis River is an affluent of the Paehitea, which in turn is an
affluent of the Ucayali, the great inland waterway of the mont$nd y
which flows north for a thousand miles to Iquitos and die
Amazon.

For years this route wild and undeveloped though k is has
been the principal link between the Peruvian East and the
Peruvian West, and it remains so today, in spite of the recent
establishment of a weekly plane service from the sierra to Iquitos.
Along it go die fortnighdy mail caravans of the Peruvian gov-
ernment, and for their convenience, as well as that of the other
infrequent travelers, several primitive inns, or tomboy have been
established along the trail Originally operated by the govern-
ment itself, they are now maintained by the individual families
who inhabit them. Each family receives a small yearly subsidy
for operating its tmnbo^ the prices charged are fixed by the
government, and the accommodation of travelers is compulsory.
At the time of our trip there were seven tombos operating, spaced
at intervals of from fifteen to twenty miles along the trail.

Hie mail-train, Whitten said, would probably spend one night
at each tmbo, and die trip to Puerto Yessup would therefore

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

require one week. From Yessup the remainder of the journey to
Iquitos would be by the rivers, first by canoe, then by steam-
launck The total time to our objective should be about three
weeks, the total cost about seventy-five American dollars. At
his suggestion I changed a good part of my paper money into
silver. It was safer, he pointed out, from the ravages of flood
and mud, and, in addition, the keepers of the tambos and the
other scattered settlers along the way seldom encountered paper
money and as often as not would refuse to accept it. On his
advice too, I laid in a small supply of tinned foods; the tambos,
apparently, had a way of running out of supplies at critical
moments and we would be well beyond the world of the corner
grocery store. By the time evening arrived, and, with it, Herman
on the collectiva from Oroya, I had our geography, finances and
canned sardines well in hand, and we were ready for whatever
the perilous Pichis had to offer. Except, of course, that Fd for-
gotten the toilet paper.

We were to make the first lap of the trip to La Merced, in
the Qianchamayo Valley in the mail-contractor's car. Deludighi
had said he would pick us up at the hotel at two in the after-
noon; we were therefore dressed, packed, and ready before
breakfast. This at least gave us the opportunity to spend the
morning parading our new clothes and equipment without bene-
fit of a mud-coating the last time we would be privileged to do
so for some time to come. Also it unfortunately provided me
time to pick through the morning newspaper, item No. i of
which was the following:

ACCIDENTE DE TRAFICO EN HUANCAYO-
PERECEN 12 PERSON AS

LIMA 25 UP Ayer, en Humcayo, resultaron 12
mtertos y u heridos cumdo un camion que conducia,
2$ psajeros de la colonist ferene se precipito en tin
ablsmo a custro kilometres de la Merced.

THE BIG PUSH l$l

For some time past in fact, even before leaving New YoA
I had been hearing reports about the Qianchamayo Road It was
the most dangerous in the world. It was suicidal It was the scene
of more fatalities than Flanders Fields. All this homicidal chit-
chat at a comfortable distance was one thing. But to be informed
that twelve people were killed yesterday doing what you are
going to do today is another story. That "Msmo A cwtro kUo-
metros de la Merce<F* was a bit hard to dismiss from the miod as
the time drew near for us to set out for it.

Shortly after lunch Deludighi, accompanied by his wife, came
by in his car, and by two-thirty we had received our good friend
Whitten's blessing and were off. Our road led out of Tanrn
toward the northeast, between the towering aides of eucalyptus,
and for the first half-hour conducted itself in conservative fashion.
Presently, however, the gradual downhill dope began to drop
away more rapidly before us, the green hills on either side closed
in f and the road twisted and writhed. From this point cm to
La Merced only one-way traffic is permitted eastbound and
westbound on alternate days. Today, a wayside sign informed us,
it was eastbound only. At least we would not have to worry
about berserker trucks or drunken college boys roaring up at us
from the other end

For perhaps five miles we advanced along the side of a deep,
wooded canyon the route of die Chanchamayo River as it drops
from the Andes to the jungle. At Tarma we had been at a ten-
thousand-foot elevation; at La Merced, a scant thirty miles distant,
we would be at only two thousand feet, and our road, in conse-
quence, had plenty of descending to do. But however dizzyingly
we dropped, the river bdow dropped away farther, with die
result that the cliffs below us had soon grown from a height
of some two hundred feet to over a thousand. The road, of
loose-surfaced dirt and at no place more than eight feet in width,
seemed to cling to the wall of the gorge like a living organism.
Deludighi's car had two qualities which are good in a bottle
of whisky, but bad in an auto on a mountain--*! was big and it
was old Every time we rounded a sharp curve, which was sixty

15* THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

times a minute, the rear end of the car, in which Herman and
I sat, appeared to lose all contact with the road and hang sus-
pended in space above an abyss. And every time we were on a
steep down grade which was always the welkin shook with the
shrieking of the brakes. From the sudden jerks and slides in
which we were indulging the uncomfortable suspicion persisted
that, canine-like, their bark was worse than their bite.

After a particularly outrageous series of hairpin turns and
scenic-railway loops we finally descended to the level of the river.
We relaxed for die first time in an hour, but before we had
advanced a quarter of a mile the river fell away again in a series
of stupendous waterfalls, and we were left clinging to the side
of a precipice fifteen hundred feet above. Directly before us the
canyon took a sharp turn to the left, and on the mountain side
opposite we could see six parallel levels of the road ahead, one
directly below the other, over which we must go before again
reaching the valley bottom and the river. Horizontal distance to
be covered one mile. Vertical distance fifteen hundred feet.

At this point of the journey a new menace was introduced.
Sefiora Deludighi had thus far been a model passenger, but now
suddenly began to exercise the immemorial wifely prerogative
of telling her husband how to drive. Deludighi, not to be out-
done, promptly exercised the immemorial husbandly prerogative
of resenting it. As charter members of the Married Motorists*
Protective Association both Herman and I sympathized with his
plight. But a Latin, unfortunately, is not so constructed that he
can express emotion with the voice alone. For the next half-hour,
over the most hair-raising stretch of road I have encountered
anywhere in the world, Deludighi drove the car with one hand
and waved the other angrily at his wife. There was only one
interruption. Suddenly the arguing ceased, and I saw with horror
that both of them were looking back over their shoulders while
die car coasted on in its own sweet way. They explained pleas-
andy diat we were near the scene of yesterday's disaster and that
they were looking around for the wreckage. I honesdy believe
both Herman and I would have jumped from the car if there had

THE BIG PUSH 153

been any place to jump to short of fifteen hundred feet below.

I cannot venture to say whether it was God in person, but
someone pretty influential in cosmic circles was on "our side"
during our zigzag descent of that mountain. For, to our astonidi-
ment, we eventually reached the bottom by the land not the
air route and found ourselves again beside the swirling river.
This time we stayed there. For the pst hour our eyes when
they were open had been concerned exclusively with curves,
drops, and the fragile geometry that separated us from our an-
cestors. Now we suddenly observed the startling change which
nature had undergone during our descent. At the altitude of
Tarma the vegetation had been that of the temperate zones. Now
we were in the tropics. The hills about us had assumed softer
contours, and the trees and plants which blanketed them were
lush and wildly variegated. Ferns were everywhere, and lofty,
leaning palms, and the hanging, twining lianas, or creeper-vines,
of the jungle. Piled high above us, their enormous weight cling-
ing precariously to the steep slopes, they had the appearance of
hanging gardens, suspended tier on tier to die very summits of
die hills.

As the vegetation had changed, so too had the ak. Twenty
miles back it had been cool and crisp; here it was warm and
damp. Indeed, it seemed suddenly as if the whole worid about
us were sweating forth the earth's internal moisture. In Ac
distance great clouds of steam arose from the forests and hung
motionless above them, like a veil From every dope a dozen
streams rushed downward to the river below, and whenever we
passed beneath overhanging rocks or trees the water beat upon
the roof of Ac car like rain. All nature was banded together
with the angle purpose of feeding this little Qianchamayo Rivcr
a tributary of a tributary of a tributary of a tributary of the
Amazon. Trying to grasp the picture of a thousand such streams
in a thousand other tropical valleys across half a continent, each
of them growing and swelling as they sucked out the moisture
from the earth, we felt for the first time an intimation of the

IJ4 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

vastncss and vitality of the great river system into whose world
we were beginning to penetrate.

Two hours after leaving Tarma we pissed through the village
of San Ramon, situated at the point where the canyon we had
been following finally widens out into the Chanchamayo Valley.
Here is the western terminus of the Peruvian government's air-
line to Iquitos. The small planes employed in the weekly service
bck sufficient climbing-power to surmount the 20,000 foot alti-
tudes of the Andean peaks, and the westernmost limit of their
flight has therefore been set at this point in the eastern foothills.
Between Lima and San Ramon the air-traveler must proceed by
train and car, as did we. A plane was taxiing about the landing
field as we wait by. It was scheduled to leave the following
morning, and in two days its passengers and mail would have
completed the journey on which we were about to spend three
weeks.

The remainder of our way to La Merced lay through fertile
plantations of sugar, bananas, coffee and cottonthe heart of the
Chanchamayo, which is probably the most productive agricul-
tural area of all Peru, ftesently we rolled down the dusty main
street of the town, past the enormous, new storage shed which
serves the entire surrounding district as market and shipping
center, and up to the door of our home-for-the-night. This time
k was not The Bolivar, but the Hotel Roca. It was perhaps not
the cleanest establishment in the world, and it had its full com-
plement of mosquitoes; but at least it did not feature two-inch
turns and thousand-foot drops.

The Peruvian provincial hotel is an institution hardly calcu-
lated to warm the heart of the traveler accustomed to Ritzes,
or even Statlcrs, and many and loud are die cries of anguish I
hire heard from gringos who have suffered in diem including
myself. It is not that the accommodations are primitive, the f urni-
ture rudimentary, the plumbing non-existent (one does not look
for luroiy in the backwoods), but that they are dirty, frowsy
and bug-ridden-conditions that with a little cajre and energy are
so easily rectifiable. But nothing is ever done about it, and the

THE BIG PUSH 155

classic answer to the fastidious traveler's complaint is still that
made several years ago to an outraged gringo by a hotel keeper
in Huancayo. The American had been berating him for keeping
the sleeping quarters in filthy condition and feeding the guests
on slops.

"You know damn well you could keep the place clean if you
tried," he said angrily. "And you could serve decently cooked
food just as cheaply as this garbage. Why the hell don't you?**

4t S* ? senory 9 die proprietor replied. "That is quite true. But
why should I bother? No one will pay their bills anyhow.**

Later in the trip we reached a point of proficiency where we
could lace up our knee-boots in less than ten minutes. At this
stage of the game, however, it was still something of a major
operation, and the morning was well along before we were out
and about in full Daniel Boone regalia.

There was no hurry, however. Deludighi was sending out a
truck in the afternoon that would go down the Chanchamayo
Road as far as a village called Punizas, where the Pkhis Trail
began. It would be carrying supplies for the mail-train, which
would not set out from there untU the next day, and it had been
decided that we would go with it and thus save ourselves an
extra day on mule-back. There was some discussion among the
town's authorities as to whether the road would be passable for
the truck, but it was pointed out that, since it had not rained
during the past few days, there was at leas: a fifty-fifty chance.
That's better-than-average odds when a Pteravian sets oat for
somewhere in a car.

For once I was rather glad of die delay. la the course of our
one-day descent from Taring's forty-degree tenipfcrature to La
Merced's eighty I had acquired a whopping head-cold, ami die
knowledge that we were HI Ac heart of Ptero's malarial district
did not add comfort to my sneezing. The mosquitoes were
everywhere, and not at all mkent in welcoming viators tp town;
and in the streets we observed many people whose sallow faces
unmistakably bore the imprint of Ac fever. I spent the morning

156 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

looking through a book on tropical medicine which I had brought
with mci and with every alternate page I defiantly swallowed a
quinine pill, hoped for the best, and expected the worst. But
apparently my number was not up. I almost broke my back
sneezing, but that was all.

As a inatter of fact, malaria by no means deserves the epithet
of "worst" in the roster of tropical diseases. Far and away the
most common (approximately half the inhabitants of equatorial
South America are or have been infected) it is seldom any longer
fatal In Brazil and eastern Peru the malaria mortality has fallen
from about thirty-three per thousand population in 1875 to J 655
than two per thousand at the present time; and although- the
chances are better than even that the itinerant gringo wiU con-
flict the disease, they are very slight that it will be dangerous
or even prticukrly distressing, especially if he is well supplied
with quinine.

The other ailments, however, for which Herman and I were
eligible as we approached Amazonia were numerous and hor-
rendous. We had been immunized against smallpox and typhoid
by vaccination and inoculation, and yellow fever is no longer
die scourge it once was in tropical America, but my morning's
reading in La Merced imparted the cheering assurance that there
wore left some thirty assorted infectious diseases we could run
tfoul of without half trying. There were, among others, dysen-
tery, both amebic and bacillary, rat-bite fever, infectious jaundice,
yaws, dengue, hookworm, leprosy, an extremely common skin
disease bearing the frightening naxne of Leishmaniasis, and a
whole list of special fevers peculiar to certain localities and usu-
ally named after them. Among these, incidentally, were an
Oroya fever and a Verrugas fever (usually called Verruga
Berataa), but they had both been almost completely stamped out
by the time of my visit to their respective homes.

Beyond a doubt the most pernicious and least controlled dis-
ease with which tropical South America is cursed at the present
rime is hookworm. It is earned by tiny worms which penetrate
the skin of the f eet f ran the soil, and in regions of hot tempera-

DANIEL

BOONE

HOVER

MERRIWELL-

QCIXOTE

AND HIS
BIOGRAPHER

THE BIG PUSH 157

tures and heavy rainfall its incidence is seldom less than sixty
percent and sometimes as high as ninety-five percent of the
entire population. Seldom directly fatal, its ravages are none die
less terrible. In children it manifests itself in anemia, stunting of
growth and the grotesquely distended belly so frequently seen in
South American and African communities; in adults it less often
produces outward deformity, but induces physical and mental
sluggishness and a general impairment of vital functions. Its
prevalence is much greater among the poorer natives, who go
barefoot, than among the well-shod upper-class residents and
visiting outlanders. A dozen times during our passage through
Amazonia we were warned by our more experienced feUow-
travelers not to walk barefoot on die earth not even for a
distance of a few yards from river bank to water when taking a
swim. We had scarcely imagined in advance that bedroom slip-
pers would be an important part of our wardrobe in Pern's
montxna, but they were.

Most of the natives we encountered unfortunately knew Btde
or nothing about hookworm, but they were very much alive to
die dangers of another, and most loathsome disease. Immedi-
ately upon entering into Amazonia we noticed that die native
men, when bathing in die jungle rivers, invariably protected their
genitals with crude coverings of cloth or tightly worm gram
Modesty, obviously, had nothing to do with the case, and we
soon discovered diat the sole reason for covering themselves was
protection against a species of tiny worm which infests the risers
and has the habit of penetrating the human penis for the purpose
of laying its eggs. The effects, as it requires no great imagination
to infer, are horrible in die extreme, and the Indians and half-
breeds we encountered along die Rchis Trails and die Amazon
tributaries feared the infection as they feared no other plague
of nature. They had only varying local names for k, bet almost
all agreed that die tiny worms were disseminated by snails, and
diis would probably indicate that it either is, or is closely related
to, die disease known to medical science as schistosomiasts. But,
whether schistosomiasis or something equally unpronounceable in

158 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

Indian dialect, it was obviously something to ghre as wide a berth
as possible, and on the few occasions Herman and I swam in the
jungle rivers we took the greatest precautions. Tm afraid it
would not do to state baldly what we used as protection; they
were objects, I may say, that were originally manufactured for
a far different purpose.

Extensive medical work, therapeutic and educational, has been
carried out in tropical South America in recent years, both by
government commissions and by the International Health Board
of the Rockefeller Foundation. Certain diseases which formerly
ravaged the region have been almost exterminated; others, like
malaria, are at least being brought under control; and the Rocke-
feller scientists are now turning their attention particularly
toward the ubiquitous scourge of hookworm. Amazonia at the
present time is by no means the malignantly unhealthy area that
k was in die early years of its exploration and settlement. But it
is still no place for a hypochondriacespecially if he possesses a
medical book with vivid descriptions of symptoms.

Nothing worse, however, than a complete depletion of hand-
kerchiefs happened to me in La Merced, and as we were finishing
lunch the truck pulled up in front of the hotel. The proprietress
(at the last minute she turned out to be a Frenchwoman) boomed
orders in various directions, and presently two girls in their
'teens appeared from upstairs carrying our heavy baggage on
their shoulders. To a gringo it is apt to be a disturbing, not to
mention somewhat embarrassing, sight to watch a woman or
half-grown child struggling with fifty pounds or more of his
equipment while he sits by and takes life easy; but in Peru it is
the accepted procedure and a custom one simply must grow
used to. For us to have carried our luggage ourselves, when there
were giris available for the job, would have caused confusion,
consternation and the suspicion that we were beachcomber or
worse. Boots or no boots, clean-shaven or with three-day beards,
we were fas seSors, and los smors do not exert themselves when
there is anyone dse around to do the exerting. It's a system that

THE BIG PUSH 159

is easy on the shoulder muscles but hard on the viriie traditions
of gringo chivalry.

We followed our baggage into the rear of the truck, and what
seemed like half die population of La Merced followed us. After
a half-hour of farewells and false starts we were off, bumping
out of town on a road that was almost indistinguishable from the
surrounding fields. Our average speed on the straightaways was
about five miles an hour, but there were not many straightaways.
We encountered none of the aerial fandangoes of the preceding
day's ride, but the road still writhed and twisted back upon itself
and every few moments we would have to stop while the crowd
of cholos piled out of the car to remove boulders from our path
or cut away fallen trees with their long m&chetes. Many streams
crossed our way powerful young freshets tumbling down front
the hills to feed the Chanchamayo. Whenever it encountered
them the road, scorning bridges or detours, simply took a deep
breath and dove in; and we dove in after*

At one stream we encountered another truck, headed in die
opposite direction from ours, whkh had come to grief halfway
across. Its rear wheels, resting on bardy submerged gravd, were
all right, but the whole front end of die car was practically
submerged. The swirling waters rushed across the footboards of
the driver's cab and gurgled happily in the motor. The driver
himself had repaired to die iwf, where he sit in solitude Kke
a marooned sailor. Undaunted, our truck dove in and by the
grace of God lurched through to die other side. The marooned
driver waved cheerfully to us as we passed and lit a cigarette,
Apparendy he was waiting for the aid of die rainy season.

After another hour of streams, boulders and fallen trees we
passed the first habitation we had seen sbee leaving La Merced
a miserable, tumble-down adobe hut by die roadside. Herman
shook his head sadly.

"It's hard to believe," he said, "diat there are peopk in the
world who can eat and sleep in a place like diat. w

Whereupon a man came running down the road toward ra,
gesturing for die truck to stop. An involved discussion ensued

160 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

between him and the driver, with die rest of the truck's popula-
tion chipping in. Finally we were enlightened

**The river ahead is impassable, sefiors," explained the driver.
"You will spend the night here.'*

We did, too,

Our emergency home, we discovered, was officially the town
of Pueblo Pardo (in rural Peru any structure from a lean-to up is
officially a town) and, in spite of its squalor, we acquired a singu-
lar affection for it during our eighteen-hour sojourn. In the first
place, our hostess was an unusual type of woman to be found
ki this primitive wilderness. She was obviously a person of some
education and breeding and was desperately apologetic for the
meagerness and dinginess of her home. She gave us a thoroughly
edible dinner, clean bedding to lie upon, and crowning example
erf * hostess's thoughtfulness placed a box across the doorway
of oar room to keep the hogs out while we slept. We regretted
thu: our combined Spanish was not sufficient to learn from her
a Ikde of her background.

After our hostess, the chief attraction of Pueblo Pardo was the
scenery. Situated near the point where the Qianchamayo and
Poiiaurtambo rivers converge to form the Perene, it commanded
from its elevated position a view of all three streams. During the
kte afternoon we walked a few miles down the road, fording
the stream that had blocked our truck's progress, and had an
opportunity to see tropical nature at her lavish best. On every
side was a wild riot of trees, shrubs, ferns, lianas, creepers. Here
ami there through the thick undergrowth we could see the
bulging trunk of a giant ceiba tree, from which the jungle
Indians fashion their dugout canoes. Far above our heads the
spreading summit of a palm would stand out, sudden and alone
against the sky. And in the distance below the three rivers shone
as they wound through the jungle to their meeting place.

The forest was alive with birds, but they were wary of
approaching too close to us, Among them, however, I recognized
my Peruvian favorite, a $wmg-red little chit, always gaudy and

l6* THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

disheveled, which the natives have given the lightest possible
name p0t/fj/i*, "little whore," The insect life beggared number-
ing or description. On our way back we encountered a colony
of sauba antsthe leaf bearers which I had often heard and read
of, but never before seen. Across the road they marched, in-
numerable thousands of them, each with a shred of leaf ten times
his own size aslant above him like a sail. By the roadside the
tattered wreckage of a dozen low-growing plants gave evidence
of where their burdens came from. On the other side of the road
the endless procession disappeared into the undergrowth, and
though we beat about for a while we could not find its obscure
destination. Incidentally, though we did not know it at the time,
we made the acquaintance of other ants than the saubas during
our walk, I do not know the entomological name for them. Our
name, bestowed some few hours later when we retired, was
genus tr&uscrensis interior.

Back at Pueblo Pardo a man was waiting for us. He greeted
as with "Hello, meester," and having thereby exhausted his Eng-
lish vocabulary proceeded to explain in Spanish that his name
was Ignacio Lopez, that he was one of the arrieros on the mail-
train and had been charged with the care of our mules during
the impending trip. The mules, he said, were still somewhere
back along the La Merced road. He would be by with them to
pkk us up at eight the next morning. We presented him with
cigarettes and a chocolate-bar to promote friendly international
relations, and with another cheery "Hello, meester" he was gone.

In the middle of the night we awoke to find the walls of our
room shaking violently.

"An earthquake!" yelled Herman.

Subsequent investigation, however, disclosed that it was only
the hogs trying to clamber in over our box in the doorway.

We were awakened by the tinkling of bells on the road: the
moles were passing by. There were fifty-nine of them in die
mail-train, their backs pled high with canvas sacks, crates, gaso-
line tins, all manner of freight and equipment. With their meas-

THE BIG PUSH 163

ured, patient pace they plodded by in single file, while the
arrieros one to each seven or eight animate walked between,
throwing sticks at lagging backsides and shouting their hoarse
cry of 4 *Hula!" At the end of the procession came Lopez with
our three mules and a cheery "Hello, meester/ 1 With astonishing
speed and dexterity he set about roping our cumbersome baggage
together and soon had it dizzily, but securely, perched atop the
smallest of the three beasts. Meanwhile we set about die impor-
tant business of becoming acquainted with the other two; after
all, they were going to be our pretty intimate companions for
the next few days, and it seemed advisable to nuke as favorable
a first impression as possible. They were sturdy animals, some-
what larger than most of the mules we had seen in Peru, d
we were relieved to see that they were well fed and without
saddle sores. One was male, one female, and a flip of a coin
assigned me to the former. There was still die question of names
to be bestowed, and after due deliberation we christened them
Edward and WaUy* Later in the trip Lopes became Baldwin; his
chief function in life was to make them behave.

Shortly after eight we left Pueblo Pardo, our hostess and our
hogs behind us. Again we forded the swollen stream and followed
the road we had traversed on foot die day before. It had rained
during die night, and die road's surface was a morass, but die
mules plopped patiendy through it without a misstep. For per-
haps two miles we followed die right bank of the Poucartambo
River; then we swung suddenly east and crossed die river by a
narrow suspension bridge. On die farther bank die road split,
the right fork leading off down die left bank of die Poucartambo
to the nearby Perene Colony. This is a large ti*et of land oper-
ated as a hacienda by the Peruvian Coi^poMion (a large English
company which also owns die Centra! Railroad), from which
comes much of die best fruit, coffee and sugar of tropical Pan.
The place received its designation of "Colony w from die former
efforts of die corporation to setde it with homesteaders from
England. For a variety of reasons, however-principally Indian
resistance and die alcoholic tendencies of die settlers-die project

164 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

was a failure, and in recent years the establishment has been run
as a private commercial enterprise.

Our route did not pass through the Perene Colony, but forked
off to the left into a low range of hills, At about eleven o'clock
we came to a solitary hut in a clearing beside the road; this, we
discovered, was the town of Punizas, the original destination of
our truck on the previous day. Directly beyond it the road
tapered off into a trail and the Via Pichis officially began.

As the forest closed in about us, we began to climb in earnest,
The Pichis begins near the Poucartambo River at an altitude of
only two thousand feet and ends at the Pichis River at an altitude
of only nine hundred. But in between it crosses an extensive
range of low mountains the easternmost outposts of the Andes
-~and attains a maximum elevation of over six thousand feet. On
this first day we circled the shoulders of one hill after another,
usually about halfway up their slopes. Most of the time we were
hemmed in closely by the dense vegetation of the forest, but
occasionally we would emerge upon an open ridge and have a
glimpse of the country, billowing endlessly away before us. No
roof, no smoke, no vestige of human life or habitation broke the
vast monotony of its green sweep.

The jungle about us was a bedlam of sound, but we saw no
animals (except a dead anteater lying on the trail) and but few
birds. Insects were legion-all sizes, shapes, colors; on the ground,
on the leaves and bark of trees, in die air; humming, buzzing, or
clacking. But they seemed disposed to let us pass in peace.

As the day progressed we were learning things about Wally
and Edward. Item No. i was that there is no point whatever in
trying to guide a mule with the reins; nine times out of ten the
way he wants to go is the right way, and the tenth time nothing
you can do is going to dissuade him anyhow. Item No. 2 was
that a saddle can be thoroughly soft and comfortable one hour
and covered with spiked knobs the next. From the first day on
we regtibrfy alternated walking with riding usually a half-hour
or forty minutes of die former to two hours of the latter.

die trip die mail-train never stopped for f ood at

THE LONG
GREEN TUNNEL
OF THE
PICHIS TRAIL

CROSSING THE PUCHELINI RIVER

THE BIG PUSH 165

midday; there were no habitations of any description between
the overnight ttmbos, and to stop and prepare our own food
would have consumed too much time. It was therefore with more
than intellectual curiosity that we arrived, just before sundown,
at Tambo Yapaz, our first Rchis hostelry. This establishment,
like all the others after it, consisted of two buildings the dwell-
ing house itself and a shed for loading and unloading the mules
and storing the mail. Sometimes it was a little difficult to tell
which was which, but we soon adopted the foolproof system
of waiting to see which structure the mules headed for and then
heading for the other*

A few minutes after arrival at Yapaz the arrieros had their
animals unburdened, and in a twinkling the landscape was a
tangled, waving forest of two hundred and thirty-six legs as the
fifty-nine mules simultaneously rolled about cm their kicks and
scratched away their memories of their loads. In the meantime
we were making our first acquaintance with two of die major
institutions of the Pkhis Trail: the Chuncho Indians ami die
tambo table *f W*e-of the Chunchos, more anon. As to die dinner
(and a description of the dinner at Yapaz is also an exact descrip-
tion of every other meal we had on the trail) it consisted of a
first course of chicken soup T a second course of chicken and rice,
a third course of rice and chicken, and coffee. We made ex-
haustive inquiries into why the chkken and ike, or rice and
chicken, were always splk into two courses, but nothing came
of them. You got chicken and rice and when you were through
with that you again got chicken and rice. That was all there was
to it, and you ate it and liked it, or didn't eat it and went
hungry.

With, around, in or between all the meals at all the tmmbos wn
yucca. This is a heavy fibrous root, indigenous to Peru's montma,
which tastes much like potato and can be prepared in almost as
many different forms. Along the Pichis k was usually boiled,
and pretty tasteless, but a Urdc went a long way toward filling
up the hollow caverns of the stomach. The country through
which we passed daily wts overflowing with its burden of

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

luscious tropical fruits papayas, mangoes, pineapples, oranges,
melons and at each txmbo we tried to secure some. Our only
success, however, was on the last day, when we finally secured a
pineapple. What the natives do with the fruits we were never
able to discoverfeed them to the hogs, probably.

Yapaz hours: dinner at six; to bed at eight, Bed consisted of a
straw mattress over which we threw our ponchos and blankets,
with a sweater added for pillow. Pajamas consisted of every-
thing we wore during the day except our boots. But I have slept
much worse in Sulka's finest.

For most of our journey from Lima to Iquitos we had excellent
luck with the weather. We were making it in the heart of the
rainy season (which extends from December to May in die
Peruvian montana), but, for the most part, the worst we en-
countered were occasional heavy showers and evening thunder-
storms. However, fateand die Deluge caught up with us.

It was raining when we arose at six; it was raining when we
left Yapaz at seven; and it rained all day. Wearily, unendingly,
the mules clopped through the mudso deep in places that their
bellies scraped it as they floundered through; so thick that they
would sometimes have to stand still and pull with all their strength
to extricate a leg. Pichis mud is like no other mud in the world.
Varying with the nature of the soil, it is sometimes brick red
and sometimes yellow; it is compounded of equal parts of cream-
of-tomato soup, mucilage, and primeval ooze; and it has the
tenacity of an octopus. After our prescribed two hours on mule-
back we attempted to walk for a way, but had to give it up
almost immediately. The human foot is larger and more cumber-
some than a mule's. Each time we took a step die muck would
engulf our boots halfway to the knees and it would require a
major excavation to release ourselves. For the rest of the day
we settled on sore behinds as die lesser of two evils.

In the rain die jungle about us was even more impressive than
under the bright tropic sun. Steaming, fecund moisture seemed
die proper element for this wild profuseness of vegetation. The

THE BIO PUSH 167

cries of die birds and the droning of insects were stilled, and no
animal life was to be seen anywhere; yet here, we felt, in the
steaming, sweating darkness of the forest was transpiring the
very generation of life itself. In such a worid of ooze and rnisc
and tangled, soaring vegetation the first primeval blob of animal
jelly must, unnumbered ages ago, have taken form ami grown,

Our route still lay uphill, and for most of the day the trail
wound in and out about the shoulders of the wooded slopes. We
crossed a dozen streams each mile, and when there were no
streams the dense foliage overhead poufed down cascades of their
own upon our heads. On the downhill side of the path die ground
fell away sharply into a tangled green abyss out of which rose
the tall, columnar trunks of die great ceibas and palms, as if f rom
a dark, unfathomable well. Their leafy summits were even with
the trail on which we rode; their roots were lost in a shadowy
nether-world of unimaginable chaos. Plunging off into it, a man,
a mule, our whole pack train would be overwhelmed and lost as
completely as if it were the ocean.

Toward mid-afternoon the rain became torrential, and up wem
the hoods of our ponchos. They were broad, deep hoods, and
the worid inside them was dry and snug. Mine extended well out
before my face, above and on both sides, and all I could sec from
its depths were Edward's dripping ears and the patch of red mod
directly before him. The rain drummed on the outside of the
hoodfaint, impersonal, and far away. The trail am] the jungle
too were presently far away, Mid I was warm and drowsy, and
Ruth and I were riding in the car along a Westchester road and
Wham! Scr-r-ratch Something hard and determined punched
me in the face; my hood was knocked off my head, and I found
myself sitting somewhere in the vkinky of Edward's tail, trying
frantically not to slide off him altogether. If one wishes to deep
while riding on die Pichis TimH, it is advisable to said a repre-
sentative ahead to cut off die branches of die trees.

We were not wet when we arrived at Tambo Enefiez-our
ponchos were true marvds of efficiency tot we were just about
everything else in the dictionary of discomfort. Ten hours astride

l68 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIK

a mule, without dismounting at any time for more than five
minutes, do not tend to loosen up the joints and muscles. Several
times during the night we awoke thinking we had heard a jaguar
howling; but it was only ourselves creaking as we turned over
in our sleep.

Enenez, we discovered in the morning, was a considerably
more attractive tambo than its predecessor; in fact, it proved to
be the best of the lot along the Pichis Trail. Its proprietor was
an aged Italian, with an Indian wife and some two dozen inde-
terminate children, and, in addition to decorating every available
patch of wall with pictures of Mussolini and Hollywood movie
queens, he had succeeded in carving a presentable vegetable and
flower garden out of the encroaching jungle. When we paid our
IriU before leaving (supper, mattress and breakfast for two-six
sales) he mack us each a present of a boutcnmiere.

Ttic day was gray and thick with mist when we set out, but
by mid-morning it had cleared, and the sun burned so brightly
that within an hour the last vestiges of the torrential rains of the
previous day were entirely obliterated except, of course, for the
imid on die trail. Neither sun nor season nor drought nor passing
years have any effect on the Pichis mud. There it is, and there it
stays.

We were still gaining altitude (Dos de Mayo, the next tambo,
is die highest on die trail), and our way for most of the day's
ride fay high up near die summits of die hills. Surefootedly,
painstakingly, with the greatest precautions for their own safety
and therefore, incidentally, for ours die mules picked their
wty through die slime and boulders of die path. Six inches to the
side of us die ground fell away sharply into deep canyons-all
the more menacing because screened by the dense vegetation. A
misstep by Edward or WaUy, and die epic of die Rover Boys in
Darkest Bern would have ended abrupdy some five hundred feet
below, ftjt they did not make a misstep, andstifl more remark-
ablewe were at no rime nerrais or apprehensive, because we
kmw tbey wrold aot make a misstiep. The mole is a thick-

THE BIG PUSH 169

skinned, opinionated and unfriendly animal, and it is almost
impossible to develop affection for him. But I defy anyone to
ride him for a week over a difficult trail and not feel respect for
him. His way may be the slowest way, but it is also the safest
and the surest; and if you provide him with sufficient food and
rest-of which he requires amazingly little he will get you where
you want to go. There is inevitably something impressive in an
organism be it man, animal or machine performing its exacdy
proper function in die exactly proper way. That's what Edward
and Wally did on the Kchis Trail, and, however humble their
task, they were mighty damned impressive doing it.

The whole mail-train of fifty-nine mules and ten arrieros sd
dom stayed together on die day's march. Usually it was spread
out on the trail over five miles or more, and our little unit, headed
by Baldwin-Lopez, was to all intents and purposes alone. Our
usual order of procession was first, die five mules carrying mail
which Lopez had under his charge; next, the pack-mule wkh <mr
baggage; next, die indefatigable Lopez himself, hurling sticks Mid
"Hulas!" at die laggers; next, Herman; and finally myself. When
either Herman or I was afoot we walked at a distance of some
twenty or thirty yards behind die others; to venture closer was
to invite a head-to-f oot mud bath from the pumping feet of the
mules.

No animals were provided for die *meiw, and, except; for an
occasional fifteen minutes on Edward or Wally, Lopez waited.
He was a brown, stocky man with a bandit's mustache, and
though he was no longer any youngster his energy and endur-
ance were tremendous. He had, he told us, been driving mules on
die Kchis Trail for ten years, and we were not long in discov-
ering that he was a master at his trade. He could fasten three
hundred pounds of baggage onto the back of a mule as quickly
and securely as an average man can fasten his belt. His timing
was infallible; if at noon he declared we would be at Tambo
So-and-So at 5:27 PM^ we wore there at 5:27 P.M.-OQ sooner
and no later. And hfe suief oocedncss and agility along the ratted,
inundated trail put eren the uraks to shame. He knew wf allibly

170 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

which rotted tree-trunk or tuft of grass would support his feet,
and which would not; and he seemed to walk right across the
surface of bog holes into which Herman and I would sink half-
way to our knees. "Hula! Hula/ Carr&johuls/"thc lead-mule
would receive a flying stick where it did most good. As grand
marshal of our parade he was tireless and efficient.

As if to compensate us for the woes of yesterday, today's was
a short march. We reached Tambo Dos de Mayo (also known as
Kilometer 71, or El Cumbre) shortly after three and celebrated
by a sunbath and a change of underdrawers. The latter was a
unique event, for every other article of clothing we wore when
we left Tarma stayed right where it was until we reached Puerto
Yessup. Dos de Mayo, highest point on the Pichis, was situated
cm the knob of a bare hill, and for miles around we had an un-
obstructed view of the endlessly rolling jungle. Toward nightfall,
however, a heavy mist crept up about us from the valleys below
and our hilltop home was wrapped in darkness and utter isolation*

Sunday is Sunday, be it on East 85th Street, Manhattan, or at
Kilometer 71, Pichis Trail. This particular one was unmistakable.
The sun shone brightly, but with a lazy instead of a ferocious
heat. We were late in starting, the mules seemed only half-awake
as they plodded along and all I needed was the rotogravure sec-
tion of the Sunday Times to read as we idled through the jungle.
I thought of Ruth, probably at that very moment reading it in
bed and happy at having it all to herself for a change.

The forest through which we now progressed was cut by a
thousand streams. Some flowed down across the trail, and we
forded them. Some dropped sheer upon it from rocky shelves
above, and we ducked them. Others we could see coursing
through the valleys below. And still others we could not see at
afl, but heard incessantly as they gurgled in the deep recesses of
the vegetation. They flowed in every direction of the compass,
wherever Ac contours of the earth directed Some followed our
eotin along the trail, some crossed it at right angles, and some
flowed in die opposite direction. But their destinations were aU

THE BIG PUSH 171

the same and so was ours. However far astray they might go,
into whatever distant valleys or through whatever dark jungles,
their waters would eventually find the Amazon and die Atlantic
Ocean. It was an impressive, a thrilling, realizationthis ordered,
inevitable march of nature in what seemed die very heart of
primeval chaos.

If Lopez was the grand marshal of our cavalcade, Herman was
its drum major. Like the mules and the vegetation he flourished
in the jungle, and in both voice and plumage put the birds of die
forest to shame. The only tune he appeared to know was "Let
the Rest of the World Roll By," but he did not let that daunt
him; and if subsequent travelers on the Kchis are surprised to
hear the macaws by the roadside croaking its strains they should
remember that the birds had one full, uninterrupted week in
which to memorize it. Somewhere in Tarma Herman had ac-
quired a stiff straw hat with an enormous brim, ami he was never
without it on die trail, ripped at a drugstore-cowboy angle and
with a waving crown of ferns stuck in the band for embellish-
ment. It topped off his mule and his Boy-Scout outfit widi con-
siderable effect. Another acquisition of which he was most fond
was a ten-foot bamboo knee, which he had cut from a tree as
we passed and whittled to his own specifications. He used k
alternately as a spear, to ward off the hordes of imaginary
Chunchos who attacked us, and as a probe, to stir up the equally
imaginary anacondas and jaguars who lurked in die underbrush
beside the trail. And on one occasion he employed k I bdkve
inadvertently to host himself right off his mule into die mud.
But, for aD that, he cut a fine figure of an adventuring hero, did
Herman-excuse me did Daniel Boone Rover Merriwell-Quixote.
And there was no need for him to f ear the Chunchos. One look
at that seven-day beard, that bamboo pok and that "kelly" with
the waving ferns, and their stoutest warrior would have been
half-way to Hobokcct before Herman could say "howdy."

When we arrived toward evening at Tanibo Porvenir we found
our chicken and rice and rice and chicken already prepared and
waiting for us. In most respects the Kchis tambos are hardly tip

172 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

to metropolitan hotel standards, but when it comes to advance
preparation for guests they are in a class by themselves. A solitary
telephone wire runs along the whole length of the trail, laid
originally for military purposes but used chiefly as a medium of
gossip between the various &i#rA0-keepers; and at each night's
stop our impending arrival was known well in advance, as well
as any other facts about us which our host of the previous night
had been able to pick up and transmit. It was a strange feeling-
traveling through the wilderness and yet having everyone you
met know all about you, as if your advance press-agent had been
there the day before.

Apart from its impressive preliminary preparations for us,
Porvenir was the worst tmba we encountered on the trail. Most
of die others were kept by mestizos (half-whites, half-Indians),
but the proprietor here was a full-blooded aborigine; and though
the Peruvian Indians may love godliness well enough they most
certainly do not love its officially appointed neighbor at all. We
were tired, but not quite tired enough to share our mattresses
widi the entire vermin population of Latin America, and spent
most of the night in the open. It was one of those brilliant, un-
real tropic nights so well known to literature and so rare in fact.
For hours we lay on our backs in die grass and watched the
pageantry of the stars. We almost found the Southern Cross.

The first event on the morning's program was for me to ride
into the telephone wire at a low-hanging point and almost de-
capitate myself. Besides knocking myself off Edward's back I
knocked the wire off its nearest mooring on a wayside tree. Per-
haps, Herman suggested, it would gum up the connection suf-
fidendy to make our arrival at San Nicokus a surprise. I was
basy trying to find my Adam's apple and didn't care much.

The second event was that we saw our first, last and only live
animal on the Kchis Trail. It was a snakea rather handsome
fdkw about five f eet in length, strikingly banded in black and
silver. Suddenly it slithered through the grass beside the path,
less dian a yard from die mules' feet but paying no attention to

THE TAMBO AT PUERTO YESSUP

A CHUNCHO FAMILY (WITH GUEST) AT TAMBO SANTA ROSA

THE BIG PUSH

them, and just as suddenly disappeared. Our study of animal life
in the Peruvian mantma was over.

Tambo San Nicolaus was fifteen hundred feet lower than
Porvenir, and we lost altitude rapidly as we advanced. The atmos-
phere grew steadily warmer and heavier, and the vegetation even
wilder and more lush than it had been during our first four days
on the trail. Ferns spread beside the path, some of them to a
breadth twice the span of a man's arms; the ceiba trees and other
forest giants reared up their heads two hundred feet above the
jungle bush; looking to right or left, the vision was almost imme-
diately blocked off in an incredible, strangled turmoil of roots,
trunks, leaves, creepers and vines. The trail narrowed, as if
squeezed into itself from either side by the enormous pressure
of vegetable growth. Overhead the summit foliage of the taller
trees often met and mingled, and we passed through a dim, green
tunnel in faint twilight. At such rimes, although the sun was
hidden from us, the heat was far more oppressive than when we
rode in its full glare. The swearing dampness of the forest pressed
upon us like a physical weight; no wisp of air stirred. It was as
if we were riding along the bottom of a stagnant lake a watery,
choking world without light or motion. There were few times
in our journey down the Pkhis that we experienced that sense
of the jungle's menace, of which one so often hears tell. Perhaps
this was because we were traveling in a large company and made
a good deal of noise as we went along. But on this one occasion,
at least, we felt the jungle, and k mack us a little afraid

Since leaving Pueblo Pardo we had not encountered a single
wayfarer between tmbos on the entire trail. Now at last one
came along, and at first sight he was a very strange-looking way-
farer indeed. His costume consisted of a pair of heavy shoes, a
union suit and a Peruvian army cap, and he bounced along with
a heel-and-toe stride reminiscent of a walking race at a track-
meet. A few minutes later another one came along, then another,
then two or three more all wearing union suits and army caps
and all tearing along as if the official starter had just fired his
gun. They told us they had just finished a term of service at

174 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

Puerto Bermudez and were on their way back to Lima. But what
they would put on over their underwear when they arrived
remained a mystery.

It was a long jump from Porvenir to San Nicolaus, and the
day wore on slowly. Apparently we were passing along a stretch
where some fern particularly beloved of mules was growing
along the trail, for every ten steps Wally's or Edward's head
would go down and our procession would come to an abrupt halt
to the sound of satisfied munching. At about four o'clock we
came to a large, thatched died, where the pack mules who had
preceded us were being unburdened and turned into pasture,
and we thought we had reached the end of the day's trek. Such
was not the case, however; the tsmbo itself, we learned, was still
another two miles along the trail. It was here that our ordinarily
imperturbable steeds gave their only exhibition of emotion on
Ac entire trip. They looked longingly at the shed, as we rode
past, and at their more fortunate brothers rolling in the grass,
and their anguished wails of protest rent the air. They were
pretty unhappy animals for the rest of the day's trip.

The t&nbos we had stopped at thus far had all been one-story
structures. San Nicolaus was in two levels-a style of building
that persisted from this point, along both trail and rivers, all the
way to Iquitos. The lower level had no floor or walls, but was
simply the sheltered space between the log beams which sup-
ported die upper level. This was reserved for the use of the hogs,
chickens, cows, visiting Chunchos and such travelers as could
not afford the one sol charged for deeping quarters. Upstairs the
floor and walls were of woven bamboo, soft and springy for
sleeping (we were now out of the mattress-belt) but with a
tendency to sag alarmingly if one walked about too heavily.
Over all was a high, sloping roof of thatch, designed to died the
lain but actually a most ingenious primitive showerbath for the
use of guests. But die extra-special feature of San Nicolaus was
that we were served our chicken and rice in three courses, in-
stcad of the usual two. Incidentally, my set-to with the telephone

THE BIG PUSH IJ5

wire had had no effect; everyone apparently knew all about the
sefwrs nortamericmos long before we arrived.

San Xicolaus was situated near the easternmost extremity of
the hills through which we had been passing, and the trail beyond
cut across almost flat country. During the morning we picked up
the Pichis River, on our right, and the rest of our course to
Puerto Yessup lay along or near its bank. Near San Nicohus k
is still little more than a mountain stream, and it is not until it
reaches Yessup that It is navigable even for canoes. Now we
began encountering other rivers flowing down through the forest
across the trail to join the Pichis. Some were spanned by primitive
suspension bridges bamboo planking hung from a steel cable
which swayed and undulated dizzily as the mules clopped across
them. Others we forded, our feet propped somewhere in the
vicinity of our mules* ears to keep them dry.

Toward midday we crossed a muddy, sloppy stream, which
boasted the most fascinatingly accurate name I have ever en-
countered: Azapku--proiK)iii]ed **Soupy Sue." On the farther
bank was a tmtbo, the only one on die trail at which we did not
spend a night; we celebrated its unexpected appearance by the
first lunch we had had since leaving La Merced. To our great
astonishment the chicken and rice were served in only one course,

During the afternoon the trail was less tortuous ami muddy
than usual, and we literally flew along at some two-and-a-half
miles per hour. As the sun was setting we suddenly came upon
what we thought was an Indian village, only to discover that k
was our day's destination, Tambo Santa Rosa. We had met two
or three Chunchos at nearly every tmnbo on the way, but this
one was swarming with than. Their permanent home, appar-
ently, was the lower level of the tambo, where they were inex-
tricably inked up with, and almost: indistinguishable from, the
cows and hogs. They slept on the ground, sometimes with ta
obliging animal for a pillow, and their food consisted partly of
the meager spoils their men brought in from the forest and pardy

176 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

of the scraps thrown them by the proprietor of the tambo
including, on that evening, the left-overs from our plates.

The proprietor, as a matter of fact, was as interesting to us as
the herd of Indians. She was female a shriveled old woman in
her sixties, obviously pure white, and living entirely alone. There
was not a Spanish Peruvian or even a half-breed anywhere on
the place, but apparently the old girl got along very nicely with-
out them. She shouted at the Indians, pushed them off the upper
level of the tmbo t and slapped die children's faces; and when
during the night they became noisy she inarched downstairs and
bawled them out like a top-sergeant. No lace-and-lavender old
bdy Ac, but a veritable virago of the jungle. We were careful
to observe our best company manners,

I can give my personal assurance that Rousseau was not think-
ing of the Chunchos when he envisioned his "Noble Savage."
I have heard from missionaries and others that they are fairly
intelligent and that the children, in particular, exhibit marked
ability to learn; but in their native state they are as brutish and
unprepossessing a breed of human beings as one could expect to
find anywhere on earth. The term "Giunchos" is loosely used in
Peru to designate any or all of the Indians of the momma, as
distinguished from the Andean Indians the descendants of the
Incas who are called "Indios" or simply "cholos." Spread through
die whole eastern half of the country, these Chunchos are di-
vided into many tribes, differing one from the other in many
of their characteristics and customs, but all of the same general
stock and appearance. Whereas the Incaic Indian of the moun-
tains is ape to be short and shriveled, these jungle aborigines are
usually tall and heavily built, the women in particular often
inclining to fatness. And whereas the former, through centuries
of virtual slavery first to the Incas, then to the whites has
become docile and almost cringing, the latter, whose contact
with civilization has been negligible, are usually independent in
spirit and manner. In the early days of colonization in the mon-
tma, they offered fierce resistance to the intruding whites, and
as recently as 1915, when a traveling functionary from Lima

THE BIG PUSH 177

was imprudent enough to appropriate a chkf s daughter as t
concubine, they responded by burning every tmnbo along the
Pichis Trail and killing every white man in the region on whom
they could lay their hands. At no time in history, so far as is
known, have they had any traffic with the more highly civilized
Indians of the west coast. The jungle is their home, and through
the centuries to the present day they have lived by primitive
jungle economy.

Perhaps you have detected traces of the "Noble Savage* in
the foregoing description. If so, I assure you that a personal en-
counter with the Chunchos would unburden you of the impres-
sionat least an encounter with the members of the Amuesha
and Campa tribes whom we met along the Pkhis Trail The
Amueshas live along the western part of the trail, occasionally
work on die sugar or coffee haciendas of the Chanchamayo, and
have learned something of the white man's ways. The Campos,
who dwell along the eastern part of die trail and try die Pichis
and Pachitea rivets are more isolated and aloof. But in most
respects die two groups are indistinguishable. They look alike,
dress alike, live alike, and arc equally dirty.

Their costume is weird and has an interesting history. It con-
sists invariably of a single loosely flowing brown g^umentraEy
similar, we noted immediately, to a monk's robe. And indeed
that is exacdy what it is. In the early days of South American
colonization the Conqidstsdores stayed close to die quick-and-
easy riches of die Andes, leaving die penetration of die interior
to the various religious orders who soon followed them to the
New World. The first contact of the Chunchos with die outside
world was therefore with die Jesuits, Franciscans and Domini-
cans, and from them they first learned to cover their nakedness
with clothes. As die only clothes they had ever seen were die
robes of the monks, they copied them and have continued wear-
ing them to this day. Whether die swarming vermin that in-
variably cover die Chunchos 9 garment are also of monastic origin
we shall respectfully leave undetermined.

The mak Chuncho's headdresspresumably his own invention,

I7 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

for it is unique is made of straw and resembles a modern Ameri-
can **keiUy," with the crown knocked out and worn upside down.
Usually a single upright feather tops off die contraption. The
women go hadess, but as esthetic compensation they paint their
faces in bright crimson streaks with the juice of the native
achiotc berry. Another berry they use to string into necklaces.
Along the Pichis we saw women with as much as ten pounds
of die little beads about their necks. Both males and females go
barefoot, and here we must make our one bow to Rousseau: in
every respect (except cleanliness) their strong, well-shaped,
supple feet pit the cramped, shoe-deformed underpinning of
civilized man to shame. I have seen Chunchos perform tasks with
their toes so delicate that the average man would have diffi-
culty with them using his fingers.

Apparently it was scratching-time when we arrived at Santa
Rosa* for die local colony of Campos were gathered in the mud
under the tmtbo and busily engaged in either rubbing their backs
against the log uprights or picking things from one another's
hair. The adults, at first, paid litde or no attention to us, but the
children followed us en masse upstairs to our sleeping quarters
and proceeded to make themselves at home. Every article we
took from our duffelbags was handled and closely scrutinized, and
presendy one enterprising youngster helped himself to one of my
cigarettes and lighted it. This started an immediate clamor for
equal rights from the others, and I confess, with a proper blush
of shame, that I handed out cigarettes to all of them. After a
long, tiring day on the trail the corruption of Chuncho youth
seemed a far lesser evil than the riot that would have ensued if
I had played favorites. By this time the mother or one of the
mother's had come upstairs and was leaning in the doorway
watching the proceedings. She was an enormous heifer of a
woman, as tall as I was and weighing over two hundred pounds,
and as die stood there she was cutting calluses, or something,
from her hands with a machete the size of a butcher's cleaver. I
breathed an inaudible, but fervent, prayer that none of the kids
wodd get sick from the cigarettes.

THE BIG PUSH

Ordinarily, if you arc trying to take a snapshot in Peru* every
able-bodied citizen within a mile's radius will rush unto the line
of focus and strike a pose. The Chunchos, however, are excep-
tions to the rule and notoriously camera-shy, and we pit in an
hour's hard work before we finally photographed diem. We
dished out cigarettes, chocolate and good-will right and left with
no effect. We even tried stealdi f but 2$ I was about to sneak a
picture I caught die large lady with the machete staring at me
balcfully and thought better of die idea. Finally our problem
was solved by good old Baldwin-Lopez, who was about as
camera-shy as Mae West. He posed for his picture while die
Chunchos looked on, and when they saw how much he enjoyed
it they decided they might as well have a try too. Herman stood
off with the camera and shouted directions, I lined up with the
Noble Savages, tried to look like Stanley in Darkest Africa, and
hoped that the animal-life on my neighbors' robes would stay
where it was. But when die photographs were later developed,
it was esthctically just about a stand-off between die Chunchos
and Ullman. The Noble New Yorker, widi his last bath and
shave ten days behind him, was no bargain either.

The last lap was die longest. The distance between Santa Rosa
and Yessap, on Ac Pkhis River, Js oraity-eight miles, and white
twenty-eight miles is not very much in terms of carburetor and
cylinder it is plenty in terms of a mule for whom two-and-a-
half miles an hour is practically racing. We were on die march
from six to six, without a stop.

A short way out from Santa Rosa we suddenly became aware
of a new sound mingled with die familiar jungle noises. At first
it eluded us; then, as it grtw louder, we recognized k. It wts
the beating of a tom-tom. Soon -we eocomtxsrec! groups of
Chunchos passing along die toul, and when they reached a point
at which the sound came direcdy from die right, they cut off
in its direction dirough what seemed impenetrable forest. Lopez
explained diat It was a feast-day of die tribe, and the ceremonies
were being held in a clearing near our present point on die tnaL

l8o THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

Sure enough, a brief break in the foliage beside the path soon
gave us a sudden view of a distant grassy slope, dotted with hu-
man figures, and with a thin column of smoke arising from a fire
in its center. Then it was gone, screened again by a wall of
vegetation. The rhythmic, hollow cadence of die tom-tom, how-
ever, followed us for an hour or more along the trail, faintly
baiting, beating, beating through the jungle. To one raised on
many *Tarzara" and "Trader Horns" its familiar, yet unfamiliar,
sound brought a strange feeling and familiar images and, I con-
fess, a faint tingling of the nerve-ends at the back of the neck,

We had now penetrated into the heart of a world of rivers.
The Pkhis broadened visibly as we rode beside it, and the streams
thtt crossed the trail to feed it were wider and deeper than on
the previous day. Some we f orded and some we crossed by sway-
ing suspension bridges. Later in the wet season, when they would
be swollen by many months of rain, dieir crossing would present
a real problem, for half the suspension bridges are washed away
each year and the streams to be forded would be boiling tor-
raits. Now, however, all the bridges were still intact diough
hardly substantial and in only one of the streams we forded did
we so much as get our feet wet. About noon we came to the
river with a name as euphonious as **Soupy Sue's" was apt
MiriatirianL It was larger than its aster-streams, and a half-awake
Indian in a dugout canoe was on hand to ferry men and mail
across, while the mules swam. On the far bank were the charred
rubs of what had once been Tambo MiriatirianL It had burned
down, Lopez told us, about six months before.

As die afternoon wore on it grew almost unbearably hot. We
wore tirtd; we were dirty; our backsides were sick to death of
the fed of nude; and Yessup seemed farther away than El Dorado.
During die morning Herman had suffered a nasty spill when
Wally fell in a siudfaole (inddcntally, die only time any of our
mules fdH during die entire trip) and he was feeling pretty
shaken up. I had no such specific complaint but, between an
epidermis that I judged would take at kast a week to rid of

THE BIG PUSH l8l

caked mud and a pair of buttocks that I knew were paralyzed far
life, I was not feeling in the sprightliest of humors either* Would
the damn trail never end?

To add to our rnorosencss, and as if in mockery of our woes,
an airplane suddenly droned overheadstartling and unreal in the
motionless immensity of sky and jungle. Lima-Iquitos: 2 days.
And \ve-~damn fools that we were were, of our own free will,
spending three weeks for the selfsame trip-plodding along
through a God-forsaken, sweating wilderness on mules, eating
dirty, ill-cooked food and sleeping in hovels, covering ourselves
with mud and sweat and insect bites, living in a state little better
than that of animals, when we might have traveled in dignity
and comfort, like civilized human beings! In ten seconds the
plane was gone from right-clear, quick, clean. Now, we thought,
it is already over Puerto Yessup, now over Bermudez, now jroar-*
ing down the Ucayali on powerful, humming motois And die
mules put one foot in front of die other, and thai the other foot
in front of that; and the sweat rolled down our faces and made
channels in the mud

We were standing knee-deep in the clear, swirling water,
our eyes looked out at the world through a film of soap lather.
About us the accumulated muck of ten days eddied away and
vanished in the swift flow of the Pkhis River. Fifty yards away,
on a green bank, rose the bamboo walk and high thatch roof of
Tambo Puerto Yessup, and before k was a forest of imde legs,
upturned and kicking. We thought we could sec Wally and Ed-
ward among them, scratching away their fast memories of us as
we were soaping away our last memories of them.

^Comd^C&md^T cried the tamboieeper, gesturing at us
from the bank.

As I came up out of the river my body was cool and clean and
tingling. Before me in the west the red sun was just disappear-
ing behind a range of distant hills-the last of the Andes. We had
come through them~up their farther sick, across their summits,

l82 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

down their nearer sick-through their mud and rivers and
jungles. The Pichis Trail was behind us, and in the clear, clean
sunset of that final day I knew I wouldn't exchange it for the
Normmdie, the Yankee dipper and the Twentieth Century
Limited rolled into one.

VII

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD

WE AWOKE early the following day, to experience that
sense of pleasant excitement which accompanies die
knowledge that one is about to undertake something
new. Mules, mud, tmbos and jungle trails were behind us; for
the next six weeks and the next three thousand miles our life
would be on the rivers of the Amazon.

I say "rivers of the Amazon" advisedly. At Puerto Yessap we
were still a thousand miles from die Amazon proper, and to
reach it we had first to descend the Pichis River, then the
Pachirea, then the UcayaJi, almost to Iquitos. But although we
were technically far away from the line on die imps labeled
"Amazon," we were actually already well within its vast pro-
vince, and had been, indeed, since we encountered the first
eastward-flowing mountain streams outside of Tanra, For the
word "Amazon," in its genuine significance, does not so much
mean any individual river as it does die whole enormous net-
work of rivers which cover die center of die South American
continent and drain an area larger than that of die United States.
Call the stream that flows by Puerto Yessup the Pichis River, or
whatever you like; it is part and parcel of Amazonia, And from
within wo hundred miles of the Pacific Ocean, across the widest
part of the continent to the Atlantic, our route f rom this point
on would lie along one great, continuous, inland waterway*

Eastern Peru is dependent exclusively upon die Amazon for
its transportation and communication. Three large tributary rivers
branch south from the main stream in die extreme north of the
country die Maranon, the HuaUaga and the UcayalL Their
courses are almost parallel, separated from each other by two
or three hundred miles, and each has its source some thousand

183

184 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

miles south of the Amazon proper, in approximately the latitude
of Lima. All are large, sweeping streams when they reach the
Amazon, but, of the three, the Ucayali is the largest and by far
the most important. Both the Maranon and Huallaga flow for
the greater part of their length through the Andean highlands
and are navigable for launches or steamships for only a few
hundred miles below the points at which they break through
the plateau and reach the lowlands of the montana. The Ucayali,
on die other hand, flows east of the easternmost range of the
Andes; its course is entirely through the flat jungle country, and
it b therefore navigable, as are its tributaries, for virtually its
entire length. It is the great central artery of Peru's mentma and
carries a full seventy-five percent of its commerce. Starring at
Puerto Yessup on the Pichis, proceeding from the Pichis to the
Pachitca, to the Ucayali, to the Amazon proper, and finally fol-
lowing die Amazon along its full length to the Atlantic, we
would be making the longest continuous river journey possible
on the whole Amazonian system which is the same as saying
the longest continuous river journey in the world.

At Yessup, however, our thoughts were not so much on the
next three thousand miles as on the next thirty by canoe to
Puerto Bermudez. It was there, or a few miles beyond, that we
would be picked up by the mail-launch, the exact spot depending
upon the depth of the river at the moment and the luck of the
launch in dodging sandbars. At the height of the rainy season,
the launches can get through all the way to Bermudez; in the
dry season they often cannot get fardier than Masisea, one hun-
dred and fifty miles farther down, and it is necessary to travel
three or four days by canoe. Theoretically this was the rainy
season; but so far k had been a rainy season practically without
ran, and all we knew was that die launch was somewhere be-
tween us and Iquitos.

We disssed and breakfasted in unaccustomed leisure, for our
knee-boots were now consigned to the duffelbags, and the fif-
teen minutes formerly devoted to lacing diem were ours to waste
as we chose. Meanwhile, cm die river bank in front of the tmnbo.

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 185

the mail sacks were being loaded into the canoes. These were
all of the dugout variety, cut in one piece from the trunk of die
huge ceiba tree, but of varying sizes. The largest was an enor-
mous craft, well over fifty* feet in length; the other two weft
perhaps thirty and twenty-five feet, respectively. None of diem,
however, was more than four feet in width at its widest point,
and it was almost a miracle of equilibrium that they could cany
their heavy loads of mail and men without capsizing. When
underway, their gunwales were never more than two inches
above water, but only once or twice did so much as a drop lap
over into the canoes.

Our good friend, Baldwin-Lopez, bide us good-by with *
cheery "Hello, meester! 1 * and at his own suggestion posed for a
final snapshot. Edward and Wally we saw only at a distance;
this was their one day of grace before beginning the return
trip to La Merced with die westbound mail, and they were far
too busy in pasture to be concerned with farewells. We perched
ourselves atop what seemed die softest mail bags in die middle-
sized canoe, the senior partner of our crew of two tooted
vocif eroudy on a shell horn, and we were off to the races.

"Off to the races'* is not merely a metaphor. Later in its
course die Kchis River flattens out into a deep, evenly flowing
stream, but here at Yessup, and for some miles bdow, it is a
bouncing, pmikish, mountain torrent. Five minutes out and we
were in white water, swishing through rapids, grinding ova: the
gravel bottom, playing cops and robbers with projecting boul-
ders. There was no paddling to be done-only steering, and the
two boatmen direaded us in and out between die rocks like a
halfback running a broken-fidd in a f ootbtfl game. They got as
much enjoyment out of k as if they were making die trip for
die first rime in their lives, instead of perhaps die thoosanddi.
Each rime we accomplished a successful maneuver one of diem
would toot triumphandy on the shell horn, and we would dien
puU up near diore and wait to see how the odier canoes would
fare coming through. The largest of die canoes, as it turned oot,
of tea didn't fare so wdL It would zoom into the rapids, widi its

l86 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

crew of six brandishing their paddles like demons and its cargo
of mail within one inch of the swirling water, waver from side
to side as eddies and cross-currents squeezed it, and end up
backside forward against a convenient rock. Whereupon its crew
would pile out into the water, pry it loose, and brandish their
paddles again until they brought up against the next impasse.
Each time they came through they blew their horns (they had
two) defiantly at us and waited, in turn, for the third canoe to
try its luck. It was more fun than a picnic at the asylum, but I
recommend to anyone contemplating sending a letter over this
mail-route that he dispatch it with a cellophane wrapping,
waterwings, and a fervent prayer.

Our particular craft fared fabulouly well until the last series
of rapids (there were six in all), where we came to a sudden
sadewise halt in what looked like a half-submerged granite quarry.
The two boatmen got out and pushed, but the canoe stuck fast.
Herman and I then removed our shoes and socks, rolled up our
trousers and joined them. I'm afraid we were neither very com-
fortable nor very impressive, slithering about on the sharp stones
while the rushing water sought to knock our feet out from under
us; but we must have been of some help indeed, too much help
for almost immediately the canoe came free and began scooting
away as if it had suddenly acquired a six-cylinder motor. With
a lunge that would have done credit to the Young-Man-on-the-
Flying-Trapeze, one of the boatmen succeeded in catching its
stern as it went by, and in a moment we were in command of
our ship again. A half-inch shorter reach, however, and the
Iquitos mail would have been en route to its destination without
benefit of human guidance.

Beyond the last rapids the river leveled off into a regular, un-
broken sweep, but its waters were sriU mountain-fresh and clear.
Pleasantly relaxed after the excitement of the post hour, we lay
back on the mail sacks, sunning ourselves and watching the un-
broken walls of jungle slip by on either side. Soon the sound of
the rushing waters behind us had faded into die distance, but it

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 187

was not long before we were brought upright by another sound,
strange and startling in the silent wilderness.

"Damned if it's noc dynamite," said Herman.

And it was. Rounding a bend in the river we came upon two
men in a small dugout. They were fishing, but not in a manner
we had ever seen before, As we passed, one of them took a stick
of dynamite from the bottom of the boat, attached the detonator,
and hurled it out into the water. In a moment there was *
muffled roar from the depths of the river, and the surface
churned and boiled. As the commotion subsided, the contents
of the depths began to float up into view: fish, eels, snakes, sub-
marine vegetation, slimy, indeterminate things for which even
the Museum of Natural History would noc have a name. The
fishermen then paddled among the debris and secured whit they
wanted of it with nets. This method of fishing, we subsequently
discovered, is the common practice in all the Amazonian rivers.
There is so much animal and vegetable matter in the water for
fish to feed upon that they will seldom take a hook, The Indians
harpoon them with great patience and skill. The white men dyna-
mite them out. Hardly a sporting procedure, one is apt to feel,
but along the Amazon fishing is not a sport. Often k is the only
method of sustaining life.

After eight days on die Kchis Trail, we had almost forgotten
die institution of die midday meal and were therefore consider-
ably surprised when, about noon, the canoes pit in at a lonely
riverside hacienda and our boatmen announced: "Ahnuerzo"
The stopping-place proved to be die home of the mail-contractor
in whose canoes we were traveling, and his hospitality far outdid
his transportation facilities. He was a man in his middle forties,
soft-spoken and well-educated He had been bom and raised, he
told us, in Arcquipa, but at twenty-five had come to die mem-
tarn and stayed. He had an Indian wife and eight children whom
he was educating himself and apparently with rather good suc-
cess. He declared he was going to take all eight of them to Lima
in die near future, but seemed a bit doubtful as to whether he
would live through the experience. Meanwhile he had succeeded

l88 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

in hacking an astonishingly comfortable and well-kept hacienda
out of the wilderness, and the meal he served us was the best we
had had since leaving Lima, not even excepting Nat Whittens
Bolivar,

Read a dozen travel books about any one country and you
will get a dozen different accounts of the hospitality or lack of
hospitality of its natives. It is one subject on which no two
travelers ever agree. My own experience in Peru was almost
identical with what I had previously encountered in a dozen-odd
countries of Europe: in the large cities or tourist centers you
get what you pay for (or slightly less); in the undeveloped
hinterland the traveler who neither gives offense nor arouses sus-
picion is welcomed and accommodated as a matter of course,
without thought of profit. I have heard often enough from
gringos who have lived long below the equator that the average
Latin-American is a grasping, greedy fellow; and there is ample
evidence to support the accusation. Perhaps I was not in Peru
long enough to give validity to my observations, but my per-
sonal experiences were directly to the contrary. In Lima, to be
sure, there were the inevitable debates with cab drivers and
waiters, but on the entire overland trip to Iquitos I did not once
encounter the outstretched arm or the itching palm. Sometimes
when we stopped off at a hacienda or chacra we would be
charged a nominal sum for food and lodging; at other times
our hosts would accept nothing, and occasionally even took
offense at our offers to pay,

"No esta un hotel, senor? I was told by the poverty-stricken
owner of a hut on the Amazon when I tried to give hiin a sol in
return for a night's shelter under his thatch roof.

No, I have knocked around a bit in various corners of the
world and I have never yet found a back-country host whether
he bear the appellation of hill-billy, pay same, Bauer or cholo
who was out to "do" the traveler. As for the acquisitive instinct
in higher and more civilized places who am I to talk about Peru,
who come from die city of Tammany Hall?

Our Kchis River lunch was of the gratis variety. The mail-

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 189

contractor stared at our proffered sok* as if they were scorpions
we had pulled from our pockets and shook his head viokiidy;
the best we could do to show our appreciation was to hand em
pennies to the eight offspring. They were better business men
than their father and should do well in Lima when he finally
takes them there on that big trip.

Shortly after we had pushed off in the canoes, it began to nun,
and the downpour continued throughout the two-hour journey
to Puerto Bermudas The canoes, heavily laden to begin with,
now almost sank from sight beneath the water under the weight
of their water-soaked cargoes. The other two craft, pushing along
beside ours, looked simply like a collection of canvas sacks float-
ing downstream, with a few shipwrecked oarsmen perched on
top of them. It was with considerable surprise that we discov-
ered, upon reaching Bcrmudez, that the canoes were still with us
after all, deep down under their dripping superstructure of
mail and men.

Puerto Bermudcz-a pin-point cm die map, a huddle of
thatched huts in the jungle, kit a veritable metropolis to us, who
had not seen a structure outranking a tambo for eight days and
nights! The village squatted on top of a high mudbank, and
as we coasted in, die entire population of some scrcncy-five hu-
mans and five hundred dogs lined up along its crest to watch
us. There was no steam-bunch in evidence, but two Jaife dug-
outs, one with an outboard motor, were pulled up on the shore.
These, it developed, had been sent op by the bunch to collect
the mail and passengers (if my), die larger craft having en-
countered sandbar trouble about thirty miles downstream. It was
five in the afternoon -when we reached Bcrmudcz, The mail
sacks, we were told, were to be transferred to the other canoes
immediately. We would leave in them at seven

Bcrmudez had one unkjae f eatore: an enterprising hoed keeper.
He met us halfway up die mud embankment and greeted us
cordially*

u ComdM & hotel,

190 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

We told him we were leaving at seven and would have dinner
later in the evening on the launch. The mail-contractor our
good host at lunch, who had come down with die canoes to
Bcrmudcz corrolx>rated us.

**Si, snores, muy buma comda a hmcha. Nos vtmos a siete
pronto"

The hotel keeper, disappointed, went away, and we set about
the earnest business of killing time. We inspected die town's
ten thatched huts and one brick edifice (the post office), watched
the transference of the mail and our baggage from one canoe to
another, and kicked a soccer ball around with the mail-contractor
and some of his Bermudian friends. Presently it grew dark, and he
excused himself.

**I am dining with my cousin," he explained. "I shall see you
it eleven o'clock."

"But we're leaving at seven, aren't we?"

"Seven, senor? No. No, indeed. The canoes cannot go until
rihe moon has risen. That will be at eleven prontoF

And with a friendly wave of the hand he was off. We re-
paired to the thatched hut with die sign "HOTEL" and told the
proprietor that we or somebodyhad changed our minds. We
would like comida very much indeed. He looked at us with a
pained expression.

"Sefiores, I am sorry I am apesadimbrado. But you said you
were leaving. I ate all the food there was myself."

He accompanied us while we tried our luck at the other
huts; but apparendy the village was in the grip of famine. One
householder offered us a cluster of green bananas; another said
diat earlier in the day he had seen a large turde on the river
bank and we might be able to catch it; the rest just said "No oi"
and let it go at that. The hotel keeper was a broken man.

"Sertores, at least accept the hospitality of my rooms. I have
two fine beds, with very few roaches."

We thanked him, tot explained we were leaving at eleven.
There would be no point in going to bed for three or four
horns. After he left us we sat cm the mudbank, watching the

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 191

river and swatting mosquitoes. The hours dragged post, ami
finally eleven o'clock came-but* with it, neither moon nor mail-
contractor. At eleven-thirty we went after him at his cousin's
house.

"Ah, senores!" he cried when he saw us. "This is a delightful
visit. Come you must have a glass of pisco with my cousin and
myself." And he ushered us in and poured out the drinks.

"But weren't we to leave at eleven? n

"Alas, seriores there was some mistake. At a certain time of die
month the moon rises at eleven, but this is not the time* Tonight
there is no moon until four. We shall leave at four~prcm;o"

Laden with pisco and somber thoughts, we returned to the
hotel. It was locked and in darkness, and though we knocked
and shouted for fifteen minutes, we could elicit no response
from within.

"The hell with it," opined Herman. "Let's get cmr blankets
from the canoe and deep on the bank."

We descended to the boats and began fumbling about in the
dark. One of the ckolos, asleep on the mail sacks, woke up and
grunted.

"Equip*]*" we sakL

"Equipaje M hotel" he replied, and went to deep again,

At five-thirty a friendly hand was placed cm my shodder as
I sat on my fallen tree trunk by the bank. In the dim light I saw
the beaming face of the mail-contractor.

"Buenos dw, senvr? he chirruped. "I/Jferf * bien d&rmhr?"

I looked at him dully. Why was the fiend so f ricndly and well
meaning? Why couldn't he be just Ac slightest bit offensive, give
me just the faintest excuse to tell him what I thought of him
and his cousin and his eight children and Puerto Bermudez and
Peru and South America and every damn, dumb "spik" that
ever lived. But no life doesn't work in soch obliging fashion.

"Come," he said instead, "My cousin has prepared some hot
coffee for you, and the hotd keeper is bringing your baggage
from your rooms. The canoes will leave in half-an-hour."

And I'll be damned if they didn't!

Ip2 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

Even the combined effects of a sleepless, shelterless night and
the righteous wrath \vithin our breasts could not dull the beauty
and excitement of that hour-and-a-half trip down the river to the
launch. By excitement, in this instance, I do not mean rapids or
crocodiles or speed; I mean the clean, sharp thrill that comes
to one who is awake in a perfect daybreak, feeling the world
about him beginning to stir, watching nature's solemn magic
of preparation for the sun. It was sail dark when we pushed
off from Bermudez* mudbank into the quiet stream dark, but
with a faintly growing pallor that lent to everything it touched
a strange and misty unreality. Since there was only one outboard
motor between the two canoes, they had been lashed together,
gunwale to gunwale. As we gathered speed the dark waters
foamed and swished in the narrow space between the two craft,
and in the stern of the larger, the propeller beat out its muffled
whirr.

Below Bermudez, the Pichis begins to widen and its water,
clear and transparent in its upper reaches, becomes an opaque
tan. There was no ripple, no faintest motion on its surface as the
slim prows of the two dugouts cut it in a double furrow. We
lay back against the mail sacks, watching the river and shore slide
past. Imperceptibly the outline of things sharpened. The vegeta-
tion that overhung the banks sucked color from the brightening
sky; presently the trees and undergrowth were no longer gray,
but green, and we could see them dripping with the moisture
of early morning. Behind its riverfront screen the forest silence
was suddenly, magically turned into a wild cacophony of bird
and insect sounds. And with that startling abruptness character-
istic of tropic dawn and dusk, the sun was all at once lying upon
the horizon, its long level beams streaming across the tree tops
into our tired eyes. At such a time one can forgive the wilder-
ness its mud and mosquitoes, its heat and fever and inhospitality
to man we could almost forgive our good host, the mail-con-
tractor, his unholy machinations. Thought and emotion are out
of place. The purposes, cares and needs of human living are,
for the moment, irrelevant and remote. A man's function is to

WE REACH THE "HUANA CAP\C AT DAWN

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 193

see and hear nothing more; to be aware and quietly, over-
whelminglyto be glad he is alive.

The canoes had negotiated perhaps fifty turns of the winding
river, and each vista was the same as the last: water, jungle and
brightening sky. At the fifty-first nature remained constant, but
man suddenly obtruded into the picture. Pulled up against the
right bank of the stream in sleepy solitude was the steam-launch,
its nose resting in a mudbank, a thin feather of smoke curling
upward from its funnel. From its lower deck, as we approached,
came a welcoming chorus of moos, grunts, squeals and cackles,
but on the upper deck, which appeared to be the section of the
boat reserved for homo sapiens, there was no indication of life.
The canoes came to rest alongside and we saw in faded gilt letters
that the name of our new home was the Huana Capac. The crew
of the canoes began transferring the mail to the launch and
finally, after ten minutes of waiting for signs of an officer or
sailor, we transferred ourselves too. Our route over the lower
deck lay across the backs of three sleeping hogs, past a cookstove
and two cows and finally over a pile of chicken crates and ba-
nanas to the companionway. As we reached the upper deck a
diminutive figure in striped pajamas popped from a nearby cabin
and began shouting. Almost immediately other figures, also in
striped pajamas, popped from other cabins. In a twinkling the
deserted ship was a riot of officers and crew, commands and
counter-commands, thudding mail sacks and hoarse, excited toots
from the ship's whistle. We tried to engage die attention of one
of the pajama-clad apparitions, but without success; so we poked
around until we found an empty cabin, threw our baggage on
the floor and ourselves on the bunks. . . ,

About an hour later we were awakened by a frenzied tooting
of the whistle and redoubled turmoil in the barnyard below.
Emerging on deck, we found that we were underway, and that
during our brief deep the striped jack-in-the-boxes had under-
gone a metamorphosis into something resembling a ship's person-
nel The diminutive one who had popped out first turned out to

Ip4 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

be the commandmte, and later in the day he was most apologetic
for his failure to welcome us properly.

"I did not at first know who you were, senores," he explained.

A few minutes later we saw our own faces in a mirror for the
first time in ten days.

"You know," said Herman, stroking the half-inch stubble on
his cheeks and chin, "I kind of know what the commodore meant.
If I saw anything with a face like that come into my boat I'd
shoot him on sight."

As steamships go, the Huana Capac was not at the head of the
class. She was small, she was rusty and dirty, and her wood-burn-
ing furnace and engine were a thin gasp ahead of the junkman.
But on the Pichis River she was undisputed queen of die roost,
and at every village and hacienda her prodigious tootings would
draw the entire population to the bank to watch her. To us, too,
at least on that first day aboard, she was a museum of wonders.
Pillows, a tablecloth, a showerbath, a toilet that sometimes flushed.
We had almost forgotten the existence of such phenomena in the
world of mules and tambos through which we had been pass-
ing. It was one of the most attractive features of our trip that
we had made the jump from civilization to primitiveness in one
fell swoop, but that the return jump was in gradual stages. From
the Pichis Trail to Para, at the mouth of the Amazon, each of
our successive homes, whether traveling or stationary, would be
just a little more comfortable than the last. It gave us the satis-
fying sense of fighting our way from the primeval wilderness
back into the world we knew by slow, hard-won degrees. The
Huana Capac was Degree No. i, and for all its humble decrepi-
tude, it was a long step away from mud floors and Chuncho
roommates.

The most thorough inspection possible* short of dismantling
the engines, required less than five minutes. Our new home was
some fifty feet in length and perhaps eighteen in breadth. On
the upper of her two decks were two cabins (one the commm-
dmte > s > the other ours by right of forced entry), together form-

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD

ing the only enclosed space on the launch. Aft of them, on the
open deck, was the dining table and still farther aft the pantry,
water-closet, shower and other marvels of niid-nineteenth cen-
tury plumbing. The lower deck was an indescribable chaos of
engines, boilers, kitchen, firewood, cows, hogs, chicken crates,
crew and smells. Secured alongside the ship's middle was a
squat, iron barge, perhaps half her size, which fulfilled the same
general functions as the lower deck, in addition to containing
die bunks or hammocks of the crew. The other passengers, when
they began showing up, slept in the open on the upper deck,
either in hammocks they carried with them or on the dining
table. Though several held what for obscure reasons were called
first-class tickets, none disputed our possession of the lone
cabin. After the first night with our variegated and hungry room-
mates we understood why.

At our sandbank starting point the Huana Capac's roster read
as follows:

Officers 3

Crew I*

Cows 6

Hogs i?

Chickens Hundreds

Rats Thousands

Cockroaches Millions

Passengers Lord and Ullman

During the day, however, we began picking up other travelers
a sergeant of police bound for Pucalpa; a young boy with a
monkey who informed us he was on his way to high-school in
Iquitos but who left the boat at a village ten miles farther on; a
silent, sinister old man who boarded the launch, slung his ham-
mock across the deck, and lay there without a word until he dis-
appeared at Masisea. Then there were two or three stops for
firewood, which the natives at various points along the bank had
stacked near the water in anticipation of the launch's coming;
and another two or three for no other reason than to permit

196 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

our commandante to enjoy a half-hour's conversation with ac-
quaintances at the haciendas along the route. All in all, the
progress of the Huana Capac was regal, but hardly rapid.

Toward evening, we nosed into the mud at a settlement called
Carhuapanas, where we had been told there was an American
missionary. As it turned out, there was not only one, but two a
Pennsylvania Dutchman called Reifsnyder and a young Califor-
nian called Rankin.

"Jesus Christ, but it's good to see a Yank!" shouted Herman,
and we were off to a fine start with the reverends.

Reifsnyder, a man in late middle-life, told us he had been do-
ing missionary work in the montana of Peru for many years
the last five at Carhuapanas. He had a colony of about fifty
Chunchos, who affected the usual monk's robes, headdresses and
achiote paint of their stock, but the cleanliness of whose persons
and dwellings were unique among the Indians we had seen.
Among those who came aboard the launch was a boy of about
ten who spoke excellent, though reluctant, English. The Chun-
chos' confidence, the missionary said, was difficult to gain, but
once it was secured, he had found them willing and capable, both
to work and to learn.

Soon the Huana Capac's whistle was vociferously shrieking.

"Well er shucks," said Herman, "it sure was good to see a
couple of Americans." And we left them standing on the mud-
bank, surrounded by their cleanly, and presumably godly,
Chunchos.

We awoke in the morning to the sound of terrific mooing
and bellowing. We were pulled up at the village of Puerto Vic-
toria, and one of the calves who had tenanted the lower deck
was laid out on the bank in the process of being slaughtered! Two
of the crew were astride its neck, trying to locate the spinal
cord with a chisel and hammer, and the rest were distributed
over its legs, back and head, holding it down. It was hardly an
edifying spectacle-especially to a city-bred innocent whose
usual acquaintance with roast beef begins and ends at the dining-

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 197

room table; but it is a procedure one must soon become accus-
tomed to in back-country Peru. Where there is no ice, there is
no cold storage, and where there is no cold storage, one's meat
has to be carried along alive until one is ready to eat it. Each
day on the Huma Capac began with a riverside welter of moo-
ing and blood, and all morning long a red pool widened on the
lower deck as ribs and haunches dripped themselves dry. In the
city, when you dine on your chops and steaks, their past is as
dark as their future. For all you know they may have grown
on trees. But they don't grow on trees in Peru's montana.

Puerto Victoria is situated at the confluence of the Pichis
and the Pachitea, and from there on for the next two days, we
were on the latter river. It is wider, deeper and slower than
the Pichis, but its banks are the same mile on endless mile
of mudbanks and low-lying forest, broken at long intervals by
the clearing of a village or a solitary thatched hut. Indeed, from
Puerto Yessup three thousand miles to Para and the Atlantic
Ocean, the scenery of the river banks scarcely ever varied. Hour
after hour, day after day, for weeks, it repeated itself, like the
ever-returning scenes in a revolving cyclorama on a stage. Tra-
verse one square mile of river and jungle and you will find them
a wonderland of lavish variety; traverse a continent of them and
you will find that very variety, multiplied three-thousandfold,
becomes an appalling, overwhelming monotony.

The country on the left bank of the Pachitea, past which we
were now moving, was the home of the Cashivo Indians, known
to history or at least to South American adventure literature
as cannibals. I should like to be able to report that our launch
was pursued by a whole tribe of them in war canoes, or at least
that we attended their unholy rites and enjoyed a sizzling platter
of missionary stew; but unfortunately nothing of the sort hap-
pened. In fact, so far as we know, we did not even see a
Cashivo. The Indians who loitered along the bank or helped load
the launch with wood when we stopped looked neither more
ferocious nor better nourished than the usual yucca-eating abo-

198 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

rigines, and if they cast interested glances at us they were at our
wrist-watches and cigarettes rather than at our spareribs.

Between Puerto Yessup and Iquitos I made many inquiries
about the Cashivos from missionaries, stray gringos and educated
natives. From the consensus of replies it appears that the tribe
has by this time been almost completely decimated and that its
few remaining members have retired from the vicinity of the
river far back into the jungle. All agreed that the Cashivos do-
or did practice cannibalism, but only of a ritualistic, or religious,
kind. That is to say, they do not eat human flesh primarily as
food; they eat it only under particular circumstances connected
with their tribal superstitions and religion. Cannibalism, as prac-
ticed in the South Sea Islands before European domination, usu-
ally took the form of eating the remains of a dead chieftain or
relative so that his spirit, supposedly still imprisoned within the
body, might be perpetuated in the bodies of those who ate him.
Among the Cashivos the theory is the direct opposite it is their
custom to eat the bodies of slain tribal enemies and wrong-
doers among their own number, so that the evil spirits of the
deceased may be destroyed simultaneously with their flesh. The
preparing and consuming of the body is accompanied by elabo-
rate ritual, the whole procedure being much more in the nature
of a religious ceremony than a meal. Undoubtedly this shows
the Cashivos in a happier light than if they practiced cannibalism
on behalf of their appetites, but it would probably be no great
consolation to a prospective meal, tied up in the kitchen and
watching the kettle boil.

During the early afternoon the launch tied up at a small settle-
ment called Agua Caliente and we went ashore to encounter not
a Cashivo, but a Californian. His name was Gillespie, he was not
a missionary, and the Frigidaire in his white-painted, screened
bungalow was full of beautiful, cold beer. He was on the Pachitea,
he told us, as advance geologist for a California oil company
that was soon to begin drilling for petroleum in this section. He
had been alone in Agua Caliente for three months and said

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 199

we were the first wandering gringos who had come his way. We
felt guilty at drinking his precious beer, but far preferred guilt
to abstinence, and partially squared accounts by presenting him
with a pint of scotch whisky we had brought along unopened
from Lima. Halfway through the second round we heard the
Htuma Capac tooting its imminent departure and emerging from
Gillespie's bungalow we saw the cofrnnandartte gesturing excit-
edly from the bridge for us to get a move on.

"Wait a minute," said our host. "This will never do."

"But they're leaving," we explained.

"The heU they are!" he replied, and waved the bottle in his
hand. "Cerveza, coTnmandante, cerveza!"

Glenn Cunningham could have made the distance from bridge
to bungalow no more quickly than did the c&mmandmte, and
an hour later we were still wiping foam from our whiskers. I
don't know how much Gillespie knew about oil and geology,
but he knew plenty about Peruvians.

Later in the day the temperature soared from its usual hun-
dred-odd to altitudes undreamed of by the thermometer. Far
from bringing relief, night clamped itself down like a lid over
the rim of the earth, suffocating by Its weight all motion, all
sound, all energy of life. There was no moon, no stars, and yet,
it seemed, no clouds. The earth around us and the sky above were
shapeless, formless, possessed of no qualities or attributes save
heat. The usually garrulous Hwrna Capac glided silently down-
stream, a ghost-ship on a ghostly river. The black water swished
tiredly against her sides, and the turning of her engines was a
faint, far-off hum.

I lay on the forward deck near the pilot wheel and watched
the bank slip by. Somber and unreal, it slid up out of the dark-
ness ahead, glimmered for a moment in the faint glow of the
ship's lights, and sUd again into the darkness behind. No air
stirred. The palms overhanging the water loomed motionless and
dead the outposts of a petrified forest.

The illuminated dial of my wrist-watch caught the corner of

20O THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

my eye ten minutes of nine. At ten minutes of nine the taxis
are roaring in West Forty-fifth Street. Like wild animals stam-
peding, they charge down from Sixth Avenue on the green light
to disgorge their cargoes of ermine and white shirt front beneath
the glittering marquees of the theaters. Now the curtains are go-
ing up. In thirty darkened houses from Times Square to Colum-
bus Circle the rustle of programs and small-talk is dying away;
the ushers sneak furtively up the aisle; the show is on. In thirty
houses men and women are sitting with their eyes on the stage,
sitting in the darkness waiting to be amused, moved, thrilled,
shocked, bored. Some lean forward in their seats, eyes bright with
expectancy. Others lean back, their features as rigid and com-
posed as the petrified palms along this breathless jungle river.

For the most part they are sleek, well-fed men and women.
They are the patrons of Art, and Art is a luxury for the full-
bellied. To understand Art one's body must be not too hot and
not too cold, one must have a good dinner dispersing calories
through the blood stream, one's back must not ache from labor
and one's eyes must not be clouded by sweat or blood. This is
culture, civilization. This is man, triumphant over nature, at the
center of his man-made universe. This is genus homo exercising
his highest, most complex functions, the critical, the philosophi-
cal, the esthetic. Behind each rising curtain is adventure for the
mind and the spirit. There is beauty, perhaps, and laughter, com-
passion and understanding. El Dorado the Gilded One is stand-
ing in the wings. . . .

The helmsman close beside me wipes the sweat from his face
with a grimy hand and spits on the deck. His tired eyes scan
the dark reaches of the winding river; his body, emaciated from
the ravages of fever but still strong from years of physical labor,
is not tired, but heavy and numb, like the heavy, numb equatorial
night about him. He is thinking dully of his adobe and thatch
cottage down-river at Pucalpa. By die time he reaches it his
wife will have been delivered of her brat their tenth. Carrajo!
Another one to feed, to clothe, to make room for on one of die
two bamboo mats.

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 2OI

In the forests beside the winding river the mangoes and papa-
yas hang heavy from the trees. Here, in the green gloom, is the
wildest profusion of nature that exists anywhere on earth: plants
and animals to feed man and clothe him, stout wood to shelter
him, minerals to make him rich. But among this fabulous wealth
man lives in direst poverty. It is his if he can get it, but to get it
he must pit himself against all the armaments of a hostile world;
against other men, wild beasts, snakes, insects, strangling under-
growth, mud, flood, fever, heat. He is beyond the help of man's
mechanical ingenuity. His railroad in a jungle trail along which
he must hack his way with a machete; his freight car is his own
back; his food and his shelter he must find for himself in the same
way as^ do the jaguar, the peccary and the armadillo. Here genus
homo is no longer the center of his own, man-made world, but
merely another species in the vast weaving web of evolution. In
the granite and concrete cities, where men have reduced all na-
ture to subservience, there is time, even among the lowliest, for
thoughts and plans beyond the moment's pressing need. But not
here. Here there is no tomorrow, no future. There is only the
mango to be plucked, the turtle to be caught, the burden to be
carried, the path to be cut through the jungle. Food, shelter and
sleep are not the means to the end of civilized, human living, but
the end of life itself.

Presently the steersman reaches behind him and pulls a cord.
The little ship's bell rings twice, tinny and forlorn in the heavy
night. Nine o'clock. After a moment a figure appears from the
darkness and takes over the wheeL The relieved man yawns, spits
meditatively on the deck and goes below; not to the theater;
not to his soul's refreshment, but to sleep.

And the Gilded Man?

In Amazonia the Gilded Man is tomorrow's meal.

The bodily structure of the Huana Capac had its full quota of
defects, but there was nothing the matter with her lungs. They
were brass-lined and tireless, and our daily progress was punctu-
ated by toots, shrieks and groans that would have done credit to

202 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

New Year's Eve in the French Casino. We soon discovered that
they were not spontaneous or haphazard, but were controlled by
an elaborate code; whistle-blowing is a major industry on the
Peruvian rivers and not to be taken lightly. Three long blasts
followed by three short ones signified imminent arrival at a port;
three short ones followed by three long ones meant imminent de-
parture. Three short ones by themselves meant actual arrival
and three long ones by themselves actual departure. One lone
short one indicated noon (noon was pretty badly neglected);
one long one constituted greetings in passing to a village or
hacienda on the bank; a whole flock of short ones was supposed
to mean lifeboat drill, but in the absence of lifeboats was simply
used by the c&mmandante to express general high spirits. In ad-
dition to its usual baritone register the whistle boasted a shrill
falsetto note of which everyone was very proud, but it was most
capricious in its use of it. Generally it made its appearance to-
ward the end of a deep and particularly impressive "long one,"
but occasionally it would oblige with a solitary peep, to the de-
light of all aboard except the commmdmte, who seemed to con-
sider it an affront to his professional dignity.

Early on the third morning of our journey we could tell
that momentous things were in the offing. For a solid hour the
whistle never stopped blowing, the only variation being an occa-
sional transition from baritone to falsetto and then back again. We
soon discovered that the cause of the uproar was threefold: (i)
we were about to enter the Ucayali River, (2) we were approach-
ing the town of Masisea, and (3) it was tie first day of Carnival.
The excitement of all three events coming simultaneously was
almost more than the antique constitution of the Humct Capac
could stand. As we swung from the Pachitea around a heavily
wooded point into the broad, northward-flowing stream of the
Ucayali, she trembled and staggered as if about to fall quite apart
from the intensity of her own emotion.

Within an hour we were safely nosed into the mud of Masisea,
the largest settlement we had encountered since leaving La
Merced. As usual, the entire human and canine population were

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 203

on hand to welcome us, but this time they were in gala array.
Carnival, the great midsummer festival of Peru, is celebrated each
year on the first Sunday, Monday and Tuesday in February*
(In Latin America it is a negligible holiday indeed which does
not merit at least a three-day observance.) During this period
virtually all work is suspended, and it is de rigueur to wear fancy
dress, dance in the streets, and hurl water, flour or perfume-filled
balloons at anyone you choose, preferably a member of the oppo-
site sex. Masisea was hardly a town of sufficient size or resources
to put on a very elaborate show; but its inhabitants made up in
enthusiasm what they lacked in paraphernalia, and as the Hzuma
Capac pulled in, it was greeted with a barrage of pretty nearly
everything on the premises that wasn't nailed down.

We, for our part, were to observe Carnival by spending the
whole day in town. The co?fimandante 9 it developed, was the
most accurate southpaw flour-thrower in the montana and had
no intention of wasting his talents in mid-river. In addition to
this, his flagship, hoarse and shaken after its morning exertions,
was badly in need of a day's rest. We strapped on our cameras,
climbed the embankment under a bombardment from the natives,
and proceeded to explore.

Masisea is one of those Peruvian back-country villages which
loom large and impressive on the map but shrink alarmingly
when encountered in person. Until a year ago, it had been the
nightly stop-over on the San Ramon-Iquitos airplane ruiv but
now that distinction had been transferred to the larger town of
Pucalpa, fifty miles downstream, leaving Masisea no function
except to sustain its own existence. It boasted a population of
some two thousand, a powerful wireless station, several stores
(all run by Chinamen), and a restaurant where warm beer could
be had for two soles y or the equivalent of fifty cents, a botde.

This was our first experience with the amazing extremes of
the cost of living in the montana. All native foods and products,
as well as living accommodations and transportation, were dirt-
cheap: a meal or a night's lodging rarely cost more than a sol;
bananas, papayas and other fruits were as-much-as-you-wanted

204 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

for ten centavos; our ten-day trip on the river everything in-
cludedamounted to less than twenty-five American dollars. But
when it came to items that had to be imported, the picture was
startlingly different. Beer two soles a bottle. Cheap cigarettes-
one sol for ten. Gasoline forty cents a gallon. Cardboard suit
cases five dollars apiece. Incredible at first sight, these prices are
easily understandable when one considers the isolation of the
region and the enormous difficulties of transportation. The beer
we drank in Masisea had been manufactured in Lima, less than
four hundred miles away, but it had been shipped to its destina-
tion by way of the Panama Canal and the Atlantic Ocean and
up the entire length of the Amazon and Ucayali rivers. No
wonder that for our bottle apiece we paid more than we would
have had to for a full dinner and a night's lodging together.

When we returned to the Huana Capac that good craft was
scarcely recognizable. Its funnel was festooned with confetti, its
sides spattered with flour, its decks a riot of passengers and
visitors throwing things at each other. Off in one corner the
commandant? and the police sergeant were engaged in a heated
argument, apparently over a question of fares and accommoda-
tions. Fists were being shaken, imprecations hurled; at any mo-
ment, it appeared, one of them would punch the other's nose,
or perhaps even draw a gun. Finally the cowmandante, who was
a man of action, ran out of threats.

"Espere aqui" he commanded. "Wait for me here."

With the slow dignity of a man preparing for a duel he walked
across the deck, picked up a paper sack of flour and with his
renowned accuracy hurled it straight into the sergeant's face.
The next time we saw the two together they were arm in arm
and drinking ptsco.

We tried to retire at our usual time, but it was no go. The
deck resounded to the hoots and shrieks of the merrymakers; as-
sorted projectiles zoomed through the open door of our cabin;
and the proximity of the ship to the shore resulted in the arrival
of visitors other than townspeople. For perhaps an hour we

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 205

slapped, scratched and swore; then we came out and joined the
festivities. If we had to swat something, we much preferred
senoritas to mosquitoes.

At six in the morning we blew three short ones and three long
ones. At six-thirty we repeated it, as well as at seven, seven-
thirty, eight, eight-thirty, and so around the clock to noon. At
twelve-thirty we actually cast off and began the four-hour jour-
ney downstream to Pucalpa. It was to be our last lap on the
Huana Capac, for at Pucalpa we were to transfer to a larger
launch for the remainder of the journey to Iquitos.

In Masisea we had picked up an assortment of new passengers,
most of them prospectors returning from the Rio Negro, a tribu-
tary of the upper Ucayali, where there had been a minor gold
rush during the past few months. Practically all had bottles and
sacks of gold dust stuffed about their persons the fruits of many
months of prospecting and washing which they were now tak-
ing to the government assay office at Iquitos. We subsequently
learned that the rumor of gold on the Negro had drawn two
thousand fortune-hunters to the region between December and
February. Very few, however, struck it really rich, and none of
our fellow-passengers had more than a few grains of the fine
yellow sand to show for their weeks of search and labor. It was
typical of the ever-recurrent pattern of booms and boomlets in
Amazonia. In that vast trackless wilderness only the luckiest of
men finds what he goes after, and even when he has found it
the lack of machinery and transportation facilities is likely to
make his discovery almost useless.

By this time both Herman and I had picked up enough
Spanish to enable us to communicate, at least in rudimentary
fashion, with people whom we met. We would usually divide
the work, one of us beginning a sentence and carrying on until
he ran dry, at which point the other, fresh and rested, would
step in and try to finish it. This was an admirable system in
many ways, the chief disadvantage being that the first and second

206 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

sections of our sentences scarcely ever had the slightest connec-
tion with each other. A peculiarly annoying, and paradoxical,
difficulty we had with the language was that die so-called "hard"
words came much easier to us than the so-called "simple" ones.
In the realm of Latin-derived polysyllables, English and Spanish
differ very little: stationary is estacionario; exigency is eodgencia;
mitigate is mitigar; salubrious is salubre; convalescence is con-
valeceneia; and so on. But when it came to the short everyday
words, life was not so simple. Sopa is not soap, but soup; ropa
is not rope, but clothing; and though caliente means hot, it means
a very special kind of hot, and a polite query to a senorita as to
whether she feels caliente on a sunny afternoon will result either
in a slap in the face or a venereal disease. All in all, I'm afraid,
we were better equipped to deliver a lecture at the university
than to discuss the weather with our table companions.

We reached Pucalpa in the late afternoon and found it to be a
slightly larger edition of Masisea. Carnival was still underway,
but with something of a second-day let down, and we succeeded
in getting ashore without being bombarded. The first thing we
ran into was, of all things, a railroad track. There it lay, run-
ning along the main street and out of sight up the river bank,
in bland defiance of the well-known fact that there is not a single
railroad in the entire montana of Peru. Its presence remained a
mystery to us until, after our arrival in Iquitos, we were en-
lightened by a resident gringo. A railroad from Cerro de Pasco,
in the high Andes, to Pucalpa, on the Ucayali, had for years been
a favorite dream of the Peruvian government. A stupendous
project, involving the penetration of hundreds of miles of moun-
tains and virgin jungle, it had actually progressed at one time
from the in estudio to the In projecto stage of existence. But not,
alas, to the in explotacion stage; not by a damn sight. Ten miles
of track were laid outside Cerro de Pasco at one end and two
miles through the streets of Pucalpa at the other, but by an
oversight, or something, the intervening four hundred miles were
neglected. In the ten years that have passed since the project

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 207

was begun, nothing further has been attempted, and today
Pucalpa's portion of the Trans-Peruvian Railway runs two miles
out into the jungle and reaches its terminus against the trunk of
a banana tree.

The Melitdy the larger launch on which we were to continue
our journey, was not due in Pucalpa until the following morning,
and we had the night to spend as we chose. The town boasted a
hotel, and the hotel boasted a bar. Thither we repaired.

"Well, if it isn't a pair of blooming beachcombers," opined a
voice as we entered. Tracking the voice down to its source be-
hind a large beer bottle, we discovered a young man with a pink
face and a chirrupy expression.

"Americano?* we inquired.

"Inglesa" he replied. "Sit down and pour yourselves one."

We did so, meanwhile introducing ourselves.

"I," said the Inglesa, "am David Ball, and I am the oldest living
inhabitant of Pucalpa."

An explanation seemed in order, and after a good swallow of
beer he supplied it.

"My home isor, rather, used to be in Lima, where I had a
wife, home, friends and other amenities of civilization. I seem
to recall too that I used to work for a British concern called the
Peruvian Trading Corporation, which sold machinery. Ten days
ago yes, a week ago last Thursday, to be exact it became neces-
sary for me to go to Iquitos for die company. The business was
urgent, and it was therefore decided that I should go by plane.
In that way I could reach my destination in two days, transact
my business and be back in Lima within a week."

"And you're on the return trip now?"

The Inglesa stared at us over his beer. There was something
wild and disquieting in his eye.

"No, gentlemen," he said. "I am not on my return trip. I am
still on my way to Iquitos. / h&ve been in this Qod-damned t&wn
-for nine days"

"But, if you're flying, how is it that"

208 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

"As you probably know, Pucalpa is the overnight stop on the
San Ramon-Iquitos route. You're supposed to change here from
the land-plane that goes over the mountains to a hydroplane that
goes down the river. Well, the land-plane got me here all right,
on schedule, but there was no hydroplane to meet it. All the
hydroplanes were out hunting for an aviator who had cracked
up out over the river somewhere."

"And it hasn't shown up yet?"

"Oh, yes, it showed up all right three days later. But it had
run out of gas looking for the missing aviator. And there wasn't
any gas in Pucalpa. It was three more days before another plane
brought it from Iquitos."

"That's six days-"

"Correct. That brings us to last Thursday. On Friday it rained.
Saturday the pilot had gastritis. Yesterday was Carnival, today is
Carnival, and tomorrow will be Carnival. No self-respecting
Peruvian pilot would dream of flying a plane during CarnivaL
There is a possibility that I may fly on Wednesday if (a) it does
not rain and (b) the pilot does not have a hang-over. Drink -up,
gentlemen!"

He seemed to need company, and we stayed with him in the
hotel bar until well past midnight. We figured out that thus
far he had spent only four less days en route to Iquitos than had
we, traveling by mule, canoe and launch. We assured him we
would help him forget his sorrows when the three of us finally
met at our destination.

"By the way," I inquired at parting, "did they ever find that
aviator who cracked up?"

Something that was half a leer and half strangulation clouded
the Inglesffs face,

"Oh, yes, they found him," he replied. "But he hadn't cracked
up. It seems that his wife was sick over in some little village on
the Huallaga, and instead of following his regular route, he flew
over to visit her for a few days. Just hadn't bothered to mention
it to anyone."

UCAYALI STOPOVER

MAIN STREET, MASISEA

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD

The Melita pulled into Pucalpa at four in the morning and
proved to everyone's satisfaction that her whistle was in no wise
inferior to the Hucma Capac*s. But she was not due to depart
until noon (it was still Carnival, and during Carnival the sun
officially rose at i P.M.), and we had the morning on our hands.
We spent it visiting the other gringo in town, a young mission-
ary from New Zealand named Pullinger. His home was a small
gasoline launch, tied up at the embankment, in which it was his
custom to cruise up and down river, preaching the gospel and
seeking converts at the various villages along the way. At the
moment, however, he was suffering from the common Peruvian
complaint of motor trouble and had, he told us, been marooned
at Pucalpa for three weeks, waiting for spare engine parts to
arrive from Iquitos. Pullinger was young and new to missionary
work; but he was possessed of die mild earnestness peculiar to
his profession and apparently considered his work in this remote
corner of the South American jungle neither more adventurous
on the one hand, nor more burdensome, on the other, than if he
had been conducting Sunday-school classes back in his home
city of Auckland. I have nothing against missionaries per se
(though practically every resident gringo I met in Peru was
violent in his dislike for them), but they have the knack of lend-
ing to their lives and experiences an almost incredible dullness
and lack of color. I must have met and talked with some dozen
missionaries in my crossing from Lima to Para, and not one of
them considered his work in any sense a tiling of excitement or
adventure. It was a duty, nothing more or less, and it seemed
to make no difference whatever to any of them that they hap-
pened to be fulfilling it in the Amazonian wilderness rather than
in Tottenham Court Road or FlatbusH Avenue.

Young Pullinger had his wife with him the first white woman
we had encountered since leaving Lima. She was most hospitable
to us, insisting we remain for an early lunch and feeding us on
ambrosial non-Peruvian muffins and preserves; but like her hus-
band her interest and experiences in the country were strictly
limited to their "mission." We tried to draw her out as to what

210 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

adventures or discomforts she had encountered in the jungle,
but apparently she had encountered none of either.

"Cooking and tidying up the launch keep me fair occupied,"
she explained, "and when I've a bit of spare time I practice at
the portable organ. I play the hymns at all Mr. Pullinger's
services," she concluded proudly.

The Pullingers, like Ball and us, were anxious to leave Pucalpa.
The local Roman Catholic priest, it seemed, was also the town's
commercial magnate, owning the hotel, the restaurant and the
two principal stores. Naturally he was not very hospitably in-
clined toward a representative of the Church of England and,
being the proprietor of practically everything in Pucalpa, was
in a position to make his prejudice felt. So far he had not clamped
down an embargo on the heretics from the antipodes; but one
could not be sure when the idea might occur to him, and the
Pullingers were anxiously awaiting those spare parts from Iquitos.

Toward mid-afternoon the Melita cast off, amid a pande-
monium of baritone and falsetto farewells between herself and
the Hutma Capac. Our new home was about twice the size of
our old, but she carried four times as many passengers, cows and
hogs, and as a result seemed even smaller. The upper deck was a
wild confusion of humanity, baggage, hammocks, gold-dust and
perspiration; the lower, a completely stocked twenty-acre farm,
compressed to the dimensions of eighty feet by twenty-five, with
an engine and kitchen stove thrown in for good measure. Verily,
we were a wondrous agglomeration of sights, sounds and smells
as we left Pucalpa behind and steamed northward down the
Ucayali.

When I say "northward" I am speaking of theory rather than
practice. Iquitos lay some six hundred miles due north of us, but
the Ucayali is one of the most meandering rivers in the world,
and from minute to minute our course would vary all over the
face of the compass. In the morning the sun, as likely as not,
would rise in what should be the west; in the afternoon it slanted
away to the southeast; and at night, standing in the ship's stern

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 211

and watching what we thought was the Southern Cross, we
would suddenly become aware that we were looking at the
Dipper. The Ucayali between Pucalpa and Contamana is nearly
a mile wide, but shallow and full of snagged trees and sand bars.
Between the treacherousness of its waters and the crazy zigzags
of its course, it was litde short of a miracle that the Melita kept
afloat and going. No scientific charts, we learned, had ever been
made of the river, but even if they had they would have been
practically wordiless, for between wet and dry season the chan-
nels, shoals and banks alter their positions and conformations
completely. Along certain stretches, the commandants told us,
the whole river bed had moved five or six miles during a period
of a few years.

Several times at night I stood upon the bridge with the officer
on watch and the sailor at the wheel. The launch carried no
searchlight, that long-promised Puerto Bermudez moon had not
yet put in an appearance, and the darkness on the water ahead
was almost impenetrable. Now and then the officer would lean
forward slightly and cock his head. Whether he was looking,
listening, smelling or using some special seventh sense reserved
for the use of Peruvian river pilots I don't pretend to know.
But presently he would motion to the steersman to move the
wheel slightly in one direction or another, and, sure enough, a
minute later a sand bar or snagged tree would emerge from the
blackness ahead and slide past a few yards to right or left of us.
In negotiating the hundreds of bends the ship invariably hugged
the inside, or convex, bank, for it was there that die water was
usually deepest. Occasionally there would be a soft, ominously
scratching sound from deep below us, as the iron hull touched
bottom lightly; but there was never a jar, and we never caught
fast. It was a fascinating, almost a magical, progress, as if some
powerful, kindly-disposed power outside ourselves were guiding
us on our course. Round and round, in and out we went
circling, threading, swerving, maneuvering borne by the river's
current in all directions, yet somehow always northward, through
dark, impenetrable jungle in dark, impenetrable night.

212 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

In the morning we reached Contamana, largest of the river
towns above Iquitos. Carnival was at last over, but the biggest
crowd we had yet seen was ranged along the embankment to
welcome us. Though accustomed to them by now, I never
quite lost the feeling of surprise at encountering these large
groups of people at every village and hacienda we passed; the
Peruvian department, or province, of Loreto, through which we
were passing, is one of the most sparsely populated areas on earth,
yet every time we touched land we were immediately in the
midst of a swarm of humanity. It was a puzzling paradox, but
can be easily explained. Of the i5o,ooo-odd inhabitants of
Loreto, perhaps 75,000 dwell in the valley of the Ucayali, and, of
that 75,000, all except a few scattered settlers and Indian tribes
live directly on the banks of the river or its principal tributaries.
For these people the steam-launch, with its passengers, mail,
newspapers and merchandise, was the only link with the outside
world, and its fortnightly arrivals were therefore events of great
importance. At each town the entire population, except the bed-
ridden and the imprisoned, would turn out for the event, as well
as the people from all the smaller, neighboring settlements, who
would paddle their canoes into port for the occasion. Some would
come to buy or sell, some to receive friends, mail or freight,
most of them merely to stand around and watch the excitement.
But for one reason or another they all came, and I think it is no
exaggeration to say that in our week on the river we saw face
to face fully half the entire population of the Ucayali Valley,
or a quarter of the population of the vast district of Loreto.

Contamana was little different from Masisea and Pucalpa, but
attained note as the site of Herman's first shelling-expedition.
Not that the ex-mayor of Muscatine had been unmindful of his
duties to the Automatic Button Company during the earlier part
of our river journey. But the Pichis and Pachitea had been
streams too young and turbulent to harbor the reposeful clam,
and at our various stops during the period of Carnival he had
been unable to persuade, anyone to forsake flour throwing long

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 2IJ

enough to negotiate the hiring of a boat. While aboard the Hiuma
Capac he had rigged up a weird dredging device, consisting of a
heavy metal bar a yard long from which two dozen hooks were
suspended on ropes, and at Contamana, with rapids and Carnival
both safely behind us, he finally had a chance to put it to use.
I was about six weeks and a thousand miles behind in my travel-
diary, and did not accompany him on his quest, but fully half
the passenger-list of the Melita did. The rumor had got around
among those gold-minded gentlemen that Herman's gadget was
really a device for snaring ingots, and they had no intention of
letting him strike a bonanza unassisted.

On the Pichis Trail, what with the mules by day and ex-
haustion at night, my companion and I had had little chance for
conversation, but in the ample leisure of life on the river-boats
we had become increasingly well acquainted. As I believe I com-
mented in describing my first meeting with him, Herman was
about as reticent as a microphone. By this stage of the game I
knew the name, address and taste in clothes of every girl he had
ever taken out; I knew his detailed opinions on the U. S. Army,
Franklin D. Roosevelt, osteopathy, the immortality of the soul,
international trade, Greta Garbo, and the health-building quali-
ties of raw onions; I knew that he had put through a lower gas
rate for Muscatine householders, that he was partial to apples,
and that his wife liked to sleep on her left side. And I knew by
heart his address of acceptance when he was offered the nomina-
tion for mayor in 1932.

I discovered early that Herman had a weakness for "addresses."
Back home he belonged to every organization which Muscatine
boastedcivic, social, fraternal and religious and it was appar-
ently his practice, when at home, to favor each and all of them
with an "address" once a week. During the early days of our
acquaintance I was several times on the point of inquiring if he
didn't occasionally run out of topics, but it would have been a
foolish question. Topics came to Herman as mosquitoes come
to New Jersey, and I never succeeded in finding one, from rela-

214 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

tivity to Peruvian beer, that he couldn't turn into an "address."
For what constituted an "address" with him was a delicate and
subtle thing. It was certainly not the subject-matter. Nor was it
the occasion, nor the presence of an audience. It was, rather, an
obscure process that went on within himself a sort of personal
mental soapbox he carried concealed somewhere inside him and
which would begin exercising its influence at the most haphazard
times. We could be talking of anythingthe most casual or
trivial subjects when suddenly I would become aware that a
strange, glassy light had come into his eyes and a strange, brassy
note into his voice. It meant that he had stopped talking to me
and was making an "address." It was a fascinating phenomenon
to watch, though a little conversation was apt to go a long way
in the already amply hot air of the Ucayali Valley.

Herman was that interesting and confusing paradox a man
with a keen and active mind, but with little or no formal educa-
tion. He had left school for good at the age of thirteen, and
since that time, he told me, he had scarcely read a single book.
He knew absolutely nothing except what had come within his
own personal observation or experience. Farms, machines, busi-
ness methods, midwestern politics, the places in South America
he had visited he knew them intimately and thoroughly. Litera-
ture, history, the theater, New York City, the places in South
America he had not visited^-he knew no more of them than if
they had been the phenomena of a remote and invisible planet.
But and it is in this "but" that made Herman Lord the unique
personality that he was the less he knew about anything the
more interested he was in it, the more eager to learn it, know it,
possess it.

"You know, Jim," he said to me one night on the Melita,
"sometimes I get scared. Sometimes when I'm sitting at home
back in Muscatine, with my slippers on my feet and a good cigar
going, I get feeling sort of middle-aged and settled and I think
to myself-well, maybe 111 just stay in the old home town and
be comfortable for the rest of my life. Then, all of a sudden,

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 215

I catch myself. Yeah all of a sudden I remember how damn
many places there are in the world I haven't been and how damn
many things there are I don't know, and I say to myself hell's
bells, you can't be turning into an old man already, Herman.
You've got too much still to do."

Or again:

"Next time I go on a trip I want to go to Alaska; then Africa;
then the East Indies. Europe? Hell, Europe's too easy. No ob-
staclesno kick. Maybe I'll go there when I'm an old man with
the missus."

And again:

"I'll bet in twenty-five years I've had twenty-five different
jobs. Never made a pile of money, but I've had myself a pile of
fun. There's only one thing I ask of a job, Jim: that it lets me
use my own brains and tackle my own problems. If a job don't
let you do that it isn't worth beans."

And once again:

"Think maybe I'll run for Congress in '38."

"But I thought you were planning to stay in the button busi-
ness?"

"Yes, I am-sort of."

"Then why are you talking about Congress?"

"Well, I've never been there, for one thing"

One day on the Melita he was sitting next to me as I was
writing. A gust of wind suddenly riffled my notebook, exposing
one of the pages.

"The Gilded Man, eh?" said Herman. "What's it mean?"

I tried to explain not, I'm afraid, with great success.

"Hmm, pretty fancy," he commented, "but I guess that's what
the reading public wants, eh, Jim? Fancy ideas; lots of gravy."

"Er yes, I suppose they do," I agreed.

"That's why I don't read much."

And that closed the subject for Daniel Boone Rover Merriwell-
Quixote, who, I think, of all men I have ever known was closest

2l6 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

upon the heels of that Gilded One "who by the Spaniards is
known as El Dorado."

Does our shipboard life seem aimless and pointless? Well, it
wasn't. Through all our loafing, dancing, leaning on rails and
general time-killing ran the thread of one great, compelling,
dominating purpose: to keep -from going to bed. Daily it had
been growing hotter as we neared the equator. For twelve hours
each day the sun glared at us with undisguised ferocity (the
rainy season was still in the realm of theory), the iron sides of
the launch caught its heat and held it like the walls of an oven,
and we all but slid about the deck in puddles of our own sweat.
But the sun, at least, is an honest, forthright foe, and it was under
cover of darkness that malignant nature set upon us with her
most subtle and poisonous weapons. With sick foreboding in my
heart, but utterly helpless before oncoming disaster, I would
watch the hands of the clock crawl around the dial to midnight,
see the phonograph shut up and the lights extinguished, and turn
grimly toward the cabin to face what I knew awaited me, . . .

The first thing that awaited me was usually Herman. I have
always considered myself a better-than-average sleeper but in
comparison with Herman I was Lady Macbeth. Heat, mosquitoes,
bedbugs, rats, the loading of firewood and the shrieking of the
whistle all the combined ingenuity of man's and nature's fiend-
ishness had no effect upon him whatsoever. In five minutes he
was asleep, and not only was he asleep but he was snoring. There
are all kinds of snores in the world. There is the common, or
Pullman-car, snorer, who goes about his work patiently and
methodically and usually has the best lasting qualities. There is
the virtuoso snorer who performs only at intervals, but puts all
he has into his art once he begins. Then there are the various
types of specialty snorers the wood-sawers, the raspers, the
wheezers, the stranglers, the thunderers, and so forth. Herman
was all of them rolled into 9ne. He could begin his nocturnal
program with a gentle, rhythmic buzzing, work slowly into a
sobbing crescendo, reach a climax in a full-throated, triumphant

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 217

blare, and trail off again into the softest and most delicate
arpeggios. His repertory was inexhaustible, and the most fascinat-
ing thing about it was that it was somehow subtly attuned to the
influences of the outside world. When a mosquito buzzed softly,
menacingly about Herman's head, Herman would buzz back in
the same restrained accents. When the insect struck, he would
rise to the occasion with a few short, sharp growls, culminating
in a throttled moan. Should a rat scurry across the floor, his
breathing would assume the rhythm of scampering anapaests.
Should the measured thumping of firewood being loaded re-
sound from the lower deck, it would shift into the measured
cadences of "Pomp and Circumstance." But his most spectacular
performance was reserved for those occasions on which the
shriek of the Melitcfs whistle was added to the lesser sound and
fury of the night. At such times he would stir slightly in his
sleep, his mouth would open and the muffled reverberations of
his larynx would rise to a swelling, full-throated blast an un-
conscious but potent Tarzan answering his mate.

This nightly broadcast had its entertainment and educational
qualities, but it was hardly conducive to my falling asleep. As a
matter of fact, it was not so much the snoring itself that did the
damage as the anticipation of it. I was a doomed man as soon as
I turned out the light and lay in bed, tensely praying: "Dear
God, please please let me go to sleep before Herman starts
snoring." But my prayers were always in vain. The harder I
tried to fall asleep, the wider awake I became, and soon the first
faint, ominous grinding of gears would come from the bunk
below. I dug my head in the straw pillow, held my pajama collar
against my ears, clenched my fists. All that resulted was that I
broke out in a sweat. That was usually the signal for the first
of my nightly visitors to appear, heralding his approach with
that thin, indescribably blood-curdling whine of his kind. Sud-
denly the whine ceased, and I knew he was hovering there,
somewhere in the darkness above my head, selecting his spot.
Then he struck, and I struck back, usually hitting myself smartly
across the nose. Silence (except, of course, for Herman's snor-

2l8 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

ing) a respite. Then another whine, this time down near my
feet another silence another strike and counter-strike. Then
another, at my neck. And another, inside my pajama trousers-
No faintest breath of air stirred within the cabin. The bunk
reeked balefully of sweat and insecticide, which almost suffocated
me but apparently was ambrosia to insects. Dimly I could see a
cockroach at least I hoped it was only a cockroach crawling
down the wall that was still hot to the touch from its day-long
blistering in the sun. I finished scratching my foot and slapped
at a whining dervish behind my ear. Then I scratched my back.
Then I slapped at my neck. Then I scratched my head with the
right hand and my other foot with the left. Growing cramped I
scratched by rubbing my two feet together, leaving both hands
free for slapping. I rolled over, and something fastened itself on
my backside. First I slapped it, then I scratched it; then I pulled
a towel from the rack and wiped the sweat from my dripping
body. By this time every inch of my skin seemed on fire not
only the lumpy, bitten areas but the protected parts as well. It
was no longer the insect-bites alone that caused the itching, but
some unholy chemistry that was going on in my own body in
response to the combined influences of heat, dirt, sweat, biting
and scratching. I tore at myself with my nails, almost hoping
that I would succeed in ripping off shreds of flesh. Downright,
honest pain and blood would be preferable to this clammy, crawl-
ing, sweat-soaked hell

The whistle tooted wildly about eighteen long ones and ten
short ones and Herman tooted back. I could hear the Melitcfs
hull scrape softly on a mudbank, and a moment later a mighty
crash of wood on iron announced that we had begun loading
wood and more mosquitoes. The crashing continued for an hour,
punctuated by the crew's shouting and Herman's "Pomp and
Circumstance." Halfway through, I stepped on deck for a breath
of air and got instead a mouthful of gnats. Trying to work my
way up forward, away from the sweltering heat of the smoke-
stack, I tripped over a passenger sleeping on the deck, recovered
my balance and collided with an occupied hammock, and, finally

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 2 19

reaching the bow, discovered that it was nosed into a clump of
trees on the bank and at the moment was doing service as exer-
cise-ground for a battalion of bats. Beating a retreat back to the
cabin I found that my bunk-mates had not been idle during my
absence, but had apparently taken the opportunity to fly ashore
and tell their friends about me. At all events, their number had
doubled in the interim.

Then back on the rack again air stifling, skin itching, blood
burning, pores sweating, wood crashing, whistle tooting, Herman
snoring. O fair and fragrant tropic night! O great, golden moon
of the Amazons above the silent grandeur of the jungle! O
glamor and mystery of lovely, lonely lands beneath equatorial
skies! O Gilded Man, half-reality, half-dream, whom all must
seek but none may ever find! O Melita on the Ucayali! O little
cabin, little bunk of mine! O Lord, O God, O Christ, O Jesus H.
Christ-
Yes, I know now what the Gilded Man is. He is a good night's
sleep.

All day an air of excitement prevailed on the launch. (The
power of cliche almost made me write "suppressed excitement,"
but it would have been a gross misstatement; the Latin-American
may suppress some things Communism for example but he most
certainly does not suppress excitement when he feels it.) Iquitos
was less than twenty-four hours away, and in Peru's montana
Iquitos is New York, London, Paris and the Land of Canaan
rolled into one and .multiplied by ten. The Melitcfs passengers,
including ourselves, fretted away the day in a frenzy of antici-
pationshaving, shining shoes, packing and unpacking, or just
fretting.

During the afternoon we stopped at a village called Rekuena
and picked up George Bernard Shaw, who, however, was dressed
for the occasion as a Franciscan monk. The old fellow had the
reddest nose and the most imposing white whiskers we had ever
seen, and we soon discovered that his personality was easily a
match for them. He had not been on the launch half-an-hour

220 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

before he engaged us in conversation, and, though he spoke only
Spanish, his enunciation was so clear and his choice of words
so careful that we had no difficulty in understanding him. But his
conversational attack was sudden and startling.

"Nortamericanos, eh? Are you Republicans or Democrats?"

"Fm a Republican," replied Herman.

The padre beamed and grasped his hand affectionately.

"Ah, that is good that is excellence! Viva Republicanos! Abajo
Roosevelt! Ah, that Roosevelt he is a fine vaudeville performer,
but tch, tch, tch what a presidente!"

As a non-Republican I felt a mild protest was in order and
made it. The padre looked at me reprovingly and shook his
head.

"Roosevelt is the friend of Communismo, and Commimismo is
the anti-Christ. Roosevelt will destroy the faith of the people of
the United States."

The denunciation continued for some fifteen minutes, with
gestures. If William Randolph Hearst ever finds himself in need
of a Spanish editorial-writer, I can tell him where to find him.
Then, as abruptly as he had begun, the padre switched subjects.

"Do you gentlemen fly?" he inquired suddenly.

I was caught a little off-balance.

"You mean er fly? In planes?"

"Si, si in planes, of course. I, senores, am learning to become a
pilot."

"A pilot, did you say?" My eyes took in his monk's robe, his
sandaled feet, his stupendous two-foot beard. Somehow they did
not suggest aeronautics.

"Si, si the commandante at Iquitos is teaching me." Then,
apparently, he noticed my roving eye. "Ah the clothes, you are
thinking. The commandante provides me with clothes."

"But-"

"And the beard?" His blue eyes twinkled and he held up a
finger. "Wait, I shall show you something."

He reached into a fold of his robe, pulled out a small woven

THROUGH PERU'S BACK YARD 221

sack with a pull-cord at the open end, and held it up proudly.
"For my beard," he explained, "when I am flying."

Shortly before midnight we reached the point where the
Ucayali River meets the Amazon. As was usual at night, we
could see nothing beyond the radius of the Melitffs dim lights,
but the commandante, with whom we stood on the bridge,
assured us that we were at last on the Great River itself. A half-
hour later, as if in honor of the event, a thin sliver of moon that
elusive, procrastinating moon we had been awaiting ever since the
dire night at Bermudez showed itself from behind a cloud bank,
and we could see faintly the outline of a distant shore and the
smooth flow of powerful waters. Simultaneously a fresh breeze
came up at us from down-river the steady, driving east wind
of Amazonia. It blew coolingly through the launch's rigging and
into our sweaty, mosquito-bitten faces, and it neatly parted the
padre's whiskers (he did not wear his sack for river-travel) and
laid them back in two long streamers against his ears.

"Our journey is almost over," he said, turning to me. "Are you
glad?"

The past two weeks aboard the Huana Capac and Melita passed
quickly before my mind's eye the rice and beans, the beans"nd
rice, the verminous cabin, the interminable delays, the wood-
loading, the frenzied whistle-tooting, the sweltering nights, the
bugs and bites, Herman's snoring

"Yes," I said, "I'm darn glad."

But I wasn't.

VIII

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY

THE SUN and Iquitos rose simultaneously out of the Amazon.
For a half-hour we leaned expectantly over the Melita's
railing, watching the one ascend and the other grow;
and then suddenly it was broad daylight, and we had arrived.
The town, like all the lesser ones we had seen along the rivers,
was built upon an embankment, well beyond the reach of flood
water, but, unlike the others, it presented a f agade of stone build-
ings, glass-paned windows, tiled roofs and lofty church steeples.
As cities go, it was scarcely an impressive spectacle this seedy
village metropolis of the upper Amazon-but after* eighteen days
in the wilderness we viewed it with as much appreciation as if
our eyes beheld the skyline of Manhattan.

With a final, ear-splitting barrage of toots the launch pulled
up at the water front this time resting not in the mud but along-
side a floating steel dock. Somehow we extricated ourselves from
the howling confusion of passengers and welcoming relatives,
secured two peons to carry our baggage, and set out afoot for
the hotel. The peons led the way, first through a narrow side
street, in which mud, grass and pigs were rampant, and then
along a wide, impressive thoroughfare that boasted stone paving,
sidewalks and a name: Calle Lima. It was not yet seven o'clock,
and the stores along our route were still shuttered; but suddenly
we rounded a corner into the town's public market and were
engulfed in a confusion of people, animals, movement, noise and
smells. Iquitos is estimated to have a population of 15,000, and
it seemed as if fully half of them were out marketing that morn-
ing. For two blocks we threaded our way through bananas,
papayas, yucca roots, turtles, dried fish and preoccupied, bare-
footed Indian women engaged in the strenuous business of bar-

222

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 223

gaining. This outdoor market, we soon discovered, is exclusively
an early morning institution, for when we repassed it a few
hours later it was silent and untenanted, save for the inevitable
pigs and a lingering aroma of God-knows-what.

Our Iquitos home bore the resplendent name of The Malecon-
Palace Hotel. (Malecon, in Spanish, means a water-front-prom-
enade; Palace, in any language, means that the proprietor is an
optimist.) It was, however, the most imposing structure in town-
three stories high, built in pseudo-Moorish style of brightly
colored tile, and commanding a magnificent view of the broad,
sweeping Amazon. Owned by the largest business firm in Iquitos
Israel and Company it houses their offices and general store
on the ground floor, the second and third being given over to
sleeping quarters. There is no restaurant, the guests being re-
quired to forage on their own among the four or five eating
establishments which the town offers.

The room to which we were shown was enormous, airy, well-
screened and reasonably clean. It boasted beds that possessed both
springs and mattress, a large balcony overlooking the river, and
just down the hall was a shower-bath that was really a pleasure,
if you didn't mind the universal Peruvian habit of spitting on the
floor. Cost of the whole layout, sixty cents per day each. Wal-
lowing in such thrifty luxury, we did not leave our room for
the rest of the morning, but slowly and sensuously savored the
joys of what I often tihink is the best part of traveling cleaning
up after a long, hard journey. Off came our three weeks'- beards
(though not until after we had carefully photographed them for
posterity), and off came the sweat-encrusted layers of Pichis mud
and river-launch grime. We stood under the shower for fifteen
minutes, returned to the room to dry ourselves, and were so sorry
to be through bathing that we went back to the shower for
another half-hour. Has any poet ever written an ode to a clean
shirt a sonnet to fresh white linen trousers an epic to immacu-
late underdrawers? Someone should. There are times when they
can offer more to the spirit of man than all the moons that ever
shone, all the nightingales that ever chanted. Yea, verily, on that

224 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

glorious antiseptic morning in the Malecon-Palace Hotel we were
two male Cinderellas dressing for the ball.

We were contemplating ourselves admiringly in the mirror
when there was a knock on the door.

"Quien esta?" we inquired.

"The oldest living citizen of Pucalpa," came the reply, and a
moment later we were holding reunion with the philosophical,
but chirrupy, Mr. David Ball of Lima. He had, he told us, been
rescued from his exile two days before and had preceded us into
Iquitos by only thirty-six hours a total of fourteen days from
Lima by plane, as against our nineteen by train, auto, mule, canoe
and launch.

"But let's not go into that again," he added. "How long are
you chaps going to be here?"

We told him we thought about three weeks.

"Three weeks, eh?" He shook his head ominously. "Oh, well,
they say there have been white men who stayed here even longer
and survived. Come on, I'll show you the town. That'll take care
of the next five minutes anyhow."

In its physical aspect Iquitos is just another down-at-heel pro-
vincial South American city, but in every other respect it is
unique. Spread out a map and observe its situation, four degrees
south of the equator, 250 miles from the Peruvian-Brazilian
frontier. On all sides of it, you will see blank space, broken only
by the serpentine lines of the Amazon and its tributaries. No
names of other cities, no dotted lines for railroads, indeed no
markings of any kind impinge upon its solitude; on the printed
pages, as in fact, it stands alone the most isolated city in South
America and, with Lhassa in Tibet and Timbuktu in the Sahara
Desert, one of the ditee most isolated cities in the world.

Politically and geographically Iquitos is part of Peru, and, in
point of fact, its actual distance from the central sections of the
country is by no means enormous. It is about 700 miles from
the Pacific Ocean in a straight line and 1200 from Lima distances
less than those from New York to Indianapolis and Kansas Gty,

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 225

respectively. Its remoteness is not measured in miles but in what
lies along those miles the vast, unbroken jungle and the tower-
ing Andean peaks. No railroads and no highways cross this wil-
derness; the only connecting links are a few mule trails and
navigable rivers, of which the Pichis-Ucayali route which we
followed is the best and shortest. Three weeks for a i zoo-mile
journey is hardly a figure commensurate with the tempo of
twentieth-century commerce and transportation, and when one
considers the added fact that only merchandise light enough for
the backs of mules can be shipped at all, it becomes obvious that
the route is commercially useless. Recall for a moment the ac-
count of our trip from Lima to Iquitos, as given in the last two
chapters; then imagine that instead of human beings Herman
and I were grand pianos or threshing machines, and you will get
the general idea.

The result of this almost complete lack of communication
with the rest of Peru is that Iquitos' face is turned toward the
east. Although 2200 miles from the Atlantic (as against the 700
to the Pacific), virtually all its trade is along the Amazon, to and
from the eastern ocean. By this route its merchants carry on com-
merce with Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, London and New
York, ports many thousands of miles away but more accessible
commercially than the Pacific seaboard of their own country.
What little exchange of goods is carried on with Lima is done
by way of the Panama Canal, or sometimes by even more circui-
tous routes. One day the manager of Israel and Company showed
me the invoice for a shipment of cotton dresses he had recently
received from the Vitarte Mills in Lima, and assured me they
had been sent by the quickest, cheapest route. They had come
by way of New York City a distance of eleven thousand nules!

In its history and growth, too, Iquitos has had little connection
with the rest of Peru. Integrally a part of Amazonia, its fortunes
have fluctuated with those of that vast area rather than with
those of the Pacific coast. Originally an Indian village and later
the site of a Jesuit mission, it first grew to importance in the
1850*5, when the production of rubber was beginning to be the

226 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

great industry of tropical South America. Together with the
Brazilian towns of the Amazon basin it wallowed in prosperity
during tKe halcyon rubber years of the 'po's and early i poo's,
and together with them its bubble collapsed in 1911 and 1912
when the South American rubber trade was virtually wiped out
by the development of plantation rubber in the Far East. Dur-
ing the last twenty-five years Iquitos has worried along in the
grip of a more or less continuous depression. Its principal exports
at the present time are coffee, cotton, lumber, barbasco, tagua
(ivory nuts), balata (a form of cork), small quantities of gold
and, still, a little rubber. In return it imports the usual com-
modities lacking in a primitive communitymachinery, manu-
factured goods, clothing, tinned foods and so on but the buying-
power of its people is too low for there to be any great influx
of goods.

Of Iquitos' items of export, barbasco deserves a special word
of mention. It is a fibrous root indigenous to Amazonia which
contains a large proportion of rotenone, a chemical compound
which has recently proved to be of great value in the manu-
facture of disinfectants and insecticides. The discovery of its
commercial value was made less than ten years ago in an inter-
esting way. An American scientist who had been sent by the
United States Department of Agriculture to study the fish of
the upper Amazon observed certain tribes of Indians employing
an unusual method of fishing. Instead of using the usual harpoon
they spread a powdered extract of a root they called barbasco
on the headwaters of a stream, moved a few miles down its course,
and waited. Apparently the barbasco powder exerted a power-
ful narcotic effect, for soon, the scientist reported, the surface
of the waters along which it drifted was a mass of stunned and,
almost lifeless fish. All the Indians had to do was to lean out of.
their canoes and pull them in. Sensing its commercial possibilities,
the American brought samples of the root back to the United
States, where subsequent experiments isolated its content of
rotenone and demonstrated its great efficacy as an insecticide.

Within a year Iquitos had a new industry, and ever since

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 227

barbasco has been one of its principal exports. The world market
for the root, however, is still not one-tenth what it should be,
considering its usefulness, and here again, as in rubber, we en-
counter the bane of all Amazonian commerce uncertainly of
supply. Not that there is an actual shortage of barbasco; on the
contrary, the jungles are full of it. But its collection is carried
on in haphazard fashion by Indians and individual settlers; the
amount available varies greatly, and unpredictably, from month
to month, and few manufacturers are willing to gamble on a
raw material which is likely not to be procurable at the time
when it is most needed. A few barbasco plantations have recently
been started in the vicinity of Iquitos, but already they have
encountered the difficulties which from time immemorial have
beset all efforts to establish organized agriculture and commerce
in the South American jungles. The white Latin-American usu-
ally refuses to do manual labor; the Indian will do it only when
he has to, and his wants are so simple and nature so lavish that
he has to very rarely. No plantation or industry can function
without steady, dependable labor, and steady dependable labor
is almost non-existent in Amazonia. Its lack is what killed rubber,
and its lack is now holding down the production of barbasco to a
fraction of its potential supply. Modern industry is not so geared
that it can depend for its basic materials on an Indian in a canoe
who may show up on market day and may not.

Herman and I followed Ball around the town two spotless
and self-conscious visions in white. "Around the town," as our
mentor had indicated, was not much of a journey. It consisted
of three blocks down the Malecon, one block right to the Calle
Lima, three blocks back along that thoroughfare, and finally
around the plaza. Iquitos, to be sure, extended considerably
farther in various directions, but beyond "the loop" it consisted
exclusively of mud streets and tumble-down huts, and we had
had all we wanted of them in Masisea, Pucalpa, Contamana, and
way-stations.

In addition to our Moorish palace of a hotel, there were several

228 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

impressive buildings, most of them, however, showing signs of
age and looking as if they had been "Somebody's Folly" in the
palmy rubber-boom days. Two notable exceptions were the
cathedral and the moving-picture theater, both fronting on the
plaza and both structures that would have done credit to a far
larger city. The movie palace, known as the Alhambra, was a
particularly surprising institution to find in the middle of a
jungle. It is well-kept and clean, has over 750 seats, and, to our
astonishment, proved to be "Komfortably Kool" inside. The
films it showed were something else again, but I shall come to
that in time.

The town's shops were ranged along both sides of the Calle
Lima and, though numerous, were woefully shabby and unin-
teresting. Most of them were of the general-store variety, offer-
ing for sale a fantastically jumbled assortment of cheap, imported
merchandise. Throughout the nineteen days I was in Iquitos I
looked for specimens of local industry or handicraft that might
be interesting as gifts or souvenirs, but with complete lack of
success. The only native products that were to be found, outside
of food, were untanned hides, snake skins and the like. All
manufactured goods bore English, German or American labels,
and they were invariably of inferior quality but high price. With
the exception of a few establishments run by Chinamen, the
shops were dirty and ill-kept, and apparently the last thing in
the world their proprietors were interested in was in making
a sale. Time and again I would walk up to a counter, ask for
some article I wanted, and receive the classic Peruvian reply:
"No d? As often as not I would then see the article standing
prominently on a shelf, point it qut to the shopkeeper and induce
him to let me have it. The high-pressure salesman is not num-
bered among the hazards of life in Iquitos.

The most attractive part of town was the plaza a wide square
with well-paved streets and sidewalks and a small park in the
center. The park boasted an assortment of shade trees and shrub-
bery, a bandstand, and a monument to the Iquitians killed in the
war with Chile in the iBSo's. But its most pleasing fixtures, from

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 229

our point of view, were four small outdoor cafes, situated one
at each corner of the square. During the heat of the day their
tables were located under the trees; in the evening they were
moved out onto the sidewalk, Parisian fashion, and half the
population sat at them and watched the other half stroll by. We
took possession of the cleanest-appearing of them at the end of
our first day's round, and it remained our general headquarters
throughout our stay in Iquitos.

The evening of our second day in town we were invited for
cocktails by Mr. Sam Harris, general manager of Israel and Com-
pany. Israel? Harris? Perhaps you are already asking yourself
the same question I did at the time. What manner of names are
these for a Peruvian town on the upper Amazon?

The answer discloses one of the strangest of the many strange
aspects of Iquitos. Although the city is as remote from the centers
of western civilization as any place could well be, virtually all
its business and commerce is in the hands of Europeansand not
only Europeans but European Jews. The list of its principal mer-
chants reads like the roster of a Zionist organization: Israel and
Company, Sam Harris, Kahn and Company, Cohen and Com-
pany, Strassberger Brothers, Mendel and Son. The individuals
come from all parts of Europe Israel from Malta, Harris from
Manchester, England, Kahn from Alsace-Lorraine, Strassberger
from Germany, others from Spain, Poland, Rumania and Tur-
keyand how they chanced, over a period of years, to congre-
gate in the obscure Amazonian town of Iquitos is one of those
strange cases of historical accident which have no explanation
other than that they happened. The situation appeared all the
more remarkable to me in light of the fact that, outside of Iquitos,
I did not encounter more than a half-dozen Jews on my entire
journey across South America.

Sam Harris was a man in his middle sixties and, at the time of
our visit, had been a fixture in Iquitos for thirty-five years. Slight,
stooped, partially deaf and wearing thick-lensed glasses, he looked
as little like a jungle pioneer as a human being possibly could;

230 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

but he had grown up with Amazonia, and his reminiscences
touched on practically everything of importance or interest that
had happened in that part of the world during the present cen-
tury. Ordinarily he was general manager for Israel and Com-
pany. At the moment, however, he was in sole charge of the
business, as its owner, Victor Israel, was in England on vacation.
Harris himself, he told us, visited his home in Manchester for
four or five months once every five years. To our astonishment,
he informed us that his wife lived there.

"Yes," he explained. "When we were first married, back in
1902, 1 think it was, I brought Mrs. Harris out here .with me, but
the climate didn't agree with her, and after six months I sent her
back to England."

He estimated that they had lived together for a total of about
three years in the thirty-five that followed. But through all that
time they had corresponded regularly once a month and three
or four times a year his wife would send him a large bundle of
clothing, table delicacies and English newspapers.

"But at sixty-four aren't you thinking of going home for
good?" I asked him.

"Home? Oh er yes, Manchester. Why, I suppose I'll go back
sooner or later." Then he looked around. "This is pretty much
home, too, you know. Have another sherry? It's some Amontil-
lado that Mrs. Harris sent me by the last boat."

During the next few days we met most of the other gringos
in Iquitos. They were all more-or-less permanent residents, Her-
man, Ball and I being the only non-Peruvian visitors in town.
The members of the Jewish colony were all men in middle or
late years, most of them cultured, well-educated and accom-
plished linguists. Standing in the office of Kahn and Company,
I heard the proprietor carry on successive conversations in Span-
ish, Portuguese, German and French before turning to address
me in perfect English. Practically all of them seemed to have
wives and families, but, with only one or two exceptions, they

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 231

were in Europe. Like Harris's, the standard Iquitian marriage
was an affair of letters, parcels and memories.

Among the non- Jewish gringos the most prominent was an
Englishman named Thomas Parsons. He was British consul and
agent for the Booth Steamship Company (which in the boom-
days of rubber ran ships from Liverpool to Iquitos, but now
operates only as far as Manaos, in Brazil), as well as general
mentor and representative for all English-speaking visitors to
Iquitos. He was short, plump, cheerful and matter-of-fact, and,
unlike the Jewish merchants, had his family, consisting of his
wife and small daughter, with him. At the time of our visit the
Parsons household was in considerable turmoil, for they were to
leave Iquitos on the same boat as we, for their first trip home
in three years.

There were two other Englishmen in town: a Mr. Sharpe, who
represented the Anglo-South American bank, and a young chap
in his twenties who was out on a three-year contract with a
lumber company and whose visiting-card spelled out the stagger-
ing cognomen of E. C. S. St. G. Drewry. The only American
enterprise in the place was also a lumber mill, owned by the
Astoria Lumber Company of New York, and the lone Yankees
were its local manager, a Mr. Hartman, and his wife. Their mill
was located some ten miles down-river from the town, and we
therefore did not have the opportunity to see much of them
during our visit. One occasion, however, was memorable. On a
certain evening Herman, Ball and I entered one of the restaurants
which we frequented to find a long table in the center of the
room at which were seated some two dozen of the more pros-
perous burghers of the town. At the head of the table sat Mr.
Hartman, and soon after we had arrived he rose to his feet,
coughed discreetly for attention and addressed his confreres.

"Fellow-members of the Iquitos Rotary Club," he began

The English-speaking colony was rounded out by the inevitable
complement of missionaries, but they lived almost completely
apart from the other gringos, and we seldom encountered them.
The Reverend Dr. Hurley, of Nudey, New Jersey, walked into

232 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

our hotel room one morning, discoursed amiably for half an hour
on the Interdenominational Missionary Society (pro), Roman
Catholic padres (con), and the comparative ferocity of mosqui-
toes in Jersey and Peru (non-partisan). And that was our only
association with the sky-pilots.

I cannot possibly explain how or why, but there seemed al-
ways to be plenty to do in Iquitos. Looking in retrospect at our
three weeks there, it is obvious that we actually did nothing
whatsoever; but, at the time, the illusion of activity, at least, was
present, and that was the important thing. Our eighteen days
on the Pichis Trail and the rivers had brought us to the point
at which such simple activities as sleeping in a bed, wearing clean
clothes and sipping an iced drink became strange and exciting
adventures.

There assuredly were not many places to go. Once out of "the
loop" there were only mud streets and native dwellings, and
once out of them there were only two dirt roads leading from
town. The longer of these, along which we taxied on our first
Iquitian Sunday, extends through the jungle in a northwesterly
direction for about twenty miles, ending at a small lake known
as Quista-Cocha, where primitive bathing facilities and a refresh-
ment-stand have been installed. The second road runs along the
north bank of the Amazon for ten miles to the lumber mill where
the multi-initialed young Englishman, Drewry, was employed.
Strike out from Iquitos in any direction other than of these two
routes and you wfll need a machete to cut your way.

The fact that there is no place to go, however, does not pre-
vent Iquitos from having an impressive array of transportation
facilities. There are perhaps thirty automobiles in town, almost
all of which serve in the double capacity of taxis, when there is a
customer about, and private cars, when there is not. Their
principal function is exercised in the evenings, when it is the
custom for ten or twelve citizens to pile into each car and scoot
around the plaza and the few paved streets in quest of a cooling
breeze. Except when some affluent and eccentric gringo arrives

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 233

in town and wants to visit Quista-Cocha or the lumber mill, they
seldom wander from the civilized purlieus. Gasoline is expensive
(the equivalent of forty cents a gallon), and even the staunchest
of Mr. Ford's products will not stay new for long on the roller-
coaster jungle lanes.

The autos of Iquitos present one feature I have never encoun-
tered elsewhere, but which might be copied to advantage in our
own world of colorless, impersonal machines: they have names.
These, we discovered, are not supplied by the factory as an extra
attraction for the South American market, but are bestowed by
the owners at the time of purchase and subsequently engraved on
metal plates, which are attached to the cars in the same manner
as the licenses. Most of the names are conservative enough, being
similar usually to those given ships: Margarita, ATnazonas, Reina
del Iquitos, and so on. But I defy the Pullman Company itself to
outdo the cognomen of the Ford touring-car in which Herman,
Ball and I made the trip to Quista-Cocha. It was Jesu el Gram
Poder. Rough translation: Jesus Christ Almighty.

Ranking after the autos in utility, but by no means in prestige,
is the trolley. Ordinarily a street car is not an object to excite
great interest, but that of Iquitos is unique in two respects: it is
purely a pleasure vehicle, and it is pulled by a steam-engine.
Originally built to convey merchandise between the stores and
the docks, it has, since the introduction of automobiles, lost this
function, and none has been found to replace it. As its trackage
is less than half a mile in length, forming a circuit around four or
five blocks in the middle of town, it is useless as a passenger con-
veyance, as well as for anything else; but civic pride has saved it
from being scrapped and found, if not a use, at least a form of
exercise for it. Every Saturday and Sunday at sundown it makes
its appearance in the plaza, the populace or such portion of the
populace as possesses ten centavos climbs aboard, and off it goes
for a joy-ride.

The first time we saw it in action we thought it was a form
of delirium or fisco hang-over, for it was a sight to strike terror
into the hearts of the uninitiated. Its engine lacked only a face for

2J4 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

it to have sprung bodily from the reels of a "Mickey Mouse"
cartoon; as it moved it buckled in the center and swayed its rear
end from side to side; its chimney threw out sparks Eke a roman
candle, and its whistle was the voice of Donald Duck on a
rampage. Behind this demon of the jungle the car, or cars (on
Sundays there were two), rocked and rumbled, while the pas-
sengers hung on for their lives and dodged flying sparks. During
the course of an evening it made about twenty circuits of Iquitos'
loop about ten minutes to the trip. Our first night in town we
were its best patrons, but thereafter we contented ourselves with
watching its convulsions from the stable security of our sidewalk
cafe. The greatest disappointment of our stay in Iquitos was that
we never succeeded in getting a picture of it. A creature of
exclusively nocturnal habits, it never emerged from its lair while
there was yet enough light for our cameras.

Foremost among our activities in Iquitos was eating. The three
principal restaurants were known, respectively, as the Union, La
Cabana, and the Continental. The first had the best food, the
second was outdoors and therefore cool in the evening, and the
third had a waitress who Herman was certain had a yen for him;
so we divided our patronage about equally among them. We were
still well within the rice-and-beans belt, but there were enough
other dishes interspersed with those ubiquitous staples to make a
meal an occasion for enjoyment or at least philosophic calm-
instead of the abject terror to which we had become accustomed.
The strictly native concoctions were few, the best thing cervichi,
consisting of fish that instead of being cooked is wrapped in
lemon peel and kept on ice for twelve or fifteen hours. It is made
from either pmche or pirmtcu, the two principal food fish of the
upper Amazon-the former small, the latter large, both good.
There was also turde, which is often tender and flavorsome eat-
ing, but around Iquitos the specimens were usually small and apt
to consist largely of claws and scales. There was also, of course,
yucca in all its variegated forms, but we got along very nicely
without it.

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 235

In the realm of beverages the stock on hand ran to European
rather than native Peruvian varieties. Pisco, by virtue of its long
journey from the west coast, was almost as expensive as scotch
whisky, and the answer to that was, we drank scotch. There was
beer, both from Lima and Germany, but a small bottle cost as
much as a five-course meal; and there were a few native wines,
which Bordeaux and Burgundy need not worry about as possible
competitors on the world market. The situation as regards gin
was unique. If you requested "gin," or even "geen," at a restau-
rant or cafe, nothing happened. Nobody had the faintest idea
what you were talking about. But if you asked for "Old Tom"
you were promptly served. Sometimes it actually was the "Old
Tom" brand; at other times it was Gilbey's or Gordon's or prac-
tically anything else. But whatever it was, it was "Old Tom" as
far as Iquitos was concerned. I never found out why, but I
thought the "Old Tom" people might be pleased to hear about it.

We occasionally did do other things beside eat and drink.
There were band concerts two evenings a week in the plaza;
there were occasional soccer games in a goat-pasture known as
the Stadium Municipal (South American soccer is not the mild
pastime we know in the States, but a ferocious form of warfare
which invariably ends in a free-for-all); and there were the
movies. The Alhambra programs did not follow the novel lines
we had found in vogue in Tarma a film, once started, usually
plodded through to the fadeout clinch but its newsreels were
an unfailing joy. Flash: "Estilos por las Senoritas Eligcmtes in 1934
Exhibite a Nueva York" Flash: "/ gran Babe Ruth Hace 'Home
Run y en su Primero Juego con Boston Braves" Flash: "Fiesta
Religiosa celbre a Madrid." And best of all-flash: -"/ Presidente
Roosevelt inaugure a Washington" A shot less than six weeks
old could this be possible? We were not long in being enlight-
ened; for in a moment the camera shifted, and there, engaged in
the solemn business of relinquishing the Presidency, was none
other than Herbert Hoover. We were witnessing the inaugura-
tion of 1932.

Best of our diversions in Iquitos, however, was sitting at our

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

sidewalk cafe in the plaza either with or without our "Old
Toms-0#-ginger ale" and watching the town go by. And go by
it did all 15,000 of the human population, or so it seemed, plus
miscellaneous parrots, monkeys and reptiles every evening from
eight until ten or eleven o'clock. The plutocrats circled about in
their open cars; the adventure seekers, if it was Saturday or
Sunday, roared to and fro in the fabulous trolley; the rank and
file walked, or sat as we did watching the others walk. The crowd
was much more homogeneous than those of Lima and the other
west coast cities; there was little of the sharp contrasts in racial
characteristics between Spanish-white and Indian-&0/0 to be
observed. Ninety-nine out of every hundred passers-by had the
brown skin, black eyes and regular, nondescript features of the
mestizo, or half-breed a mixture of races that has been so long
in the process of development that it is scarcely any longer a
mixture at all, but a race in itself. Such distinctions as there were
among the people of Iquitos were economic rather than biologi-
cal. The gente decente dressed in white linen, wore the jackets
of their suits even in the hottest weather, and smelled redolently
of the barber shop. (The representatives of this group whom we
saw were practically all male, for the better-class Peruvian woman
is still greatly restricted in the matter of public appearances.)
The peons, on the other hand, wore a minimum of clothing,
went barefoot, and, while they were often redolent of something
unpleasant, it was rarely of tonsorial origin. Among them the
women were as much in evidence as the men and, as a rule,
considerably more prepossessing. In common with the women
of many tropical countries, it is their custom to carry burdens
balanced atop their heads, and as a result their carriage is ex-
tremely erect and graceful. Watching diem, it was not hard to
see how Orellana, on his voyage of discovery down the Amazon,
selected his name for the great river. A hundred times in an
hour a young woman would pass us-head high and poised, body
strong and supple beneath a thin cotton dress who might have
passed for Hippolyta herself.
We had heard a good many advance reports about sexual

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 237

promiscuity in Iquitos, and, being of the masculine gender, were
of course not incurious in an academic way. A Panagra pilot I
met in Lima had told me it was unsafe for a lone gringo to walk
the streets at night. Nat Whitten, in Tarma, had suggested the
best way to keep out of trouble was to carry pictures of our
wives in our^pockets and pull them out in moments of tempta-
tion. And a certain travel writer whose book I had read as much
as said that when one turned down one's bed at night it was
necessary to shoo out the senoritas as well as the mosquitoes.
After aU this our own researches were a dire disappointment.
True, there were a few girls on the streets who probably would
not have called the militia had we said "Buenos noches? but we
were not once accosted by any of them. And occasionally in the
evening a few decrepit females would stand about in the corridor
of the hotel; but they never spoke a word to us, and I am not
sure to this day whether they were after our virtue or our
laundry. I herewith give assurance all legends to the contrary
that any visitor to Iquitos can, if he so desires, leave town in the
same lily-white state in which he arrived.

The nightly procession around the plaza was by no means
restricted to human participants. The dogs, cats and hogs of the
town turned out in force for their daily exercise, and often there
was a delegation of creatures from the jungle, usually with a
string about their necks and a small boy on the other end. We
ourselves never had any luck in encountering wild life in the
forests our approach seemed to be the signal for everything on
the premises either to climb a tree or disappear down a hole but
on the main thoroughfare of Iquitos we were practically in a
metropolitan Noah's Ark. It was the custom of the boys of the
town to parade about with such animals as they had caught in
the jungle roundabout either in the hope of selling them or
simply to show their prowess as amateur Frank Bucks and the
resulting eff ects were often startling. It takes a bit of getting-
used-to to look up from one's table at a cafe and see an anteater
trot by on the end of a leash, like a Pekinese on Park Avenue.
Lizards and turtles were almost as numerous as dogs, there was

238 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

an occasional small wildcat or sloth, and a full complement of
monkeys. Of the latter one species particularly caught our fancy:
a biggish monk, pontifical in bearing and with a red, hairless face,
to whom the Iquitians have given the beautifully appropriate
name of mona inglesa. It was hard to resist buying one they
were cheaper than a bottle of beer but, having wisely contem-
plated the future, I at length decided that I preferred staying
married.

Time: Any evening.

Place: The cafe.

Characters: Lord, Ball, Ullman.

Props: Three Old Tows-con-ginger ale.

Ball: In a well-regulated society chaps like you two would be
kept in padded cells.

Lord: Come again?

Ball: Anyone who'd come to a place like this of his own free
will should be under observation.

Lord: What's the matter with it?

Ball: What's the matter with it? Good Lord, man, what isrit
the matter with it? It's dirty; it's unhealthy; it stinks; there's no
sanitation; there's no decent food; there's nothing to do; there
are ten million mosquitoes

Lord (scratching himself) : I hadn't noticed many mosquitoes.

Ball: In fact, I might go so far as to say, in choicest Anglo-
Saxon, that Iquitos is the arse-hole of the world.

Ullman: Have you ever been in Brooklyn?

Ball: No. But Fm sure that, whatever its defects, Brooklyn has
streets without pigs, houses without cockroaches, and meals with-
out beans, rice and yucca.

Ullman: And sooty factories, and sunless streets, and howling
subways in which human beings are reduced to the stature of
chickens in a crate.

Lord: Don't forget the Dodgers.

Ball: Give me a soft cushion to rest my bottom on and a good

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 239

cut of rare roast beef, and I'll let someone else worry about my
stature.

Lord: If you had your choice of anything in the world what
would you like to be doing right now?

Ball (dreamily): Right now I should like to be walking slowly
along West 52nd Street, New York City, U.S.A., in evening
clothes, with a six-course dinner in my stomach, a dizzy blonde
on my arm, and two tickets for a good show in my pocket.

Ullman: You enjoy the theater?

Ball: Of course. Don't you?

Ullman: I prefer the mosquitoes.

(A pause, while we scratch ourselves meditatively.)

Ball: I can't understand you chaps. You live in a civilized coun-
try. You have decent, comfortable homes. No one asked you to
leave them. Yet you deliberately head off for a God-forsaken
hole like this. What for? What's the reason?

Lord: That's what my wife asked me.

Ball: Well, what did you tell her?

Lord: I said, maybe it would harden me up to run for Congress.

Ball: I'm speaking seriously. Why did you come here?

Ullman: Because it was far away.

Ball: And what did you expect to find?

Ullman: I suppose what every man expects to find when he
goes to a distant place.

Ball: And that is?

Ullman: It's hard to say. The Spaniards called it El Dorado
The Gilded Man-

Ball: My Gilded Man lives in an air-conditioned penthouse in
the biggest city in the world. He sleeps in black silk pajamas,
eats caviar for breakfast, cuts coupons for a living and spends his
week-ends on a yacht with Greta Garbo.

Lord: That's okay if you're not married.

Ball: Chacun a son gout, I guess. Or words to that effect.

Ullman: There's one thing in the world that every man who
ever lived wanted.

Ball: What's that?

240 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

Ulbnan: What he hasn't got.

Ball: Escape, eh? Yes, all of us want to escape, I suppose. I
want to escape from Iquitos and go to New York. You want to
escape from New York and go to Iquitos. Each of us wants
something different. You, I, Herman

Lord: That's baloney, boys. Right now all three of us want
exactly the same thing.

Ball: What's that?

Lord: Another drink.

Bally Ulbnan: Como no?

Lord: Tres mas Old Tom con ginger ale, for favor.

Waiter: Si, senor.

(Silence, as the Iquitos trolley, twelve pedestrians, -four
lizards and an anteater pass by. The drinks arrive. Ball
raises his glass.)

Ball: Gentlemen, I give you the Walla-bird.

Lord, Ullman: The what?

Ball: The Walla-bird, Surely you must have encountered it
along the Pichis Trail.

Lord: What's it like?

Ball: The Walla-bird, mis buenissimos amigos, is a remarkable
and wily individual. He is, in addition, incomparably the greatest
master of the art of Escape that nature has developed. We can
all learn from him to our advantage.

Lord, Ullman: How?

Ball: When attacked, gentlemen, the Walla-bird flies upward
in ever-decreasing circles, finally disappearing up his own back-
side, from which vantage point he hurls dung and derision at his
pursuers.

And so on, until they took our chairs out from under us and
sent us home. There's nothing like a warm tropic night along
the Amazon to stimulate keen, coherent conversation.

Life was not all a round of gin, anteaters and metaphysics.
Herman and I had "things to attend to," and attending to things

DOWN THE MALECON TOWARD THE MARKET, IQUITOS

THE MALECON-PALACE HOTEL, IQUITOS

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 241

in Iquitos was usually a lengthy and complex undertaking. In
the first place, there was the invariable reluctance of shopkeepers
to part with their merchandise; in the second place there was
the question of time. There were a few clocks in town, and the
day was officially recognized as being divided into hours and
minutes, but the average Iquitian was not interested in such
trivia of civilization. We soon discovered that there were two
systems of timekeeping in operation the first, known as the
manana or mas tarde system, being of local origin, and the sec-
ond, or hora inglesa system, being an introduction of the gringo
colony. It was necessary, in making appointments or arranging
for deliveries, to specify which of the two you were using, for
there was considerable difference between them. For example:
eight o'clock, hora inglesa, meant eight o'clock, whereas eight
o'clock, without the qualifying phrase, meant anything between
ten o'clock and the middle of the following afternoon. It was a
helpful distinction and occasionally had results.

In our bouts with Iquitos officialdom, however, neither hora
inglesa nor any other stratagems at our command availed us any-
thing. We had been relieved of our passports and other docu-
ments when the Melita arrived and told we could pick them up
in forty-eight hours at the office of the commmdante of the
Port. Reporting there at the specified time we were informed
that they had been turned over to the police, from whom we
could get them the next day. By that time, however, the police
had passed them along to the mayor's office, who in turn had
executed a speedy double-play by handing them over to the
military authorities. Eight days after surrendering them we got
our passports back, duly stamped by all four departments in
recognition of our arrival and present residence in Iquitos. But
it was necessary, we discovered, to give them back almost im-
mediately so that they could be restamped for our departure.
The itinerary of their return journey was in reverse from the
army to the mayor to the police to the port authority from
whom we finally retrieved them for good the day before we
sailed.

242 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

Officialdom is omnipresent in Iquitos, and there are so many
uniforms in evidence that the town has the appearance of a
military encampment rather than a community of civilians. Four
square blocks along the Malecon are given over to barracks; there
are always two or more gunboats at anchor near the river bank;
and there are enough police to maintain order in Chicago. Squads
of soldiers are forever marching back and forth through the
streets, and the sound of bugle calls and barked commands is
almost as common as the yapping of dogs and grunting of pigs.

The reason for this concentration of military strength in
Iquitos is twofold. In 1933 Peru and Colombia came to the verge
of war in a dispute over their boundaries in the upper Amazon
region, and though a settlement of their difficulties was eventu-
ally eff ected by a commission of the League of Nations, no love
has since been lost between the two nations and neither appears
satisfied with the adjustments made. Colombian maps show
that country as possessing a large frontage of land along the
Amazon, as well as the whole territory between the Putumayo
and Japura rivers, west of Brazil; Peru, on the other hand, claims
this region as her own, and, although both nations are at present
abiding by the League compromise, neither, apparently, has any
intention of doing so indefinitely. Ecuador also enters the picture
with a claim of a large segment of land directly north of Iquitos,
but in the past few years there has been less friction over this
than over the Colombian dispute.

In addition to its international problems, the Peruvian govern-
ment is concerned over the status of the province of Loreto itself.
This vast area of jungle, of which Iquitos is the only important
city, is, as has been pointed out, almost completely isolated from
the rest of the country and leads an economic life of its own.
In consequence the average Loretano feels little bond between
himself and the Costeno, or inhabitant of the west coast, and is
apt to resent the interference of Lima in the conduct of his
affairs. There has never been any active effort at revolt or seces-
sion by Loreto, but the ties that bind it to Peru proper are so
thin that the central government is constantly on the alert for

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 243

such a contingency. The situation has of late been particularly
aggravated by the friction with Colombia. Geographically and
economically Loreto could just as well be part of either country,
or neither, and in the event of actual war Peru could expect
little support from the Loretanos themselves.

The result of all this is a strong show of military strength in
Iquitos. As added precaution in the event of trouble, the govern-
ment has seen to it that the personnel of the army, navy and
police force on duty there is composed almost exclusively of
Costenos. Particularly is this the case with higher officials. The
mayor of Iquitos, being an elective officer, is a native of Loreto,
but all other important authorities the military commander, the
chief of police, the chief of aviation, the head of the secret-
service, and so forth -are men who have been sent out from Lima.
To date the jungle country of the montana has not been of great
economic importance, but its resources are vast and its future
possibilities boundless. Peru has no intention of permitting those
resources or that future to become the property of Colombia' or
of an independent state of Loreto; so the flags fly, the troops
deploy, and the uniforms parade in the streets of Iquitos.

My companion, Herman Lord (as distinguished from my com-
panion Daniel Boone Rover Merriwell-Quixote) was not un-
mindful of the fact that he had come to these ends of the earth
with a purpose. Since the time of our arrival at the westernmost
headwaters of the Amazon he had been making inquiries about
the existence and whereabouts of shells, and, once in Iquitos, he
went into action on all fronts. From one local merchant he pro-
cured an elaborate, made-to-order apparatus for dredging; from
another he hired a twenty-foot dugout canoe with an outboard
motor; and from in front of our sidewalk cafe he enlisted a crew
of two boys to accompany him as mechanic and cook. Mean-
while word had got round that he was in quest of shells, and
every day an assortment of callers would show up in our room,
bearing clams, mussels, snails and such, together with long recitals
of where they could be found. "Mucbas conchas. Muchas con-

244 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

chas y buenissiTms para buttones" From their descriptions it
seemed that the Amazon was nothing less than an outdoor but-
ton-storehouse, with a little incidental water running through.
But we remembered we were in Peru, and we remembered our
good friend Enrico Sims, and we listened with one ear only.

The day arrived on which we had planned to start off on our
first expedition, but I awoke in the morning feeling ill and
feverish. I took my temperature and found it was 102. Then, to
make sure, I took it again and found it was 96. Nevertheless, I
could tell I had fev.er and reluctantly decided to stay behind
while Herman braved river and jungle for three days alone. Left
to myself, time dragged on interminably. I tried to sleep, but
couldn't, and spent the day roving about the room and tossing
on the bed. Toward evening Ball came in and, upon finding I was
ill, demonstrated true British efficiency. He ordered me to wrap
up in a heavy blanket, sent out for two varieties of anti-fever
pills, and, in addition, fed me what amounted to a square meal of
quinine and sedatives out of my own medical kit. Practically
bursting with chemicals, I went to bed and sweated and sweated
and finally slept.

When I awoke next day the fever was gone, but Herman was
back. His outboard motor had broken down a few hours down-
stream from Iquitos, and he and his crew had spent half the
previous day and most of the night paddling back against the
powerful current. I commiserated with him, but was secretly
glad of his misfortune, for now that my fever was gone I would
be able to accompany him when he set out again. I spent the day
convalescing with grim determination and drying out the four
pairs of pajamas I had wetted through during my all-night sweat-
ing-orgy. By evening I was well enough to see Babe Ruth hit
his homer for the Boston Braves at the Alhambra, and the next
morning I was a hundred percent all right. We set it down to
grippe and went about our plans for the next shelling-trip.

Before getting started we had one unexpected encounter with
the police, who not content with playing basketball with our
passports had also been keeping a vigilant eye on Herman and

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 245

his activities. One morning a policeman appeared in our room;
examined his dredging apparatus, books and other paraphernalia,
and invited us to accompany him to the station house. The ques-
tioning that ensued there made it obvious what was up. Like the
passengers on the Melita, the police suspected that what Herman
was after was not really shells, but gold; and while the gold in
the Peruvian rivers is the property of anyone who can find it,
its exportation from the country is strictly forbidden, and they
had decided to nip in the bud any smuggling activities which
we might be contemplating. One look at Herman's gadgets, how-
ever, was all the prefect needed, and we were again free men.
I don't think he was quite convinced of the purity of our motives,
but 'was convinced that we would never land any gold with the
weird implements in our possession. We were given a polite dis-
charge, together with the assurance that our passports would be
ready mancma, or, if not manana, surely pasa wianana.

We embarked on our Amazonian canoe-trip on behalf of the
Automatic Button Company of Muscatine, Iowa, in the half-light
of an early Thursday morning. We planned to be gone only
until Sunday night, but our expedition was equipped as though
we were setting out on a non-stop voyage to New York by way
of Cape Horn and New Zealand. This time there were Pwo out-
board motors the little Evinrude which Herman had had before
and which had theoretically been repaired, and a gigantic John-
son "Sea Horse" that practically shoved the whole canoe under
water but churned us along at the pace of a speed-boat. Our
equipment included the shelling apparatus, hammocks, blankets,
ponchos, a change of clothes each, food, medicines, and a half-
dozen bottles of nice warm beer. Herman's former crew of two
remained on duty two boys in their late 'teens who apparently
had but one full name between them. The cook and chamber-
maid had a first name Ladislaus but no last, and the mechanic
had a last name Garcia but no first. It was a bit baffling to us,
but probably not nearly so baffling as our names to them. After
a few futile attempts at "Senor Lord" and "Senor Ullman" the

246 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN"

boys gave up, and we became simply "Meester Un* and
"Meester Dos."

Our comfort-loving friend, David Ball, astonished both us and
himself by arising before sunrise to bid us good-by. He had
finished his business in Iquitos and was departing by plane the
following day theoretically for Lima, but actually, he assured
us, for his old stand at Pucalpa. He was cheerful about it, how-
ever, and estimated that he should be back home within two
weeks provided no other pilots decided to visit sick wives. As
we shook hands and stepped into our canoe he contemplated us
pityingly and shook his head.

"I suppose the beds in Iquitos are too soft and the mosquitoes
too tame for you chaps," he said. "Well, in that yacht you ought
to find all the discomfort your little hearts desire. Blessings on
you."

Fifty yards .from shore we heard him shouting at us. "Hey,"
he yelled.

We heyed back.

"If you're attacked by crocodiles, don't forget the Walla-
bird!" And he was gone. If any reader of this record happens to
make the trip along the lower Ucayali during the next few years
he might stop in at the hotel in Pucalpa and see if one David
Ball, of the Peruvian Trading Corporation, is still there.

Thanks to the larger of our two motors, we zoomed down
the Amazon at a fine clip throughout the morning. Our plan was
to follow the main stream to a point fifty miles east of Iquitos,
where the Napo River flows into it, and then to ascend the Napo
for about the same distance, stopping at such places en route at
which Herman's eye or imagination might detect the presence of
shells. As the day advanced the sun shone hot and blinding in a
cloudless sky, but the breeze we generated in our progress made
its power bearable. We soon discovered, however, that it was
necessary to wear our hats and keep our shirt sleeves rolled
down, if we did not wish to be fried alive. At about eleven we
stopped at a riverside hacienda to buy fresh eggs and papayas,
and we had them for lunch along with a variety of things out of

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 247

tins, which Ladislaus (by this time his -lone name had been
chopped down to "Lad") prepared in his improvised galley
amidships. Lest there be any misapprehension as to the size of
our craft, let me hasten to explain that "amidships" consisted of
the space between my right and left knees, when spread well
apart.

Shortly after noon we came to our first shelling-ground a
wide, shallow inlet off the main river known as Lago Despense,
which our various visitors at the hotel had agreed was literally
reeking with shells. For an hour or more the boys paddled about
slowly, while Herman dredged and I manipulated ropes and
things and concentrated on not falling overboard. Our efforts
did not meet with success; in many places the lake was too deep
for the dredge to reach bottom, and when it did it brought to
the surface only mud and decaying vegetation. We were pro-
vided with a good sideshow, however, by the antics of a large
number of bufeos. These are the porpoises which inhabit the
upper reaches of the Amazon and are, so far as is known, the
only members of their species which live in fresh water. In Lago
Despense there were two varieties a black and a reddish-pink
both well over six feet in length and both quite unconcerned by
our presence in their midst. Every few minutes one of them
would appear within ten yards or less of the dugout, let loose
with a snort that was halfway between the sound of a taxi horn
and Herman's snoring, and vanish again beneath the surface with
a sinuous, graceful swoop. They were interesting to watch, but
their honking had a note suspiciously like a Bronx cheer. After
a while we abandoned our futile dredging and chugged away.

Another two hours downstream brought us to the mouth of
the Napo. This is one of the larger tributaries of the upper
Amazon almost a thousand miles long in itself which flows
down from the mountains of Ecuador and joins the main river
from the northwest. We turned off into its slow but powerful
current and after a laborious upstream run reached our second
objective another inlet, known as Cajo-cocha. Whereas the first
lake had been broad and regular in shape, this one was narrow

248 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

and wound bewilderingly through thick jungle growth; and
whereas the first had been full of bicfeos, this was full of alli-
gators. Throughout our trip down the Pachitea and Ucayali we
had kept a close lookout for these large caymans that infest the
rivers of tropical South America, but our vigilance had been un-
rewarded; now, however, we had ample opportunity to make
up for lost time. It was late afternoon, the alligator's favorite
time for making his appearance, and all along the inlet we en-
countered dozens of the brutes sunning themselves on the banks
or drifting slowly upon the surface of the water. Those on the
shore were motionless, with that almost petrified stillness that
only reptiles can assume, but those who were swimming were
very much alive. Like the bufeos, they were anything but
frightened at our approach, and many of them approached rather
too close for comfort to our frail dugout. There was something
indescribably sinister about them as they nosed toward us, their
protruding eyes shining like black buttons just above the water,
their ten- or twelve-foot length of scale and muscle barely visible
beneath the muddy surface. There was no hurry or excitement.
They barely stirred the waters of the lake as they advanced a
faint, soft ripple before their snouts, and that was all. On they
would come, their eyes fixed unblinltingly on us, until they were
within ten yards or so of the canoe. Then, invariably just as they
came within range of our cameras and we were about to shoot,
they would disappear not with the diving, headforemost swoop
of the bitfeos, but all at once, straight down, like watersoaked
logs. We would wait, wondering what would happen if one of
them should decide to conie up under the canoe, but they never
did. Usually they would reappear after a minute or two at a dis-
tance of some hundred yards and begin again their slow, sound-
less approach. I don't think I have ever before or since experi-
enced so acutely the feeling of being watched and followed.
Cajo-cocha had one feature in common with Lago Despense:
it contained no shells. After proceeding for an hour along its
dark, tortuous channels we turned about, and retraced our course
to the Napo. The alligators accompanied us to the mouth of the

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 249

inlet but did not venture out into the current of the river and
at our last view of them were lying motionless on the bank,
staring after us with beady, glistening eyes. By this time the sun
had set, and the quick dusk of the tropics had begun. The boys
said they knew of a small chacra a few miles up-river where we
could spend the night. Arriving there we were made welcome
by the Indian family whose home it was and offered their best
trees on which to swing our hammocks and their fireplace on
which to cook our supper. It was not long, however, before we
discovered that we had come upon a veritable metropolis of
mosquitoes, and within half-an-hour our persons were the ren-
dezvous for every insect inhabitant of the lower Napo. They
were in our hair, in our ears, under our shirts, and when we
opened our mouths to eat they swarmed in with the food and
frolicked up and down our gullets. The astonishing and doubly
maddening thing was that they seemed to concentrate exclusively
on Herman and me and leave Garcia, Lad and our hosts quite
alone. While we scratched, tore and shadow-boxed in a frenzy,
the others sat about quietly enjoying their meal, with at most
an occasional languid slap at an unwelcome visitor.

This is not an exaggeration for the sake of effect, but a simple
fact, and a striking demonstration of the marvelous adaptability
of human beings to their environment. Whether through some
chemistry of the blood or a protective process that occurs in the
skin, the native of a tropical country is always far less suscepti-
ble to the attacks of insects than the visitor from a temperate
climate. He is not bitten so frequently, and when he is bitten the
effects are not so severe. A hundred times in my journey across
South America I have seen natives living in apparent comfort in
mosquito- and ant-infested shelters in which a gringo could not
spend an hour without going insane.

In the present instance we had no intention of testing the hour
endurance-limit. Although Garcia and Lad were still busily
enjoying supper, we seized them with their mouths full, prac-
tically hurled them into the canoe, and pushed out into the
blessed, bugless breeze of the river. We had no idea where we

250 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

were going, but we knew damn well where we weren't staying.
As we chugged out into midstream the full moon, glowing and
enormous, came up over the horizon. In its soft light we could
see the little chttcra from which we had come, alone and tiny on
a wooded promontory, the tall, proud palms rising above it, the
jungle beyond faintly luminous as it spread away into distance.
Across the dark water stretched a golden band from the canoe
to the promontory, from the promontory across the water be-
yond into the very face of the moon itself. It was a scene of
magical, tJirilling beauty, and as we left it behind it seemed
wrong and perverse that a place so lovely to look upon could
be a place so unendurable as a habitation that such a visual para-
dise could be such a sensuous hell.

We cruised the river for an hour, and each time we ap-
proached shore we were driven back by the minute, ferocious
hordes. At last, in the very center of the river, we espied a dark,
motionless shape. Approaching it slowly we found it to be a
huge mahogany tree snagged in the stream, and without farther
ado set about making it our home for the night. Herman and I
built ourselves beds of charcoal sacks and gasoline tins in the
canoe, and the boys, with the effortless facility of those who
have grown up without benefit of mattress or springs, curled
themselves on two square feet of log and fell instantly asleep.
Nor were we far behind them. The dark waters of the Napo
were three inches from my nose a disquieting proximity for a
chronically restless sleeper but the breeze was fresh and cool,
and our rights to the log were undisputed by mosquitoes or other
humanivora. Once during the night I awoke to find my left arm
trailing in the water. I removed it gingerly and ascertained to my
satisfaction that an alligator had not dined on my hand while I
slept. Then I closed my eyes again.

We arose at six, after one of the best night's sleeps we had
had since leaving Lima. A dip in the river, breakfast, a few
snapshots of our home (X marks my room), and we were off
again. After his experiences of the previous day Herman had
soured on inlets and determined to concentrate on sandbanks.

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 251

All morning we pushed up the Napo, to a point only a few
miles short of the Ecuadorian border (according to Ecuador;
according to Peru we were still a good three hundred miles from
the frontier). We made perhaps half-a-dozen stops at sand- and
mud-flatslow alluvial deposits in midstream or along the banks
which in another two weeks would disappear under the rising
tides of the river. We found dead fish, lizards, snakes, and the
tracks of 'gators and turtles, but there could not have been
fewer clams at Broadway and Forty-Second Street.
"The hell with 'em," said Herman. "Let's eat."
We made our way back to our chacnt of the night before
now both less beautiful and less hellish in the hot glare of mid-
day. Lunch consisted of tinned things of our own and a turtle
provided by the household, and, by way of preparation for
supper, we took with us when we left a fat and most edible-
looking chicken. It seemed a fine idea at the time, but proved
distinctly the contrary before the afternoon was over at least
for me. Peruvian fashion, the animal was alive, not to be killed
until immediately before cooking, and the quarters assigned her
in the canoe were directly between my feet. Unfortunately she
proved to be a most friendly and entertaining companion,
hopping about on my knees and sitting contentedly in my lap,
with the result that by evening I had developed quite a fondness
for her. Old Farmer Ullman had not yet become accustomed
to having social relations with his meals before eating them, and
the thought of dismembering and devouring the creature who
was now clucking at me pleasantly did not result in the most
pleasant of sensations. When at last Lad reached over toward
her with no good intent, I almost intervened. But, considering
that it would hardly be fair to the others, I refrained, and con-
tented myself with staring at the scenery during the subsequent
proceedings. But I had sardines for supper.

In the meantime, with the Napo's current behind us, we had
come rapidly downstream and by sundown were back in the
Amazon. This time our search for a night's habitation was more

252 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

successful. Deciding to try our luck at a larger-than-average
chacra we espied on the bank, we found that it was not only
comparatively free of insects but that there were accommoda-
tions for us indoors. ("Indoors," in tropical Peru, means a bam-
boo floor raised from the ground and a thatch roof; it has
nothing to do with walls.) Our hosts were obviously a prosper-
ous family, as prosperity goes in Amazonia; their cattle and swine
were numerous and well-fed, their equally numerous children
were tolerably clean, and their Singer Sewing Machinein my
whole crossing of South America I never encountered even the
rudest hut that did not contain a Singer was shiny and in good
repair. The man of the house was away .on his business of taguct-
trading, but his wife and dozen-odd grown children took us in
hand and did all they could to make us comfortable. It was true
luxury after our night on the log. So we slept much worse.

In the morning we got off in fine style, zoomed about in a
handsome curve in front of the chacra, waving good-by to our
hosts, and proceeded all of fifty yards upstream before our motor
broke down. Garcia tinkered with it while we drifted in the
wrong direction at a neat four miles an hour, but it had quit
for good, and we were finally compelled to remove it and fall
back on the little Evinrude. By the time we were underway
again we were some five miles back of where we had started,
and it took us a full hour to pull back even with the chacra.
Our hosts, polite to the end, came out and waved to us as we
went by for the third time.

With the smaller motor shelling was out of the question, for
it would be a good twelve-hour pull to Iquitos against the
powerful current, and we had neither food, gas, nor inclination
for another day on the river. All morning we chugged slowly
along beside the endless forest wall, keeping as close to the bank
as possible, both to seek shade and to keep out of the strong
sweep of midstream. The weather, ever keen to scent out human
difficulty and contribute its own tithe of woe, set its cap for us
in earnest First it shot the sun at us not merely the ordinary,

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 253

hot tropical sun to which we had grown accustomed but an
extra-special, malignant fireball that almost fried the canoe out
from under us. Tiring of this, it amused itself with an hour of
scooting winds and heavy waves, and topped off its repertory
with a howling downpour. At first the cooling rain was wel-
come, but soon it became necessary for us to bail out our craft,
and after an hour of stooping and scooping we were hotter than
we had been while lying in the sun with our shirts over our
heads. Toward mid-afternoon the storm finally abated. We
stripped to our underdrawers, spread our clothing out to dry,
and tried to mop things up a bit. But it was no use. During the
last stage of our journey the bottom of the canoe was an unholy
welter of wet charcoal, spilled beans and butter, river-bank mud,
chicken feathers and well-stepped-on bananas.

As evening came on we began passing many chacras and
haciendas along the bank and dozens of canoes loaded with
produce for the Sunday market at Iquitos. Many of these canoes
were more than fifty feet in length, with low thatch roofs to
shelter their contents from rain and sun, and some had as many
as a dozen paddlers. They made a picturesque procession, crawl-
ing slowly along against the heavy current, their colorful cargos
of fruits and vegetables piled high amidships and the bare, brown
arms of their crews swinging together in strong, tireless rhythm*
Our Evinrude was no speedster, but we passed them one by
one, and by nightfall had reached the American lumber mill at
the mouth of the Nanay River. Another hour and Iquitos hove
into sight first the two decrepit gunboats that guard the harbor,
then the other ships and the docks, finally the Malecon and the
lights of the town itself. Tied up to the principal floating pier
we saw a large, unfamiliar shape. It was the Cuyaba, the Brazilian
ship on which we were to leave Iquitos, and it had apparently
slipped by us on its way upstream either while we were sleeping
or while we were side-tracked on the Napo. Ordinarily we
would have been glad to see it and curious to examine it, but at
the moment our only interest in life was to get out of those
mashed bananas and chicken feathers and into bed.

254 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

The Cuyaba, we learned next day, was scheduled to leave on
March fourth, which gave us the better part of another week
in Iquitos. Herman, long undecided as to which way he would
go once he reached the Amazon, had finally determined to ac-
company me down to Para, whence he would head south for
Rio de Janeiro and the Argentine. He was disappointed at the
failure of his shelling ventures, but. not discouraged, and held
to the belief that he would find his elusive quarry in the Parana
and Paraguay rivers.

Although Herman was a Quixote, he was if the paradox is
possible a keenly practical Quixote. Loving to forage through
the queer and remote corners of the earth, he nevertheless
looked upon those comers not with the eye of the adventurer
or the romanticist, but of the business man. A rushing river was
water power; a tree, furniture; a palm, vegetable oil; a clamshell,
buttons. Everywhere we went along the streams and through
the jungle his mind dwelt on the possibility of future develop-
ment and exploitation.

"Hot damn what a place for a power plant!" he exclaimed
as we crossed Miriatiriani on our mules. "By gosh with a capi-
tal of a few thousand bucks and a hundred peons who would
work, this could be the greatest fruit-plantation in South
America," he commented as we threaded the jungle in the out-
skirts of Pucalpa. "Those shells may be buried in the mud now,
but they're here all right," he said on the day following our re-
turn from the Napo. "In twenty years I'll bet yqgthe upper
Amazon is the biggest source of supply for pearl buttons in the
world. Hot damn, yes!"

His enthusiasm was that of an irrepressible small boy. A dozen
times a day his eyes, for no apparent reason, would light up with
a satisfied twinkle, he would rub his hands violently together
and suddenly let loose with a muffled sound that was half giggle
and half purr. Then I would know that in his mind's eye he was
seeing the great things that were to be done-and that he would
do in the world. The names of towns and rivers, where we were
going and how we would get there, were matters of complete

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 255

indifference to him, and he turned them over to me. He himself
was too busy building empires.

The day following our return to Iquitos we spent the after-
noon in our room, writing letters. After an hour or so I suddenly
became aware of the unusual sensation of feeling cold. There
was no wind stirring, and outside the sun was baking the street
as usual; across the room Herman sat in his underwear and
sweated. But from minute to minute I felt colder. Soon, in spite
of the coat I put on, I was shivering and chattering, and I knew
I had fever again.

The chill lasted for about an hour and then disappeared, leav-
ing me hot, dry and lightheaded. I took my temperature and,
finding it was 102, wrapped myself in a blanket and lay down.
But I could neither sweat nor sleep, and as the afternoon wore
on I could tell the fever was rising. At six I arose, took my
temperature again, and found it was 104. To make sure, I sucked
the thermometer three times, and, unlike my experience of ten
days before, it registered the same each time. I also took my
pulse and found it to be no, but unfortunately I couldn't recall
whether this was fast, slow, or normal. The time seemed to have
arrived, however, to call a doctor, and Herman sent the boy
who waited on us in the hotel to rustle one up. Half-an-hour
later he reappeared and said, "No ai? whereupon Herman went
out himself and returned with one in five minutes. The physician
he was a Dr. Gamero, attached to the Iquitos naval base spoke
about as much English as I did Spanish, and our conversation was
strictly rudimentary; but he examined me with what seemed pro-
fessional thoroughness.

"Grippe?" I asked him, when he had finished.

"Nopaliidismo. Malaria."

He wrote out a prescription for quinine tablets (I told him
I had plenty of quinine with me, which I had been taking regu-
larly as a preventive, but he seemed to prefer his own brand),
and told me to call at his office the next day for the first of three
injections of quinoplasmina.

256 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

"As it is malaria," he said, "the fever will be gone in the
morning. "

During the evening I was surprised to find myself in unusually
good spirits. My fever was still high, but its effect, instead of
being depressing, was exhilarating; my head felt light, and the
general sensation was that which usually follows the third or
fourth cocktail on an empty stomach. Before I fell off to sleep
I was feeling perfectly swell.

The next morning, as the doctor had prophesied, the fever
was gone. I was a little weak on my legs, but otherwise physically
all right. Mentally, however, I was not so good. Malaria, I well
knew, was one of those tropical diseases which hates to let go,
once it has got hold of a victim, and a year or more of unpre-
dictably recurring chills and fever was not a prospect to antici-
pate with pleasure. In addition, I now had occasion to remem-
ber the admonitions and warnings of various friends back home:
"Why must you deliberately, go to a notoriously unhealthful
part of the world and expose yourself to disease?" "It would
be a fine thing, wouldn't it, to take a pleasure-trip and come back
with dysentery or hookworn or malaria?" No, I was not very
pleased with myself. For a person who had to be in Amazonia
for Herman, say, in his wanderings for the Automatic Button
Company of Muscatine to get malaria was one thing: a kind of
heroism, almost. But for me, who had no earthly reason to be
there other than my own sweet will, it was something else again.
It was just plain damnfoolishness. Plagued by such somber
broodings I repaired to Dr. Gamero's and received my first shot
of 2 c.c. de soliicion.de quinoplasmma in the place I ordinarily
use for sitting down.

The conclusion of this episode if, indeed, the conclusion has
been reached is shrouded in mystery. I received the two subse-
quent injections, sat only on well-cushioned seats for the next
few days, and continued taking ten grains of quinine daily, as I
had done before being taken ill. Before the end of the week I
left Iquitos, feeling fine, and as I write this I still have had no'
recurrence of fever. What that means I do not know. Perhaps

PROMOTING

INTERNATIONAL

RELATIONS

THREE THOUSAND MILES OF IT

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 257

that I did not have malaria after all. Perhaps that Dr. Gamero's
injections were extraordinarily effectiveor that I am an extraor-
dinarily fine patient. Perhaps that the little fellows in my blood
are just biding their time.

Our last few days in Iquitos were full and enjoyable. Ball, to
be sure, was gone, and we missed his philosophical disquisitions
over our "Old Toms con ginger ale," but we saw more than we
had previously of the other gringos in town. At the Booth Line
office we were introduced to a Mr. Massee, their regular repre-
sentative in Iquitos as well as British consul who had arrived
on the Cuyaba to replace the soon departing Parsons. He was a
tall, ruddy man with white hair, had been on the upper Amazon
even longer than Sam Harris, and was famous throughout the
region as being the only resident foreigner ever known to say
that he liked it there. Our most frequent companion, however,
was E. C S. St. G. Drewry. (The initials, we had by this time
ascertained, stood for Edward Charles Stuart St. George, but not
satisfied with so wide a choice, he insisted on being called
"Baron.") He was only twenty-six, very proper, well-mannered
and British, and "frightfully keen on sports." His job in Iquitos
was with the Loretano Lumber Company, a French concern, and
at the time of our visit had been there only two months of his
prospective three-year term. Early in our acquaintance I gathered
that he was engaged to a girl back in London and assumed that
his plan was to marry her upon his return. Taking a page from
David Ball's book I discoursed upon the terrors of life in Iquitos
for civilized humans, particularly women.

"A man would certainly be out of his mind to bring his wife
down to a place like this," I observed.

"Why-er-do you think so?" said E. C. S. St. G. D. "You see,
my fiancee is coming down next month. Mr. Massee is going to
marry us."

In spite of the false start, we got on very well. Drewry intro-
duced me to two Iquitian institutions I had not before known
existed: a swimming pool and a tennis court. Together we made

258 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

pleasant use of them during my few remaining days in town I
a bit gingerly, owing to the spirited chemical warfare that was
going on in my buttocks as a result of Dr. Gamero's ministra-
tions.

Sam Harris was an unending source of information about
Amazonia, its history, conditions and inhabitants. It was typical
of the isolation of Iquitos, however, that he knew nothing what-
ever of the rest of Peru.

"For thirty years now," he told me, "I've been planning to get
over to Lima for a visit, but somehow it's never worked out. It
takes sixty days by ship, you know twice as long as to England."

"How about the airplanes?" I asked.

"Well, they've only been operating for the last five years, and
I figured that at sixty I was a little too old to start leaving the
ground for the first time. As for that Pichis Trail" he smiled
"I suppose it's all right for Indians and crazy Americanos."

As a matter of fact, of all the gringos living in Iquitos, only
two Victor Israel and Sharpe, of the bank had ever been over
the Andes to the Peruvian west coast.

"All of us originally came up the river," explained Harris.
"Our business and interests are along the river. We have no more
contact or relationship with the rest of the country than with,
say" he waved his hand "China. Less. Half our retail merchants
here are Cantonese, but the only Costenos in the place are the
frefectos and commmdantes"

He divided the foreigners in the montana into two main
classes: business men and missionaries.

"It's astonishing how little the two mingle," he commented.
"In thirty-five years I don't think I've known more than a half-
dozen sky-pilots better than to bow to. It has nothing to do with
my being Jewish either. Sharpe and Parsons and chaps like that
don't know them any better than I do."

I asked him about the various colonization projects by which,
I had heard, the Peruvian government had from time to time
endeavored to settle the region. Harris shook his head.

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 259

"All washouts," he said. "I remember in 1922, when about a
hundred Italians from San Francisco came down here; the gov-
ernment had made them a grant of land for settlement over on
the Huallaga. There's one of them left, and he's married an
Indian woman and moved in with her family. Then there was
another project, about five years later; about fifty families of
Polish immigrants. In three years they were camped outside the
town here, living on garbage and charity. The Polish government
finally paid their way home."

"What was the chief trouble?" I asked.

'Well, it wasn't what you're thinking," he replied. "It wasn't
the heat or tropical diseases or rum or anything fancy like that.
It was the soil. You see," he went on, "the soil in these jungles is
peculiar. It looks rich as hell, doesn't it? And it is for a depth
of about two feet. After that it's just clay. In other words, it's
fine for one, or at the most two years' crops, and after that it's
finished, without fertilizer. Have you any idea how much it
would cost to bring fertilizer all the way in here? No, it's no
go for agriculture around these parts. And what else could a
colonist expect to do?"

How about beachcombers, I asked him; adventurers, tropical
tramps, that sort of thing? Did many of them show up in Iquitos?

"Once in a while," he said. "Not so many now though as
fifteen, twenty years ago. Right after the war that was the time.
Dozens of young fellows knocking around then with no place
to go."

I inquired if he had ever encountered the man called Barnes
of whom Whitten had spoken in Tarma.

"Barnes? Sure, he was here not so long ago either. Blew in
from the west coast, I think the same way you came. Only he
came in style, with an Indian wife paddling his canoe. He hung
around for about a month; played the piano, I remember, like
a wizard, but was drunk every night he was here. Finally we
paid his fare down river, to get rid of him. I guess he was the
real thing in beachcombers, all right. But there aren't many of
them around any more, and I'm usually pretty suspicious."

260 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

"Suspicious of what?" I asked him.

"Of who they really are. About two years ago a chap showed
up in Iquitos here damnedest-looking tramp you ever saw in
your life; didn't have a centavo in his pocket and looked as if
he'd been on the beach for ten years. We put him up free at the
hotel for a few nights, bought him a half-dozen meals and a new
suit of clothes. When he left we paid his steamer ticket down to
the frontier. About a year later I get a package postmarked New
York, and, opening it up, I find it's a book by the same fellow:
'How I Worked My Way Through South America/ Worked':
that was the part of it I Eked! Since then I've looked through
the pockets of every 'beachcomber* that came along to make
sure he wasn't EL G. Wells or Sinclair Lewis."

Like every gringo of long residence whom I met in South
America, Harris was pessimistic about its opportunities for the
average Englishman or American.

"Take this enormous jungle," he said. "Potentially it is the
richest area on earth, but its wealth will be hard won. No indi-
vidual can lick it, nor any number of small groups of individuals.
Look what happened to rubber. And to those colonists. Look
what's happening now to barbasco. This Amazonia is too big
and too wild a place to be conquered by you or me with an ax,
a thousand dollars, and a few ideas. The big corporation the
large, organized syndicate that's who its wealth is for, and even
they will have their hands full with problems of labor and trans-
portation. But it can be done. It's been done in Africa and the
East. Ford's doing it now, down on his rubber-plantation on the
Tapajos. Yes neither you nor I will live to see it, but the day
will come when this wilderness will be a vast treasure-house of
agriculture, industry and commerce."

"Well, I'm glad I got a look at it before the rush," I com-
mented.

"Confidentially, so am I," he said.

The Cuy aba's whistle was just as active, and much louder than
the Huam Capac's or the Melita's. It awoke us at six in the

THE CITY WITHOUT A COUNTRY 261

morning of our day of departure from Iquitos and never stopped
until we were well on our way at eleven. The dock, when we
reached it with our peons and baggage, was a welter of color,
noise and confusion; according to the invariable South American
custom, everyone in town had come to see everyone else off,
regardless of whether or not he knew him. A dozen times in an
hour we were bade an affectionate farewell three pats on the
right shoulder, three on the left by excited gentlemen we had
never laid eyes on before.

The gringo colony was out in force, too, most of them to bid
Parsons and his family good-by.

"Watch out for the rats," Massee admonished us. "The
Cuyabcfs rats are guaranteed to be the biggest and hungriest in
the world."

"I hope you have some food of your own with you," said
Drewry. "The Cuyabtfs meals are the worst you'll ever taste."

"Got your insect powder along?" inquired Sharpe. "The
spiders and roaches on the Cuyaba are terrible."

"Bon voyage!" all three concluded in unison.

Sam Harris came over and shook my hand.

"Well good-by, beachcomber," he said.

"Beachcomber?"

"Yes I'm on to you all right. Every chap who's come through
here in the last ten years claiming to be a beachcomber has turned
out to be a writer. You claim to be a writer; so I guess I've
found the real thing at last."

Extra-special blasts of the whistle. Answering reverberations
from the barnyard on the lower deck. Officers shouting orders
and stewards clanging bells. Claps on the shoulders, kisses, tears,
waving hands palm upward on the receding dock. "Adios
adios "

The City Without a Country disappeared in our wake.
Herman and I walked forward and stood near the Cuyabds
prow, watching the stretches of the river open out before us.

"It's a long way to Tipperary," he said.

262 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

"Twenty-two hundred miles. Right across the continent."
Apparently the prospect pleased him. For the Quixote twinkle

had come to his eye, he was rubbing his hands furiously, and that

half giggle, half purr was rumbling in his throat.
"Hot diggety-dog haven't had so much fun since I had the

measles!" quoth the former mayor of Muscatine.

IX

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT

Ar ATTEMPT to set down the events of our two weeks*
voyage down the Amazon in accurate chronological se-
quence would be impossible. True, the sun rose and set
as usual, and the wall-calendar in the purser's cabin changed
numbers occasionally. But aside from these phenomena, and a
three-day stopover in Manaos, there was absolutely nothing to
distinguish one day from the next, and such a distinction in this
record would be arbitrary and false. If, therefore, the narrative
in the following pages exhibits a bewildering tendency to go
'round and around, be assured that it is a tendency it shares with
the actual routine of life on the Amazon and that, also like it,
it will come out in Para eventually. No, our steamship voyage
across the continent was made without benefit of man's intricate
and artificial chronology of minutes, hours and days. Time, like
the river, did not concern itself greatly with beginnings, middles,
and ends, sections and divisions. It just kept rolling along,

Had we been traveling on the Cuyaba in the opposite direction
and boarded it fresh from an Atlantic liner, we would probably
not have considered it quite the last word in water transporta-
tion; but coming to it by way of mule-back, the Huana Cttpac,
Melita and Malecon-Palace, we could not have been more im-
pressed with our new-found luxury if we had been assigned the
de luxe suite on the Queen Mary. In addition to this pleasant
illusion the direction of our voyage had another advantage: the
trip upstream from Para to Iquitos requires the better part of a
month, whereas the trip downstream requires but half that time.
A fortnight of muddy waters and everlasting forested banks is
ample for the average traveler. Drewry, Massee and other gringos

263

264 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

who had recently made the trip up spoke of their thirty con-
secutive Amazonian nights with a haunted glint in their eyes.

But to return to the luxuries of the Cuyaba: it numbered
among its impressive features a promenade deck, comfortable
chairs, cabins with running water, a bar, and officers in regulation
white uniforms, although we subsequently discovered that the
last made their appearance only on very special occasions, such
as sailing, landing, and Sundays* The ship was capable of a speed
of about ten knots, downstream about twice the pace of the
Melitazad accomplished it, once we were away from ports and
admiring crowds, with a minimum of sound and fury. Built espe-
cially for the Amazon service, she was broad and flat-bottomed,
the better to avoid sandbars and the better to slide off them
when she couldn't avoid them. Like the smaller ships, her lower
deck was open on all sides, and also like them though on a
grander scale its contents were a compendium of the fauna,
flora, humanity, colors, sounds and smells of Amazonia. There
were pigs, cows and chickens by the hundred our lunches and
dinners for many days to come. There were parrots, monkeys,
and dozens of enormous turtles, who slid back and forth across
the deck with a mighty crashing of shells whenever the ship
made a slight pitch or roll. There were great gummy balls of
raw rubber, piles of odoriferous bctrbasco and dried fish, stacks of
sugar cane, bins of Brazil nuts, sacks of coffee a complete
museum of tropical produce. And somehow, among all this, there
was still space for the ship's engines, the huge supplies of fire-
wood, the kitchen, and the sleeping quarters of the crew and
third-class passengers. I did not wait at the end of the voyage
to see how the conglomeration was unloaded, but it must have
been done with the aid of a can-opener and a pair of pliers.

On the upper deck there was less chaos but almost as much
crowding. All eighteen of the first-class cabins were occupied
when we left Iquitos, but that did not deter more and still more
passengers from coming aboard at every stop and piling in with
the original occupants. Herman and I began the trip as sole
proprietors of our six-by-four cubicle, but long before reaching

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 265

Manaos we had acquired three roommates: a Peruvian detective,
a Brazilian lawyer, and the latter's tame but decidedly un-ship-
broken marmoset. By this time, however, we had adopted the
admirable Brazilian custom of sleeping on deck in our hammocks,
and our only visits to our cabin were for the purpose of washing
or determining which of our articles of clothing the rats had had
for breakfast.

During the early part of the trip most of our fellow-passengers
were Peruvian, but they began disappearing as we neared the
frontier, to be replaced by oncoming Brazilians. Only seven pas-
sengers, in addition to ourselves, made the entire journey from
Iquitos to Para. The officers and crew of the Cuyaba were all
Brazilian, and exhibited the astonishingly scrambled racial mix-
ture characteristic of the people of that country. There were
whites, Negroes and Indians, mulattoes (half-white and half-
negro), mamelukes (half-white and half-Indian), ctfuzos (half-
Indian and half-negro), as well as all varieties of sub-mixtures of
these primary mixtures. A Brazilian of a single racial strain is a
rare phenomenon, particularly in the tropical northern section of
the country, where constant interbreeding between Europeans,
Africans and aborigines has been going on for four centuries.
The officers of the Cuyaba, however, if not pure white, were
all on the whitish side of die fence. The cammandante had a
pink face, white, unruly hair, and must in an earlier incarnation
have been a Roman Senator. The chief engineer had the color-
ing of a Swede and the features of an Indian. The purser, I could
swear, was Jewish, with perhaps a slight admixture of Hottentot*
The doctor was notable chiefly for the fact that she was a female.

Besides Herman and myself there were two gringo units on
the boat: the Parsons husband, wife and daughterand a French
couple called Boucher. The latter, at the time we met them,
were none too well disposed toward Iquitos, the Amazon, or the
world in general. They had come out from France only two
months previously, he having been engaged for a position with
the Loretano Lumber Company (the same outfit as that for
which Drewry worked); but he had almost immediately had a

266 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

quarrel with his boss another Frenchman and was now on his
way back home. It was understandable that the voyage was not
quite a joy-ride for a man who was in the process of completing
a four-month, ten-thousand-mile trip for a six weeks' job. But his
spirits seemed to improve as we slowly moved farther away from
the Malecon-Palace and nearer to the Champs Elysees.

There are perhaps a dozen rivers in the world that are over
two thousand miles long, and even these giants among inland
waters are ordinarily not navigable beyond a thousand, or at most
fifteen hundred miles from their mouths. But not only is the
Amazon not an ordinary river; it is not an ordinary giant. Two
thousand miles from its destination in the Atlantic Ocean, with
three-quarters of the width of a continent still before it, it is
already a mighty stream over a mile in width and deep enough,
except at the very end of the dry season, for the passage of ocean
liners. By the time it reaches the frontier between Peru and
Brazil, it has received and absorbed into itself the waters of a
dozen tributaries which, if they were not dwarfed by the main
stream, would themselves rank among the great rivers of the
world. The Maranon, the Huallaga, the Ucayali, the Napo and
the Javary are streams which individually are over a thousand
miles in length; with their tributaries and sub-tributaries they
drain areas of hundreds of thousands of square miles in Peru,
Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador; and all that they accumulate they
bring to the mother Amazon.

As already narrated, we had encountered one group of its
affluents when within a hundred miles of the Pacific and followed
them for twelve hundred miles before we reached the main river
near Iquitos. First there had been the rushing mountain streams
of the Andean slopes near Tarma; then the clear, swift-flowing
Pichis, navigable for canoes; then the larger Pachitea; and finally
the Ucayali, itself a greater river than any in the United States
with the exception of the Mississippi-Missouri. Now at last we
were on the Amazon itself and though we had covered a distance

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 267

equal to the length of five Hudson Rivers, we still had eight
Hudson Rivers between us and Para.

The Amazon, during our first few days upon it, was like, and
at the same time unlike, the Ucayali. Its waters were the same
opaque yellow-brown; its banks presented the same endless,
changeless sweep of impenetrable forest. But its windings were
less cramped and tortuous than those of its great tributary, and
its current flowed with heightened strength and purpose. No
wider and but little deeper here in its upper reaches than the
Ucayali is at its mouth, one had only to take the most casual
glance at it to tell that it was the main stream and the other
the tributary. There was only one place to which it could be
flowing, one reservoir vast enough to receive its accumulated
mass and power; and that was the ocean.

Although it passes through one of the least-known and most
sparsely inhabited areas in the world today, the Amazon, like
the west coast of Peru, was known to white men long before
the first settlers had come to the eastern seaboard of the United
States. Its mouth was discovered by the Portuguese, Vincente
Pinzon, less than eight years after the first voyage of Columbus,
and was named by him, with noteworthy unoriginality, the Rio
Grande. Pinzon did not venture more than a few miles up-
stream, but provided a thoroughly appropriate beginning to the
European invasion of South America by raiding whatever Indian
villages he encountered, slaughtering those inhabitants who
offered resistance, and carrying the rest back to Portugal as
slaves. This was the first that the civilized world heard of the
great river, but its true discovery was not made until forty years
later. This was accomplished by a Spaniard, Francisco de
Orellana, and is, strangely enough, both one of the greatest and
one of the least-known feats in the history of exploration.

In 1541 Gonzalo Pizarro, brother of the conqueror of Peru,
set out from Quito, in Ecuador, with a vast company of soldiers
and Indian slaves in quest of El Dorado, the Gilded Man of
Manoa. His route lay to the east, down the inner slopes of the
Andes and through the thick, humid jungles near the headwaters

268 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

of what is now called the Napo River. After six months, how-
ever, hunger and disease had so decimated his force that it was
unable to proceed farther, and Pizarro ordered his lieutenant,
Orellana, to proceed down the Napo in a small ship they had
built, in quest of food. While the others encamped where they
were, Orellana and fifty men set off downstream, searching for
provisions on the same banks along which, four hundred years
later, Herman and I stalked the wily clam on behalf of the Auto-
matic Button Company of Muscatine, Iowa. But success crowned
their efforts no more than it did ours, and gradually the current
carried the ship to the mouth of the Napo and out into the main
stream of the Amazon. By this time two months had passed,
they still had not found the food they sought, and it would have
taken another five months to battle their way back to the main
body of the expedition against the swift current and rapids of
the Napo. They had no idea where the great river on which they
found themselves might lead, but they decided to cast their lot
with it and follow it to its end. Beset by incredible hardships and
difficulties hunger, disease, Indian attacks, everything which the
wildest jungle in the world had at its command to defeat them
they yet made the voyage to the Atlantic with the loss of less
than a half-dozen men. The passage of the Amazon itself re-
quired eight months, the crossing of the continent a year and a
half.

Litde is known of the life or character of Orellana, but he
must have been a remarkable leadef to conduct a small and
wretchedly equipped band of men across an utterly unknown
continent. He was also, apparently, a man of lively imagination
a quality not rare among explorers and travelers of all times for
in his subsequent account of the voyage he described his vessel
as having been attacked by a tribe of female warriors, all over
six feet in height and more ferocious than any mere men he en-
countered. Whether he was believed or not, the legend stuck in
men's minds, and within a few years Pinzon's Rio Grande had
been forgotten and the great river was known to the world as
Amazonas: the Amazon.

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 269

(Gonzalo Pizarro, incidentally, eventually struggled back to
Quito from the point at which Orellana had left him, but only
after three-quarters of his men had perished.)

The history of the Amazon for the next three hundred years
is largely the story of protracted dispute between the Spaniards
and die Portuguese over boundaries and territorial rights. In
1637 Pedro de Texeira, a Portuguese, made the first ascent of the
river along its whole length and set the boundary at approxi-
mately the point at which Peru and Brazil meet today; but in
the intervening years it has changed frequently, the Spaniards
in Peru pressing constantly to the east and the Portuguese in
Brazil seeking to expand toward the west. But, as is usually the
case in the settling of a new country, the Conquistadores and
important merchants stayed close to the easy riches of the coasts,
and left the exploration of the interior to lone adventurers and
missionaries. It was one of the latter, a Jesuit priest from Bohemia
named Samuel Fritz, who did more to open the upper Amazon
to world trade than anyone before or since. For thirty-eight
years, from 1686 to 1724, he traversed enormous areas in eastern
Peru and western Brazil, founding missions, -baptizing Indians,
and exploring the most remote rivers and jungles of the conti-
nent, and throughout it all found time to keep a detailed and ac-
curate record of his wanderings and activities. His principal
mission, which he called San Joaquim, was located not far from
the site of present-day Iquitos and was the earliest headquarters
for explorers and traders penetrating into western Amazonia.

During the last two centuries all the tributaries and important
sub-tributaries of the Amazon have been explored, and most of
them have been charted for at least part of their courses. One
of the last to be investigated was the so-called River of Doubt,
an affluent of the Madeira, which Theodore Roosevelt visited
with a large expedition in 1913 and which subsequently was re-
named Rio Roosevelt in his honor. (Incidentally, it is generally
believed that a fever, which the former President caught on this
expedition and which he never wholly shook off, was an im-
portant factor in hastening his death several years later.) In the

270 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

past twenty years, South American exploration has turned from
the rivers to the vast jungles which lie between them, but so far
only the bare surface of the wilderness has been scratched.
Though an occasional airplane passes over it and an occasional
expedition penetrates some new area, the interior of the great
forest domain, is little better known today than it was when
Orellana nosed his ship along its dark banks. The map of tropi-
cal South America is still, in effect, simply a map of the Amazon
river system; between the thin, winding ribbons of its streams
spread thousands of miles of forest which no man has ever seen.

During the first few days of our journey the Cuyaba averaged
three or four stops a day. First of these after leaving Iquitos was
the sawmill of the Astoria Lumber Company, some thirty miles
downstream, where we loaded several thousand feet of mahog-
any. Mr. Hartman, the lone Iquitian Yankee, was on hand to
direct the loading, looking most un-tropical in a blue serge suit
and with an umbrella over his arm. Anchored alongside the bank
were dozens of rafts of mahogany and tropical-cedar logs the
principal commercial woods of the upper Amazon waiting to be
cut and graded in the mill. The Astoria, like all the commercial
and manufacturing concerns in the region, does not collect its
own raw material, but is dependent for it on Indian and mestizo
traders. These traders ply up and down the main river and its
tributaries, collect trees which have been felled by settlers or
Indians along the banks, and, tying them into rafts, float them
down to the Astoria or Loretano companies at Iquitos. A few at-
tempts have been made in the past to establish mahogany and
cedar plantations, but they met with the usual failure of such
ventures in Amazonia. All the timber now being exported is se-
cured from trees growing wild in the jungle, and, although the
potential supply is enormous, actual deliveries to the mill are
sporadic and uncertain.

A few hours after leaving the mill the Cuyaba passed the
mouth of the Napo and the tagua-trader's chacra where we had
spent the second nigjjit of our canoe-trip; but it was almost mid-

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 271

night before we made our next stop. This was at San Pablo, a
leper-colony maintained by the Peruvian government. The ship
did not go alongside the bank here a thoroughly agreeable
omission to most of the passengersbut anchored some fifty
yards offshore, while a canoe came out from land with outgoing
produce and returned with incoming supplies.

Upon awakening the next morning we found we had made
the first of our many halts for firewood, or lenya as it is known
along the Amazon. The Cuyaba, having a larger storage capacity,
did not have to stop for fuel so often as the Huawt Capac and
Melita (there were only eight loadings during the entire trip),
but when it did load it was a major operation. Its engines, when
running at top speed, consumed twelve thousand small logs a day,
which meant that we took on twenty thousand or more every
time we stopped to replenish the supply. At the haciendas where
we loaded, the wood was invariably piled as near the river bank
as possible, and there were usually between twenty and thirty
peons on hand to carry it aboard. But each peon carried only
ten logs at a time, and the going was slow in the thick mud of
the bank and across the single board that served as the Cuyabcfs
gangway. Thirty men times ten logs, times two minutes per
round-trip. Well, anyhow, each loading required anywhere
from four to six hours.

Toward evening of the second day we approached the inter-
national frontier, or rather the first of a complex scramble of
frontiers which entangle themselves in the course of the Amazon
about two hundred miles east of Iquitos. It is at this point that
Peru, Brazil and Colombia come together the last-named being
present by virtue of the much-disputed "Leticia Corridor" with
the international port of Victoria, under League of Nations man-
date, thrown in for good measure. For the next twenty-four
hours the Cuyabds course was an exercise in plane geometry, as
we circled, crisscrossed and back-tracked between the various
ports, and it. was doubtful if even the captain knew what country
we were in at any given moment. The first stop was Ramon

272 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

Castilla, the Peruvian military base and customs station on the
south bank of the river, where passports were stamped and sus-
pected gold-smugglers were given a thorough once-over. These
formalities over, we crossed to the north bank and the town of
Leticia, Colombia's only port on the Amazon. This territory
used to be Peruvian, and Peru still claims it as its own, but since
1930 Colombia has had the upper hand in the dispute, and for
the time being, at least, its flag flies over the city and its soldiers
patrol the streets. What makes this argument between the two
'nations more difficult of satisfactory settlement is the fact that
the natives of Leticia and the surrounding area do not themselves
particularly care to which they belong. Their home is equally
remote and cut off from both the main part of Peru and the main
part of Colombia; they have little intercourse with the capitals
or governments of either country and consider themselves
Loretanos, or natives of Loreto, rather than either Peruvians or
Colombians. Theirs is the role of neutral bystander while the two
Republics to the northwest and the southwest fight over them.

From Leticia the Cuyabcfs dizzy course doubled back upon
itself, and we returned about ten miles upstream to Victoria, the
international port. This town, too, was Peruvian until 1930, when
it was ceded to Colombia by the Solomon-Lozano Treaty. In
1933, however, Peruvian troops crossed the Amazon and retook
it, and the two nations were on the verge of war until the League
of Nations patched up a compromise and established Victoria as
a neutral zone. At the present time it is governed by three com-
missionersone from Peru, one from Colombia, and one an out-
sider appointed by the League.

At Leticia and Victoria there were no formalities only loading
and unloading but at the next port, Tabatinga, we were back
again in the zone of passports and inspectors. This is the Brazilian
military outpost on the north bank of the river, and to reach it
from Victoria we passed again between Leticia and Ramon
Castilla. As the commandantes, coinmissionnaires, prefectas, sub-
prefectos, or their Portuguese equivalents, swarmed aboard I
clutched my Folha de Identificagao para Pedido de Visto em

THE SHELL GAME: THE FLAGSHIP AND THE ADMIRAL

STANDARD TRANSPORTATION

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 273

Passaporte estrcmgeiro en Brasil (Port of Entry: Rio de Janeiro)
and contemplated the prospect of a return trip to Lima via
Amazon, Ucayali and Pichis Trail. But the vested powers either
couldn't read or didn't care, and my papers were soon handed
back to me duly stamped and beribboned. From Tabatinga, we
crossed the river to Esperanza, Port No. 5 on our international
tour. This too was Brazilian the seat of the civil authorities and
the customs and more inspecting and more stamping took from
midnight until early morning. By eight o'clock we were under-
way again, but not down the Amazon. Instead our course led
back past our old friends Leticia and Ramon Castilla and off into
the Javary River, which flows into the Amazon from the south
and for some thousand miles forms the boundary between Peru
and Brazil.

The Cuyaba, however, refrained from following it for the
full thousand, contenting itself with a three-hour run to a de-
crepit town on the Brazilian side with a name that rivals "Soupy
Sue" in my affections: Remate dos Malles "The Culmination
of Evil." In the heyday of rubber, it was one of the most impor-
tant collecting and shipping stations in all Amazonia, and its
name seems to have been acquired in recognition of the high-
jinks which were carried on there by the newly rich rubber-
hunters. Today its once-flourishing bars and brothels have given
way to ramshackle native huts, but it is still an important enough
rubber station for the biggest river-boats to visit it regularly on
their downward voyages. The Cuyaba took on several dozen
great, black balls of crude rubber, which the natives rolled
ingeniously over the narrow gangway and which bounced about
the lower deck, raising havoc among the firewood, hogs, chickens
and third-class passengers. At this point our lady ship's-surgeon
displayed her professional status for the only time during the
trip, advising the passengers not to go ashore, as Remate dos
Malles is notorious as one of the worst malarial spots in the South
American tropics.

With its newly acquired rubber balls thumping merrily about
below, the Cuyaba retraced its course down the narrow, swamp-

274 THE THER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

lined Javary to the Amazon and put into Esperanza for another
call. This time, however, it was for less than an hour, and it was
not long before we were again out on the main stream and the
ship's whistle was announcing triumphantly that we were at last
through with frontiers, customs and enchanted mazes, and on our
way.

Life on an Amazon river-boat has one thing in common with
life on boats the world over no one has anything to do. This,
of course, excepts myself, who, wherever I am, always manage
to be at least three weeks behind in my diary; and my solitary
labors, as I tried to catch up with myself, provided the principal
entertainment for the other passengers on the Cuyaba. Each
morning after breakfast I would seat myself at one oithe dining
tables on the afterdeck, and as soon as my pencil was poised, the
crowd would begin to gather. I have made a few inconspicuous
appearances on the stage in my life, but I had never before
written for an audience, and at first it was a bit upsetting to look
up from my paper and see a half-dozen faces staring at it with
eager interest. The Latin-Americans, however, are probably the
most accomplished over-the-shoulder-lookers in the world (Lord
knows, they practice enough to be), and when I found that my
audience refrained from breathing in my ear, jostling my elbow,
and dropping cigarette ashes down my neck, I ceased fretting
about them. Indeed, by the end of the trip I rather liked them;
they gave me the pleasantly important feeling of being the Old
Master at Work, surrounded by his disciples. And, in any case,
they could not read what I was writing, and I could not under-
stand the comments they made. So there was no hard feeling.

Aside from these personal appearances shipboard life was
routine enough, but there were many respects in which it dif-
fered from that on American or European ships. Meals were
served at eight (cafe), eleven (ahnozo), three (lunch), and six-
thirty (jmtar), almozo and jantar being the important functions.
Table vegetables, strangely enough, are a rarity in the Amazonian
kingdom of vegetation, and the menu invariably consisted of

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 275

three or four courses of meat, with a meat-soup at the beginning
and cheese or fruit at the end. Omnipresent was farinha, the
staple Brazilian starch-food which is made from the mandioca
plant. It is not unlike the Peruvian yucca, but instead of being
served all of one piece is ground up and used as a sort of sauce
on practically every kind of food. We soon became adept at
scraping it off our plates and feeding it to the ship's cat. Beans
and rice still made their appearance, but at decent intervals, and
guayaba, the native variety of guava jelly, and papaya were the
staple fruits, as they had been in Iquitos. As is usually the case in
encountering a new menu, we thought the food very good for
the first few days; for the next few we thought it only fair, and
during the last week we thought it terrible. But the same thing
can happen at far better restaurants than the Cuyabcfs.

The niceties of shipboard etiquette baffled us no little at first.
The middle-class Brazilian's tropical wardrobe is ninety percent
pajamas, and these articles of clothing are considered not only
permissible, but fashionable, for every occasion of the day except
evening dinner. When Herman and I, however, made our appear-
ance at table in the morning in our shirt sleeves, we were advised
by the steward that he could not serve us unless we wore coats.
We returned to our cabin, put on our crumpled pajama tops, and
were forthwith received as members of die elite. Two other
Brazilian customs which needed getting-used-to were using the
edge of the tablecloth as a napkin (napkins were provided but
no one ever used them) and throwing scraps of unwanted food
over the shoulder. This latter practice was not quite as bad as it
sounds, for the dining tables were on the afterdeck and most of
the missiles would clear the railing and end up in the river.
Eventually we got to the point where we thoroughly enjoyed
the custom, and, whatever may be said against it, it did save the
dishwashers a lot of work.

The ship's bar offered little that was new or exotic. The beer
was locally made and both cheaper and better than in Peru. The
wines at least such as we triedwere cheaper and worse. In the
non-alcoholic category, coffee was of course the most common

276 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

drink, followed closely by mate (yerba mate officially), the
Brazilian equivalent of tea. Englishmen and other regular tea-
drinkers whom I met in the tropics grew pale at the very mention
of mate and swore it ranked as a beverage with arsenic and
prussic acid, but I must confess that I personally could not tell
the two apart. The national cold-drink of Brazil is known as
guarana, and it is even more ubiquitous than Coca-Cola in the
United States. Made from the berry of a tropical tree, it tastes
like a mild sort of cherry "pop" not very exciting, but a good
hot-weather drink either plain or as a mixer. Being on our best
behavior, after three weeks of "Old Toms" in Iquitos, we used
it principally in the former capacity.

One problem which besets the Nortamericano everywhere in
the tropics is that of water to drink and flirt with dysentery,
typhoid and cholera, or not to drink and go. thirsty? After a few
days of parched tongues at the beginning of our overland jour-
ney, Herman and I threw in our lot with the microbes, and con-
tinued to drink whatever came along during the remainder of
the trip. Neither of us ever suffered any ill effects, but we were
not very happy about it. On the Cuyaba, as on the Huana Capac
and Meltta, the aqua impwra for passenger consumption was
dipped out of the river in pails, with the result that the liquid
in our drinking glasses underwent startling and sinister changes
in color from day to day. At cafe it might be yellow, at almozo
brown, at jantar a pale chartreuse almost in perfect harmony
with the current tints of the Amazon around us. Usually, too,
there was an ample display of the river's less cumbersome animal
life, and on one memorable occasion the beige innards of our
table carafe proudly displayed an agitated frog. Against such
odds the puny science of the germophobic gringo was impotent.
We closed our eyes, held our noses, and gulped.

One of the most pleasant features of life on the Cuyaba was
sleeping in hammocks. Few of the male passengers used their
cabin bunks except on particularly stormy nights, and the aft
section of the top-deck after 10 P.M. was a swaying forest of
cotton and rope. Whereas below the air was stuffy sometimes

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 277

almost stifling there was invariably a cooling breeze above, and
the nocturnal concerts of Herman and his brother-snorers were
dissipated in the wide open spaces of the Amazon. It was the
first time since I had been in the tropics that I could look
forward to retiring at night with pleasure rather than dread.
Hanging next to the rail the hammock swaying gently, its
tassels ruffled in the breeze the dark water flowing below and
the keen stars winking overhead, it was falling asleep as falling
asleep should be. Except when But we shall come to that in due
time.

A word of warning: hammock-sleeping is not an innate human
accomplishment, like breathing or walking, but an art that must
be acquired sometimes painfully. It is very easy to tie the ropes
so that one end usually the head crashes to the deck as one is
just falling asleep. It is also easy to fall out, and if one is a
particularly good faller, not only fall out but overboard. Sleep-
ing lengthwise along the hammock is no good; it results in jack-
knifing, with the head and feet high and the backside out of sight
in the depths. The proper position is to lie crosswise at a forty-
five degree angle, which, through some law of physics known
only to hammock-manufacturers, keeps the body in a more or
less horizontal position. For persons who habitually sleep on their
stomachs I have only one word of advice don't.

The day after leaving the frontier behind we passed the mouth
of the Putumayo, also known as the Iga or Rubber River. For
several years before 1911 the jungles along its banks were the
greatest single source of the world's rubber supply, and even
today they rank as one of the most productive areas in Amazonia.
In 1910 the name of Putumayo acquired, in addition to its com-
mercial fame, an unsavory notoriety. Reports became current
that European and Brazilian rubber-gatherers were enslaving the
native Indians and perpetrating atrocities in an effort to force
more productive labor from them; and an international commis-
sion headed by Sir Roger Casement (the same Casement who was
hanged in England during the World War for high treason) was

278 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

appointed to investigate. The commission's investigations sub-
stantiated many of the rumors, and active measures were insti-
tuted to suppress the ruthless exploitation of the country and its
inhabitants by the rubber-traders. Within a year or two, how-
ever, the South American rubber-boom had collapsed, and the
atrocities, together with the feverish commercial activity which
had engendered them, stopped of their own accord. This black
page in Amazonian history is only another, though an extreme,
example of the labor difficulties which have invariably attended
all attempts to establish large-scale trade and industry along the
great river.

The Cuyaba continued to make its regular stops; for wood, for
freight, to take on and discharge passengers. The day after pass-
ing the frontier we touched at Sao Paulo de Oliverga and Tunan-
tins, the next at Fonte Boa, the next at Teff6 and Coary. As a rule
we found these small Brazilian river towns to be more prepossess-
ing in appearance than their Peruvian counterparts. Their princi-
pal buildings were usually constructed of multi-colored tile that
reflected the bright sun in garish but attractive brightness; the
humbler dwellings, instead of being huddled together, were
spread over wide areas of cleared land; and the streets and lanes
that connected them, while never paved, at least resembled public
thoroughfares rather than elongated pigstys. Perversely enough,
we came alongside the bank at practically all the smaller villages,
but at the larger places, such as Teff e and Coary, were compelled
by the presence of shallows and sandbars to anchor a quarter of
a mile or more offshore while our commerce with them was
carried on by canoes and small sailboats. As had been the case
with the Melita along the Ucayali, the arrivals and departures of
the Cuyaba were events of importance along the river bank. At
each port the local notables plus any non-notables who could
wedge themselves into a canoe came aboard for a guarana and
an hour of gossip; passengers came and went; and the vegetable,
animal and human conglomeration on the lower deck waxed ever
larger and more confused. Being on the down-trip the ship had
virtually no freight to discharge, but at every port there was

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 279

fresh cargo waiting to be taken OIL By the fifth day out there
was no longer room below for the third-class passengers, and
they were extricated from behind their fortifications of barbasco
and Brazil nuts and moved, bag and baggage, to the top-deck.
The catde, poultry, hogs and turtles, however, had to make the
best of things, piled one on top of another and Heaven help the
bottommost.

The section of the river down which we were now progressing
the 8oo-mile stretch from the frontier to Manaos was formerly
known to geographers and travelers as the SoUmoes, to distin-
guish it from the lower Amazon, below Manaos, and in Brazil
today is still often referred to by that name. Amazon or Solimoes,
it is quite a stream; its width during this part of its course
varies between one-and-a-half and three miles, though there are
so many islands that one is seldom allowed a simultaneous view
of both banks; and the mass of its waters is enormous. The
Cuyaba kept most of the time to midstream, to take full advan-
tage of the current and avoid the sandbars and mudbanks near
shore, but occasionally she was compelled to veer and maneuver
as obstructions in the form of shallows or snagged trees appeared
in her path. Navigation was by much the same "smell and feel"
method as on the Huana Capac and Melita* The river was far
deeper and freer of obstacles than the Ucayali, but the Cuyaba
was a far larger boat than the others and, though flat-bottomed,
would have had no easy time of it if she ran aground.

We never ceased marveling at die skill with which the river
pilots steered their craft particularly at night but gradually we
learned a little of their system. First, there was the trick of keep-
ing to the inside, or convex, bank when rounding a bend, for it
is there that the water is usually deepest. Secondly, there were
the shadows. A certain kind of shadow it rarely could be called
even a shadow, but was rather a faint differentiation of light-
meant sandbanks; another kind meant mud; still another only a
large school of fish beneath the surface. Then there were the
sound of the river, the smell of the river, the feel of the ship

280 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

beneath the feet, and a dozen other varieties of signs and portents
all thoroughly unscientific, all meaningless to the unschooled
landlubber, but all combining with astonishing efficacy to carry
the ship safely along its course. In landing for wood or at the
riverside towns we would invariably steam by our destination
in midstream to a point perhaps a quarter of a mile below it,
then describe a wide semicircle and approach the embankment
from downstream. This was a precaution against becoming stuck
in the shallows near shore; if we grounded coming up against
the current the weight of waters would help materially in push-
ing us off, but if we came in with the current and struck bottom
its pressure would have the opposite effect of shoving us farther
and deeper into the trap.

In the old days, when Iquitos was a flourishing rubber-town,
ocean-going freighters of the Booth Line and other European
and American vessels ventured occasionally along the upper
stretches of the Amazon during the height of the rainy season.
But even with the lucrative cargos, the voyage was a poor
gamble, for it was a lucky ship that did not go aground at least
once during the round-trip. One English freighter, coming down-
stream from Iquitos near the end of the rainy season, was caught
on a sandbank in the falling water and did not get off until the
middle of the next rains eight months later. In the meantime, her
cargo rotted, her crew almost starved, and her owners became
pretty discouraged with the upper Amazon as a thoroughfare
for ocean ships. A few years later the fall of rubber removed
all reason for large vessels to visit Iquitos, and during the past
twenty-five years few have ventured farther upstream than
Manaos. The treacherous channels of the Solimoes have been
left as the undisputed province of the Cuyaba and her flat-
bottomed sisters.

The river widened, its rushing waters increased in volume and
power, and the occasional towns along its bank grew larger and
more prosperous in appearance. But the banks themselves did not
change; they presented the same, unvarying curtain of impene-

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 281

trable vegetation that had screened the interior of the jungle
from our sight ever since we left the first outpost of Amazonia
on the Pichis River, fifteen hundred miles to the southwest. There
were few signs of animal life along the main stream; indeed,
there could not well have been many, for in most places the
rising waters had overflowed the bank, and the outermost trees
grew out of the river rather than on dry land. Now and then
we would catch a glimpse of an anteater, porcupine or other
small animal in a forest clearing, and once we espied three large
tapirs rooting about on a sandbank, but of the more exotic
denizens of the tropical jungles jaguars, peccaries, sloths, ana-
condas and the like we saw nothing at all until we reached the
zoo at Para. Alligators were also absent. They inhabit the Amazon
and its tributaries by the million, and in the dry season can be
seen, even along the busiest stretches of the river; but when the
water rises and inundates the sandbars, which are their favorite
resort, they abandon the main stream for shallow bayous and
inlets, such as those in which we encountered them during our
canoe-trip on the Napo. Bufeos, the snorting fresh-water por-
poises, do not exist in the lower or middle stretches of the
Amazon at all. The only sizable aquatic animal we saw between
Iquitos and Para was the pirarucu, largest fresh-water fish in the
world, which is highly esteemed as food along the river and
which we several times saw being harpooned or landed by native
fishermen.

If animals were scarce, Indians were scarcer; indeed, aboriginals
living in their primitive state of savagery are almost non-existent
along the main stream of the Amazon. Everywhere in Brazil
where the white man has penetrated to any extent there has been
so much intermarriage that the Indian has almost lost his racial
identity, together with his old language and customs. Fully two-
thirds of the people we encountered on the trip down-river were
half Indian or more, but they spoke Portuguese, wore cheap
European clothing, and were most of them at least semi-literate.
Tribes of the type of the Chunchos and Campas whom we met
in Peru have during the past century retired farther and farther

282 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

into the interior of the jungles, and it is estimated that there are
today not more than fifty thousand such wild Indians left in
Brazil. For the most part they are a weak, disease-ridden breed;
it is probable that in another hundred years they will be extinct,
and the White Man's Burden will have been carried to its in-
exorable end in Amazonia.

There was, to be sure, no turistcts Baedeker for the region
through which we were passing, but there was Bates, and that
was better. Henry Walter Bates was a British entomologist who
for twelve years, from 1848 to 1859, lived and worked in tropical
South America, and his book, "The Naturalist on the River
Amazons," is still, after eighty years, the most interesting and
informative account of the region that has been written. Most of
his work was done in the jungles around Para, but his wanderings
took him many times up-river, and from Teff (in his day it
was called Ega) down we were in what might properly be called
the Bates Country. His investigations and researches were enor-
mous; they were by no means confined to insect life, which was
his particular province, but included geography, geology, botany,
zoology, economics and human history as well. Did I wish to
know the name of a tree, a vine, a flower? Bates had it. Was I
curious about the habits of a strange animal or bird? Bates gave
the answers. Whatever the information I desired whether it
concerned sauba ants or poisoned arrows or methods of prepar-
ing farinha, or the sex-life of the Tapuyo Indians it materialized
like magic from the pages of Bates.

But even more remarkable than the man's vast knowledge and
experience was the fact that practically all his observations are
as valid and accurate today as when he made them three-quarters
of a century ago. Time, in Amazonia, is not time as we know it
in the feverish change and onrush of the civilized world, and the
things Bates saw and experienced in the i85o's the river itself,
the forests and their wild life, the towns and their inhabitants,
even the river-boats on which he traveled differed scarcely at
all from what I was seeing and experiencing in 1937. Rubber-
booms have come and gone along the great river; the ships of

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 283

many nations have breasted its current, and explorers and traders
have penetrated ever farther up its tributaries and into the dark
interior of its jungles. But none of these things is the true history
of die Amazon. A tree, animal or man is born, feeds, grows,
propagates and dies. The process is repeated once, a hundred-
fold, a thousandfold, a billionfold. That is its changeless story;
in the time of Orellana, in the time of Bates, now. It will still
be many years before civilized man, with his ships, machines and
schemes of conquest, will cause more than a ripple on the vast
surface of its yellow tide.

Becoming acquainted with our fellow-travelers on the Cuyaba
was a rather more difficult process than it had been on the Huana
Capac or Melita. We had never rated as silver-tongued orators in
Spanish, but in Portuguese we might well have been taken for
deaf-mutes. Our joint vocabulary consisted of four words
almozOy jantar, guarana and farinhaoii thoroughly respectable,
and pleasingly impressive when tossed casually into back-home
conversation, but of woefully little help in establishing com-
munication with our Brazilian confreres. For the first few days
aboard we carried on abortive conversations with our Peruvian-
detective roommate in purest pigeon-Castilian, but after he quit
ship at Coary (whence he was to extradite a gold-smuggler) we
were linguistically marooned. After several futile efforts at
addressing our Portuguese lawyer roommate in his own tongue
we gave up the struggle, ^and thereafter replied to any remark
he directed at us with either "guten morgen" or "pasta fazool"
Between his marmoset and myself, however, there was much
better co-operation. I understood perfectly what he was getting
at when he chased scurrying forms across my berth while I was
trying to sleep, and he, in turn, seemed to get the general idea
when I hurled my pillow at him.

Taken as a whole, the community of the Cuyaba was long on
religion, but short on sanitation. At no time during the trip were
there less than three priests aboard, and whenever time seemed
to hang particularly heavy on the passengers' hands one or an-

284 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

other of them would relieve the situation by conducting Mass.
Most of them were strictly routine services, but one, we learned
from Parsons, was a very special Mass indeed. It was held for
the express purpose of absolving sinners who had taken the name
of the Lord in vain while chasing rats and roaches in their cabins.

Life would have been much pleasanter if our companions had
been as interested in immaculate bodies as in immaculate souls,
but unfortunately they were not. The condition of the Cuyabcfs
decks would have sent an English or American skipper into a
seizure of the D.T.'s; the stains on the dining-table covers looked
less like the remnants of spilled food than like ancient geological
strata; and the great majority of our shipmates, sweating and
scratching through the days and nights, obviously had no best
friends to tell them. Worst of all, however, was the spitting. To
Shakespeare all the world was a stage, but to the average Brazilian
all the world's a cuspidor, and rare indeed was the minut6 that
passed on shipboard without the sound of ominous throaty rum-
blings followed by a dull plop on the deck. Or, if it was not the
deck, it was elsewhere anywhere. Herman and I were not pre-
cisely lily-white exquisites after our seven weeks in the jungle,
but we wore our slippers in the shower bath just the same.

One man's dish, to be sure, is another man's poison, and while
the Brazilians spat and we squirmed, we took our daily sunbaths
and the Brazilians stared at us as if we were escaped lunatics.
Living almost perpetually, year in and year out, in the sun's hot
glare, they could not comprehend how anyone in his right mind
could willfully expose himself to its malignant influence. More
than once while toasting in a deck chair I turned suddenly around
to see one passenger pointing me out to another and tapping his
head significantly.

We had, of course, become increasingly well acquainted with
the Parsons and Bouchers as the voyage continued. Indeed, had
it not been for the former, it is doubtful if we would at any
time have had the faintest idea of where we were, who was who,
or what was going on. George Parsons was typical of the better
type of Englishman in the tropics. He knew his way about, spoke

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 285

the language of the country, and in every way seemed as com-
pletely at home as if he were already walking the streets of
London, toward which he was headed on vacation. He was
invariably courteous to the natives with whom he had dealings,
but never patronized them, fraternized with them or sought out
their company; and it obviously mattered little to him whether
or not he was liked, so long as he was respected. Observing his
tact, his store of information and his cool matter-of-factness in
any and all situations that arose I acquired a better understanding
than I had ever had before of how John Bull's little island had
spread itself over the globe and gotten away with it.

In striking contrast to Parsons, the Frenchman Boucher was
unhappy, uninformed and unsure of himself. His Iquitian mis-
adventure, of course, had not left him any great reason for high
spirits or borihomnne, but the impression persisted that even
under the happiest of circumstances he would have been a lonely,
alien misfit in this uncouth, un-French world. He spoke neither
Spanish nor Portuguese and had obviously made no effort to
learn them; his comments on the country through which we
passed were usually confined to an eloquent "pfui"; and he
showed his contempt for the Cuyaba. and all it represented by
letting his beard grow and appearing in linen that put even the
table covers to shame. At first acquaintance, I confess, we took
him for a boor and a fool and were subsequently startled to
discover that, once his shell was broken, he was an intelligent
gentleman and pleasant companion. It was just that he belonged
on the Grandes Boulevardes not on the upper Amazon.

Between the extremes of the Englishman and the Frenchman,
Nortamericmos Lord and Ullman worried, along as best they
could. We were not, I am sure, as impressively masters of all
situations as was Parsons, nor were we, I hope, as hopelessly lost
and floundering as Boucher. Carrying neither the White Man's
Burden nor the White Man's Grouch, we fumbled our way
through a world that was strange to us, were the friends of all
who smiled at us and the enemies of all who scowled, understood
practically nothing that anyone said, and replied politely in the

286 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

purest gibberish. We most certainly did not strike awe or venera-
tion into the hearts of the Amazonians, but, on the other hand,
we were never so far as we knew, at least objects of scorn.
In the dramatis personae of the Cuyaba put us down as the comic
relief.

"I wish we knew our way around as well as Parsons," I said
one day as we sat out in the isolation of our sunbaths. "We must
seem like an awful pair of boobs to these people."

Herman shook his head.

"What the hell?" he replied. "I'm like Popeye the Sailor Man.
I yam what I yam, and if the spiks don't like it it's just too bad."

But the spiks did like it. In fact, I think Daniel Boone Rover
Merriwell-Quixote could have been president of South America
if he had half tried.

Late in die afternoon of our seventh day on the Cuyaba I was
standing on the bridge watching the endlessly unvarying vistas
of yellow water and green forest wall. Suddenly I became aware
that something, somehow, had changed. Far ahead of us and to
our left a vast, heavy shadow seemed to lie upon the river, but
when I looked skyward I saw there were no clouds. Could that
darkness mean a mudbank, a shallow, a great school of fish or
alligators? I called to the officer on watch and pointed in its
direction.

"S/," he nodded "Rio Negro."

Swiftly we approached the shadowed area, and as we did so I
became aware that what I saw was not shadow at all, but water
itself that was black. I could see it sweeping powerfully along in
its dark tide, side by side with the yellow-brown stream of the
Amazon, but separated from it as if by an invisible wall. Within
a few minutes we had crossed the dividing line and were steam-
ing suddenly through what seemed a river of ink. Simultaneously
the steersman swung his wheel hard, the Cuyaba veered slowly
round to portside, and the siren let itself go in one of its most
prolonged, full-throated whoops. We were headed up the Rio
Negro for Manaos.

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 287

It was only twenty-five miles to our destination from the
confluence of the Amazon and the Negro, but so great is the
volume of the waters at the point where the main stream receives
its greatest northern tributary that for a short time we were
almost out of sight of land. Gradually the Amazonian yellow
faded from sight astern, and we were surrounded as far as the
eye could see by the strong sable current that pushed down upon
us. The blackness of the Rio Negro is not caused by filth, but
by the decomposed vegetation of its upper banks. Its water is safe
to bathe in and to drink indeed, it is even held to possess certain
antiseptic qualities. But its appearance is against it. Laboring up-
stream against its black tides, it seemed to have a heavier, thicker
texture than the other Amazonian rivers. One had the sensation
of adhesiveness, as if sticky fingers were stroking the Cuyabtfs
hull, restraining its progress. The foam in our wake was dark
and sluggish, like molasses.

The city we were approaching gave evidence, long before we
sighted it, that it was far different from the sleepy, ramshackle
river-towns to which we had become accustomed. Small sailboats
and steam-launches scuttled back and forth across our path, and
presently the massive outlines of ocean-going freighters loomed
up on the horizon. Soon we were among them, strangely awake
to the realization that we were at last out of the remote, green
wilderness in which we had lived for the past seven weeks and
back in the world of men, machines and commerce. To our right
was the Booth Line's Dunstan, steam up, ready to sail for Para,
the Atlantic and Liverpool To the left, riding at anchor, was
the ten thousand ton Schlesivig, from Bremen, its winches swing-
ing Brazil nuts into its holds from a clutter of surrounding barges,
its swastika fluttering, sternly incongruous, against the lazy tropi-
cal sky. And now, between them, up rose Manaos itself, vivid and
garish in the setting sun behind die masts and rigging of the
ships along its water front. High above everything else loomed
the dome of its famous opera house a mosaic crazy-quilt of
every color in the spectrum, with a few others thrown in for
good measure. Behind its foreground of black jungle river and

288 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

against its background of green jungle palms, it was so out of
place as to be almost fantastically ridiculous. But Herman and I
eyed it with an appreciation we would not have vouchsafed the
Taj Mahal itself. After seven weeks of nature's vast, impersonal
and perfect architecture, it was so ostentatiously, self-consciously,
foolishly, beautifully human.

The story of Manaos is the story of rubber. During a few
short years toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the
Amazonian forests were supplying ninety percent of the world's
raw caoutchouc, it mushroomed from an obscure trading post
into a thriving modern city of nearly a hundred thousand popu-
lation. Down from the up-river jungles flowed an endless stream
of the precious black gold, and up to meet it came the traders,
speculators, capital, machines and ships of the civilized world.
Money sprouted from the earth like the trees themselves; over-
night beggars were transformed into tycoons and penniless ad-
venturers into international bankers; and as in boom cities the
world over, the result was fantastic exaggeration and excess.
Here was homo sapiens, triumphant and in the chips, and he
damn well was going to let the world know about it. Paved
streets, water power and electricity, hotels and shops were not
enough. Soon there was the opera house, as imposing and ornate
as any on the continent, a skyscraper brewery, spacious boule-
vards and parks, and a street-car system extensive enough to
serve a city of a million people.

In those days, as a matter of fact, an eventual population of a
million seemed no idle dream. But it was not to be. When the
Amazonian rubber industry declined Manaos declined with it,
and in twenty-five years the city has shrunk from its peak popu-
lation of almost a hundred thousand to about sixty-five thousand.
That it did not wholly collapse into abandoned decrepitude was
owing to its unique geographical situation. Although a thousand
miles from the Atlantic it is easily accessible to even the largest
ocean-going ships; and although no longer the rubber center of
the world it is still the only community larger than a village in
an area of two million square miles and, as such, the natural

THE "CUYABA"

LOADING RAW RUBBER AT REMATE DOS MALLES

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 289

clearing-house for the produce of the upper Amazon and its
numberless tributaries. The Gty that Rubber Built no longer
waxes fat and fabulous on the milk of the hevea tree, but it is
still kept alive by the stream of jungle-wealthtimber, fruits,
nuts, hides and the rest which flows through it en route to the
world's markets. At the present time upper Amazonia is prob-
ably as commercially stagnant as any area in the world. But
Manaos is its only port of entry and exit and, as such, still
fulfills a function and has escaped the dustheap of abandoned and
forgotten cities.

The Cuyaba dallied in Manaos for three days, loading and
unloading cargo, and Herman and I had ample opportunity to
survey its slightly down-at-heel marvels. All roads led to the
opera house, glittering and splendiferous atop its centx4 hill, and
thither we repaired as fast as the thermometer's hundred^cad-five
degrees would permit us. The great building stood in a broad
plaza (praga in Portuguese) paved with multi-colored mosaic
that rivaled the dome itself for the distinction of knocking your
eye out. Between brilliant footstool and brilliant summit the
walls were a uniform white, but so broken up into colonnades,
balconies, porticos, friezes, abutments and plaster confectionery
that it seemed the architects had gone to the jungle itself rather
than to the Dorians, Corinthians and Byzantines for their model.
Although a quarter of a century ago the house often played host
to the most famous European singers and musicians, it has now
been many years since it has been used for anything other than
occasional political meetings or local festivals, and at the time of
our visit it was closed and dark. Snooping about, however, we
found an unlocked side door and for a moment stepped inside
into the cool gloom of the interior. The auditorium was enor-
mous, and in the darkness we could faintly see the shrouded
seats sloping away row on row and tier on tier. How many
passes, I brooded morbidly, would the house manager have to
hand out to fill up those cavernous recesses on a rainy Monday
night?

The rest of the town we saw mainly through the good offices

2pO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

of the street-car company. The trams of Manaos lacked the
exotic appeal of Iquitos' furious Donald Duck, but they were the
swiftest and best operated I have ever ridden in anywhere, and
they penetrated practically every nook and alley of the town.
In addition, several of the lines wandered well beyond the limits
of human habitation into virgin jungle (they had been laid in
the optimistic days when that million population was just around
the corner) and in the course of a complete circuit we were
presented with an out-the-window panorama ranging from traffic
jams on the Avenida Joachim Nabuco to monkeys hurling coco-
nuts from the top of forest palms. So tightly does the jungle
press against the outskirts of Manaos that constant vigilance is
necessary to keep it from overrunning the streets and squares,
and two miles from the center of town, in every direction save
riverwards, is a tight ring of wild, untouched vegetation. It is
penetrated only by the more adventuresome branches of the
trolley line at a few scattered points and by a single dirt road
leading out for some twenty-five miles to the waterfalls near a
small lake called Taruma, where a resort of sorts has been estab-
lished. Beyond Taruma there is no overland egress from Manaos;
a thousand miles of forest separate it in every direction from the
nearest road or railway.

In the pleasant sidewalk cafes on the main avemdas, however,
the jungle seemed remote. Here electric fans, ice, laundered
clothing and pretty women were no longer the visions of a
fevered imagination, but vivid realities; small boys shouted the
attractions of newspapers and shoe-shines; trucks, taxicabs and
the innumerable trams rumbled past; and in the cool of the
evening crowds thronged the streets on their way to movie-
shows, prize fights and similar super-civilized diversions. In the
main square there was even a drugstore with modernistic fixtures
and a large sign over the entrance bearing the incredible legend:
SODA.

"Hot damn!" quoth Herman, as he poured the second quart
of what purported to be chocolate ice cream down his gullet.

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 29!

"If it wasn't for the scorpion under the table I'd think I was back
in Liggett's."

Manaos was pleasing to the eye, as well as to the stomach. The
opera house, of course, was the show place, and the huge, brick
brewery the runner-up attraction; but most of the principal
squares and thoroughfares were attractively if less sensationally
impressive. Almost all the better buildings were built of tile,
predominantly white, but with colorful embellishments and red
roofs, and the wide avenidas which they fronted were lined with
richly green, spreading mango trees. In view of its economic
plight since the decline of rubber the city could hardly be said
to be prosperous, but there was at least a certain illusion of
prosperity and, for a community located less than five degrees
from the equator, astonishing activity. Occasional pas&ers-by on
the streets actually looked as if they were going some ptece.

In Peruvian Iquitos most of the inhabitants had been so similar
in appearance as to be almost indistinguishable one from another.
In Brazilian Manaos they were as heterogeneous as the passengers
in a New York subway car. One out of about every five appeared
to be pure white, another one pure black, the rest an obscure
mixture of both, usually with a liberal dash of red Indian thrown
in. The extremes of wealth and poverty were great, but the
distinction between "civilized" and "uncivilized" which we en-
countered along the upper Amazon and its tributaries was gone.
Even the lowest-class Indians and Cafuzos spoke Portuguese and
wore modern, machine-made clothing.

There was, we soon found, a rather large gringo colony in
Manaos, most of them either representatives of the Booth Line
or employees of the street-car company, electric light company
and port works, all of which were either British or American
operated. This was Parsons* home grounds (he had been first in
command of the Booth office for over eight years) and through
him we met several of his compatriots and imbibed many excel-
lent whisky-ands. It is a well-tried truism that two or more
Englishmen, set down anywhere on the surface of the earth, will
form a club, and those in Manaos had punctiliously observed the

292 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

tradition. Indeed, there was not merely one club, but two; the
Athletic Club, near the center of town, where the available
exercise was principally of the elbow-bending variety, and the
somewhat euphemistically named Country Club, some three
blocks farther out, which boasted a miniature botanical garden
and a natural, open-air swimming pool. The pool was fed from
the Rio Negro, and, although filtered, its water was as jet black
as that of the river itself. It took a bit of priming before we were
up to the initial plunge, but once in we found it coolly refresh-
ing and without taste or odor. Only once while in its murky
embrace did an untoward event occur. While treading water I
suddenly looked downward and saw two dim, faintly yellowish
horrors wriggling toward me from the inky depths. I yelled
good and loud but before Herman or Parsons could reach me
order had been restored. I had discovered they were only my
feet.

By far the most interesting and colorful part of Manaos is its
port. Its docks, built as floats so as to be unaffected by the
periodic rise and fall of the river, accommodated the large cargo
ships of many nations; in a sheltered bay near by was the land-
ing-place of the weekly Pan-American planes from Para; and
swarming everywhere, from sunrise to sunset, were the hundreds
of small craft of the native fishermen and traders. Steam and the
internal combustion engine still come under the heading of
luxuries in Amazonia, and only a few of Manaos' merchant
marine were thus equipped. But scarcity breeds ingenuity, and
each morning we were in port we saw the few power launches
there were set off about their business with a dozen or more
motorless craft dragging along behind. In the evening they re-
turned in the same fashion. The procedure was for the launches
to shuttle back and f orth all day between Manaos and the princi-
pal near-by fishing grounds and trading stations. They offered
towing service f 05 a small charge, and the boats they towed cut
themselves loose when they reached their destination and later
in the day, when their business was done, were picked up again
by the caravan.

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 293

Shortly before the Cuyaba sailed an interesting newcomer
pulled into port: a small launch flying the Venezuelan flag that
had come to Manaos not by way of the Amazon, but through
the Casiquiare Canal and down the Rio Negro. This natural canal
the only one of its kind in the world connects one of the tribu-
taries of the Negro with the upper Orinoco in southernmost
Venezuela, thus providing a continuous inland waterway from
the Caribbean Sea to Manaos and the heart of Amazonia. More
than two hundred miles in length, it is broad and deep enough
during the rainy season to accommodate ships of considerable
draft, but the region it serves is so remote and commercially
undeveloped that only a handful of boats traverse it in the course
of a year. Indeed, this northern part of South America's interior
is so little known that only a few geographers and the more
traveled native river-men are aware of the Casiquiare's location,
or even its existence.

The CuyabcHs course, I regret to report, did not carry us
toward the mysterious Casiquiare, but back down the Negro to
Old Mother Amazon, who by this time was as familiar an ac-
quaintance as the Hudson or the Harlem. As we nosed away
from the dock in the late afternoon the welkin shuddered with
the anguish of tooted farewells, particularly between the Cuyaba
and her sister-ship, the Districto Federal, which had arrived a
few hours before on her up-trip to Iquitos. Soon, however, the
accustomed silence of the river had descended upon us, broken
only by the faint, dull swish of the black waters against the ship's
side. Swiftly, for we were now proceeding downstream, the tall
ships and red roofs of Manaos receded in our wake, until all that
was left was the distant glittering dome of the Opera House that
Rubber Built. Then that too was gone, and there was only the
river and the jungle and a red sun cushioned on the tree tops.

During our three days in Manaos the long-deferred rainy
season of Amazonia had at last given indications that it might be
catching up with us. It had rained in short, sudden spells early
each morning and again late each afternoon, and in between we

294 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

had noticed an unaccustomed heaviness and humidity in the air.
But there had been nothing even vaguely resembling the equa-
torial torrents of which we had been warned. As we nosed out
of the Rio Negro and back into the Amazon that night the sky
was rich velvet above us and the stars were burnished gold.

"Hell's bells," I remarked to Herman as we double-jointed
ourselves into our top-deck hammocks. "If they call this the
rainy season they should visit Atlantic City on a Labor Day
week-end."

"Yeah," he replied sleepily. "I was just wondering what it'd be
like in die dry season. We'd probably have to iwlk down the
river to Para."

Soon a deeper, more majestic note mingled with the steady
thrumming of the Cuy&bcfs engine, and I knew he was asleep.
I closed my eyes and swung toward darkness on the gentle rock-
ing of the warm east wind.

I have never been shot from the mouth of a cannon, but I can
tell you exactly what it's like. As I recall the event, I began
awakening while hurtling through the air at approximately the
muzzle-velocity of a Big Bertha shell and completed the process
as a crumpled mass against the Cuyabds iron rail. The first thing
I discovered was that I had not been alone in my flight. My
hammock had followed me or I had followed it and it was
now busily engaged in strangling me in wet folds as I lay half-
stunned and panting on the deck. Laboriously I extricated myself
from its clutches, shook my head to clear it, and looked around.

The scene on die Cuyabtfs top-deck was straight out of Dante's
"Inferno," except that water instead of fire was being used for
the chastisement of the damned. To say simply that it was rain-
ing and that the wind was blowing would be like saying of the
Adantic Ocean that it is rather wet. What seemed like a solid
wall of water was pouring across the railings from the night
beyond, propelled by a force it was impossible to believe mere
air could muster. The wind howled and whooped and raved like
an army of lunatics; the sound of the rain as it struck die surface

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 295

of the river below was like the crackle of machine-gun fire.
Directly in front of me an empty hammock (it had just de-
posited its owner beside me on the deck) was straining, rigid
and horizontal, against the blast. Even above the howling of the
elements I could hear its fibers stretching, cracking; then sud-
denly it gave, with a report like a gun, and in a twinkling had
vanished into the night. The whole length and breadth of the
deck the same carnage was under way. Hammocks, ropes, bag-
gage, lifebelts, clothing everything and anything that was not
structurally part of the ship, was whirling through the air, flap-
ping crazily from poles and stanchions, or simply disappearing
overboard. Here and there among them, crouched over against
the wind and rain, passengers ducked and darted in desperate
but futile efforts at salvage. Rashly I stood up without holding
on to anything, only to be smacked down again as if by the blow
of a gigantic fist. On the second try I at least got somewhere;
a screeching blast of wind and water wrenched the railing from
my hand and deposited me against the upright from which my
hammock had been hanging. There was no hammock there any
longer only the tattered remnant of its supporting rope where
it had broken cleanly in two. As I hugged the upright for
support something wet and heavy zoomed out of the night and
wrapped itself about my head. Pulling it off I discovered it was a
pink-striped pajama top. By this time I should not have been
surprised if its owner had suddenly come sailing through the
air after it.

At this point I discovered I was in imminent danger of losing
my own pajamas. The wind had somehow got under them, and
though sopping wet they bulged out away from me, straining
at the buttons. Qutching them to me I tore for the companion-
way, only to find that some dozen other passengers had had the
same bright idea at the same time. We arrived simultaneously
not, however, in the shelter of the companionway, but flat on
the deck, and the tangled mass of us promptly slid back to the
railing in the best Coney Island-Steeplechase style. The lone
night-light of the Cuyabcfs top-deck had long since gone out,

296 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

and we struggled to extricate ourselves one from another in
howling, waterlogged darkness. Removing one fellow-wrestler's
hair from my mouth and another's foot from my pajama pocket,
I finally regained my feet; then seeing a momentarily clear path
to the companionway, I rushed for it again. The deck sloped
away from me as I ran, ankle-deep in rushing water, and when I
was five yards from my goal the wind caught up with rne and
knocked me flat again. But this time I made it. Not on my feet,
to be sure but I made it. In his palmiest days Ty Cobb never
stole second base in finer style.

Herman had reached the cabin before me and was dripping
ruefully in the middle of the floor.

"Guess maybe that rainy season's arrived," he said.

When we ventured on deck the next morning the elements had
resumed their mask of guileless innocence. The sun was warm,
but friendlily disposed; only the tiniest shreds of white cloud
drifted across the bottomless blue of the sky; and the east wind
purred through the rigging as if its sole concern in the world was
the well-being of the Cuyaba and its passengers. To the south,
we suddenly noticed, the shore had again disappeared. We were
passing the mouth of the Madeira River, and our eyes, encom-
passing half the horizon, encountered an endless waste of heav-
ing yellow water, and nothing more.

The Madeira is the greatest of all the Amazon's tributaries, and
the volume of its current rivals that of the mother-stream itself.
Flowing into it from the southwest it drains an enormous area
in western Brazil and eastern Bolivia. One group of its remoter
affluents rises in the Peruvian Andes, only a few miles from the
headwaters of the Ucayali; another group, far to the south,
almost touches the northernmost streams of the great Plate sys-
tem of die Argentine. There has been occasional talk in the
past of connecting these Madeira and Plate tributaries by a
canal, and although the terrain, in the heart of Bolivia's Gran
Chaco, offers almost insurmountable difficulties it is an idea with
thrilling possibilities. With such a canal in operation it would

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT

be possible for a small ship to make an inland voyage of almost
four thousand miles through the heart of the South American
continent; into the Orinoco from the Caribbean, up the Orinoco
to the Casiquiare Canal, down the Rio Negro to the Amazon, up
the Madeira and its tributaries to the headwaters of the Plate
system, and finally down its rivers to their terminus in the
Atlantic Ocean at Buenos Aires.

But if the Madeira offers immense possibilities for the future,
it has, in the past, been a river of frustration, heartbreak and
death. Some seven hundred miles above its confluence with the
Amazon its course is broken by a series of rapids and falls, effec-
tively blocking commerce between the lower river and its great
tributaries to the south. For years this barricade of nature was
a nightmare to Bolivia. Shut off from the Pacific by the highest
ranges of the Andes, its natural commercial outlet would have
been the Madeira and Amazon, had it not been for the former's
two-hundred-mile stretch of rocks and shallows. In the first
decade of the twentieth century the nation's problem became
particularly acute. The great Amazonian rubber-boom was at its
height, and along the Mamore, Beni and Guapore rivers and the
other Bolivian tributaries of the Madeira grew countless thou-
sands of trees bearing the precious latex for which the world was
clamoring. But there was no way to get it out. As far back as
1878 the government had sought the aid of American engineer-
ing skill, and an attempt had been made to build a railroad along
the obstructed stretch of the river, connecting the lowermost
navigable point of the Mamor6 with the uppermost navigable
point of die Madeira. But two years later the job had been
abandoned, with millions of dollars spent, tracks laid for exactly
two miles of the necessary two hundred, and one-third of the
men engaged in the project dead.

After this disaster more than thirty years passed before the
world's demand for rubber became so pressing that another
attempt was made. In 1909 an English engineering company
undertook the job, and during the next three years, in the face of
almost incredible difficulties and hardships, carried it through to

2p8 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

its successful conclusion. It was of the building of the Madeira-
Mamore Railroad that H. M. Tomlinson wrote in "The Sea and
the Jungle," and if ever there was a story of man's struggle
against nature worthy of recording in the pages of a great book
surely this was it. All materials, machinery, fuel and supplies;
had to be brought from England (Tomlinson himself came on
a ship bearing coal). The jungles which had to be penetrated
were among the densest and wildest in all Amazonia a sweating,
matted wilderness of rank vegetation, ferocious beasts, disease-
bearing insects and hostile savages. The men, both gringos and
natives, died like flies from the still uncbnquered Yellow Jack,
from malaria, dysentery and typhoid fever, or, if they escaped
the ravages of the microbes, from heat prostration, ill-nourish-
ment, snakebite or poisoned arrows. But in spite of everything-
the work progressed and by 1912 it was completed: two hundred
miles of shining steel, from San Antonio in Brazil to Porto Bello
in Bolivia, through the most savagely impenetrable terrain that
the surface of the earth has to offer.

The greatness of the story of the Madeira-Mamore lies in its
building; its tragedy and irony in what followed. The very year
of its completion was the year in which plantation rubber was
first successfully exported from the East Indies, and in an un-
believingly short time the industry in South America was dead*
The countless thousands of wild rubber trees still stood in the
Bolivian jungles, but nobody wanted them. The Madeira-Mamore
Railroad, one of the greatest engineering feats ever accomplished*
stood ready to transport their latex toward its market, but nobody
had any use for it. For the past twenty-five years an average
of one train a month has passed along the tracks which it took
such superhuman effort and so many lives to lay. Wild rubber is
still dead, and the new trans-Andean railways provide quicker
egress for Bolivia's mineral and agricultural exports than would
the Madeira and the Amazon. In terms of present-day com-
merce the obscure jungle railroad is as dead as the thousands of
men who gave their lives to build it.

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT

Soon after passing the mouth of the Madeira we put in at the
town of Itacoatiara, or, more pronounceably, Serpa. While the
Cuyaba gorged its lower deck on rubber and Brazil nuts, we
plopped through the sodden streets (the deluge of the night
before had obviously handled Serpa as roughly as it had us) and
presently arrived at what seemed to be the community's major
enterprise the slaughterhouse. It was situated directly on the
river bank and was easily identifiable from afar by the hosts of
vultures which circled watchfully above it or perched, waiting,
on the surrounding trees. Serpa's abattoir, however, attracted far
more sinister visitors than these. Remnants of the butchered ani-
mals were thrown into the water, and lying in wait for them
were schools of piranha, the most dreaded of all the Amazon's
galaxy of weird and terrible inhabitants.

Many tales some tall, some true have been told of the piranhas,
but even without the embellishments of travelers' imaginations
they are among the most formidable and dangerous creatures that
nature has devised. Small fish, seldom more than a foot in length,
they are possessed of almost incredible strength and speed, and,
added to these, a strange sensitivity to human or animal blood.
Traveling always in schools they will rarely, if ever, molest man
or beast if his skin is whole and free from cuts or bruises; but
woe betide the swimmer who has so much as an open scratch
upon his body. For once they catch the scent of blood, in how-
ever small quantity, the piranhas are transformed into demons
of unimaginable ferocity. Their jaws have the strength of iron
and the tearing power of a buzz saw, and when they gang up
upon a victim they do not merely wound or mutilate, but liter-
ally devour him. There was no living prey available for the
piranhas around Serpa's slaughterhouse, but what they did to the
scraps of meat that came their way was ample proof of their
habits. As we watched, one of the butchers rolled the head of
a slaughtered ox down the mud embankment into the river. In-
stantly the sluggish stream became a boiling frenzy of flashing
ns and snapping jaws; we could hear the ripping and tearing of
.flesh, and the surface of the water quickly darkened from yellow-

300 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

brown to red. Within two minutes the commotion was over,
and the river flowed on quietly as before. Presently, though,
something washed up out of it onto the shore near where we
stood. It was the skull of the ox, as white and bare as if it had
been buried in the earth for a hundred years.

Although the day was hot and the Cuyaba seemed in no hurry
to leave Serpa, we successfully resisted any urge to plunge in
the Amazon. We replaced our vanished hammocks at the town's
lone general store, slung them on what was left of the top-deck,
and prepared to make up for our interrupted sleep of the previ-
ous night. There is, however, apparently something about a ham-
mock that enrages the Amazonian heavens, for no sooner were
we comfortably installed than the sun sickened and died, fero-
cious black clouds swarmed up over the horizon, and the deluge
resumed where it had left off some twelve hours before. This
time we escaped to the shelter of the lower deck with both
hammocks and anatomies intact.

Neither our attorney-roommate nor our marmoset-roommate
was in the cabin when we reached it, but another fellow-passen-
ger was: a small boy of some seven or eight years whom I
recognized as belonging to an Indian family that was traveling
third class. Herman, who was fonder of children than anything
except talking and snoring, had struck up quite an acquaintance
with him during the past few days teaching him games and
feeding him indigestibles from the ship's commissary and we
were therefore not particularly surprised to find him in our
quarters.

"Pasta -fazool" said Herman by way of greeting.

The only response was a shy smile, and as the little fellow
apparently wanted nothing except to sit there we let him sit,
while we piled into our bunks and fell asleep. He was still there
when we awoke. He was still there when we went out to jantar.
And he was still there when we returned and not only there,
but undressed and asleep in Herman's bunk. The time for con-
structive action having obviously arrived, we awakened him, but

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 301

all efforts to ease him out of the cabin resulted in stiff resistance
and, finally, tears.

"I'll get his folks," said Herman, and disappeared down the
deck.

Five minutes later he returned, minus folks, but with a baffled
expression.

"All they did was to keep pointing at me," he explained.
"Maybe we'd better get Parsons."

With the omniscient Britisher in tow we sought out the boy's
parents. Herman and I stood by while he weathered a violent
barrage of Portuguese. When finally he turned to us his usual
imperturbability seemed somehow a little askew.

"She says he's yours," he explained, pointing at Herman.

Daniel Boone Rover Merriwell-Quixote's Adam's apple per-
formed a double somersault.

"Mine?" he gulped feebly.

"&', si, si, si, si, senbor? declared the mother. "A listed, serihor.
A usted."

For the first time since I had known him words failed the Man
from Muscatine but not the mother. She was rattling away again
to Parsons.

"She says," he finally explained, "that she has fourteen children
and you haven't any. She doesn't want the boy, but she thinks
you do; so she's making you a present of him."

It took Herman some five minutes to catch his breath and
another twenty to explain to the woman, via Parsons, that he
would have to decline the offer. At last she accompanied us
reluctantly to the cabin, collected the child's few belongings and
took him away with her. He cried as he left.

The next morning, at Parintins, the family left the Cuyctba.
We watched them crossing the gangplank to the shore, the
boy's pockets bulging with chocolates and nuts that Herman had
given him, his back bent under a seventy-five pound sack of
farinha. Halfway down he turned to smile good-by, but his father
forestalled him with a kick that sent him sprawling in the river-
bank mud.

302 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

"The son of a ," muttered Herman. Then he turned away.
In Amazonia, after all, one cannot expect a mere human child to
receive the treatment that is accorded, say, a fine, fattened hog or
a new pair of shoes. Children come cheaper.

During our passage of the lower Amazon the rainy season
settled down to work in earnest, and from Manaos to Para not
a day passed on which the heavens did not at some time open
up and dump their contents in our lap. Once underway, how-
ever, the rains observed a punctilious schedule which enabled
us to prepare for them in advance and eliminated the possibility
of a recurrence of our Night of Havoc. Promptly at two o'clock
each morning and at four each afternoon the clouds gathered,
the wind came up, and the deluge was on; and each time the
storm continued for an hour, almost to the minute, and then
blew away. This timetable, of course, made it impossible for us
to spend the nights in our top-deck hammocks, but we finally
effected an amicable compromise with the elements. We retired
into the hammocks about eleven, set Herman's alarm clock for
one-thirty, and when it gave warning betook ourselves to the
shelter of our cabin, leaving the deck to its imminent watery
fate. By that time we were sleepy enough not to be bothered
by such minor matters as rats gnawing at our toes.

Below Parintins the river widened appreciably, and frequently
long vistas opened out ahead in which no land was visible. We
began to encounter islands long, low bars of mud and sand built
up by the enormous mass of silt which the water carried with it.
As often as not, however, what we first took for islands were
not islands at all, but great floating conglomerations of earth,
trees and grass which the river had torn from its banks and was
carrying oceanward. The surface of the stream, though still the
same yellow-brown, had acquired a new power and turbidness
from the weight of the recent rains and the influx of the great
tributaries. Along the banks palms and vines growing directly
out of the water gave evidence of how far the river had risen.

On the morning of the third day from Manaos we put in at

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT * 303

Obidos, one of the largest towns on the lower Amazon. It is
situated at a point where the river suddenly narrows to a width
of less than a mile and passes between high walls of gray-white
rock. In the unfamiliar constraint of this channel the current
more than doubles its usual three-mile-an-hour velocity, and the
Cuy abets engine strained into reverse as we neared our landing
place. In a moment we noticed a strange thing: for the first time
on our journey the ship was not circling about to effect a landing
facing upstream, but was heading directly in toward the shore
with the current. Or was it with the current? Suddenly, peering
over the side, I saw that the river had seemingly reversed itself
and that though we were still facing downstream the water was
pushing strongly up against us. The engine was no longer in
reverse, but drivings forward with all its power. Under our
bows a canoe appeared, drifting rapidly upstream. Parsons showed
up in time to assure me that I was not suffering from hallucina-
tions, but was witnessing the peculiar Amazonian phenomenon
of the remxnse. At certain points along the river, he explained
particularly at such places as the narrows of Obidos, where the
main current is greatly compressed and intensified a counter-
current is frequently developed along one or both banks which
flows upstream for a distance of a few miles while the main body
of the river continues its usual course. The remanse is hurled
back from the fringes of the central current in much the same
way as if it were by the force of an onrushing speedboat.

Atop its steep escarpment Obidos was a town of considerable
attractiveness but no apparent reason for existence. Owing to the
swiftness of the main current and the trickiness of the rewumse
scarcely any of the big, Manaos-bound freighters stop there, and
even the Cuyaba, which constitutionally preferred loitering, to
moving, made short shrift of it. Whatever interest the town
may have for the casual traveler lies less in its present than in its
past. At the conclusion of the Civil War in the United States
a small group of Confederate die-hards, unwilling to submit to
Yankee domination, emigrated to Brazil and eventually settled

304 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

along the Amazon, near Obidos. They fared considerably better
than the average white colonists in tropical South America, but
,as new generations came along, to whom slaveholding and the
Civil War were no longer vital issues, most of the families began
to drift back to the States. The few who remained have by this
time, through intermarriage and the adoption of Brazilian ways,
become indistinguishable from, their Latin and Indian neighbors.

From Obidos it was about an eight-hour run to Santarem, at
the mouth of the Tapajos River. Within fifteen minutes both
remanse and cliffs disappeared, the river widened, and all was
again the same as it had been for two thousand miles: trees, ferns,
vines; trees, ferns, vines; and between them, endlessly, the great
yellow-brown flow of the Amazon. At four it rained. At five it
stopped. And at nine the clustered lights of Santarem slipped
toward us out of the darkness across our starboard bow. No
sooner had we cast anchor than the waters around us were alive
with moving lights, as every boat, raft and other floating object
in the harbor scurried out to meet us. Before the engines had
stopped there was an almost solid bridge of small craft between
us and the shore, and what seemed to be 9999 of Santarem's ten
thousand inhabitants were milling about the Cuy abets deck. After
several weeks of Amazon river ports we were accustomed to
welcoming committees, but this one, unlike all the others, was
not socially but on business bent. In a twinkling merchandise
was everywhere on display mostly painted gourds and multi-
colored basketwork, for which Santarem has long been noted
and the quiet night air was shattered by the shouting of the
vendors.

"Serihor, compra isto" raucously.

"SenhoTj imm canastra" cajolingly.

"Meestair, observa isto" importunately.

"Meestair " thunderingly.

It was with a sharp, sudden pang that I realized we were back
in the world of high-pressure salesmanship. Lord and Ullman,
adventurers-par-excellence, were no more. Suddenly they had

THE OPERA
HOUSE THAT
RUBBER BUILT,
MANAOS

ITACOATIARA (SERPA IS EASIER)

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 305

been transformed into those worthy but dull fellows: Lord and
Ullman turista. Oh, well
"Qwnto?" \ heard myself inquiring in the old familiar tone.

Like the other Amazon towns between Manaos and Para
Santarem's commerce is negligible, but, unlike them, its hopes are
great. One hundred and fifty miles up the Tapajos River, near
the inconsequential village of Bella Vista, work is in progress on
the only large-scale rubber plantation in the Western Hemis-
phere. The name of the plantation is Fordlandia, named for the
proprietor, Henry Ford.

To understand the nature of this venture in the Brazilian
jungles and its enormous importance to all Amazonia it is neces-
sary to be acquainted, at least in rough outline, with the history
of rubber and its exploitation. The best rubber in the world is
derived from a tree known to botanists as hevea brasiliensis,
which is indigenous only to tropical South America. Throughout
the nineteenth century this tree was jealously guarded by the
Brazilian government, which realized its growing commercial
importance, but in 1876 a small group of Englishmen collected
and smuggled out of the country a large cargo of hevea seeds,
and the result was its transplantation, for the first time in his-
tory, into foreign soil. For years thereafter English and Dutch
scientists studied the seed and the difficult problems of its culture,
and early in this century, as the fruit of their labors, the first
rubber plantations were laid out in the Malay Peninsula, Ceylon,
Java and other East Indian islands. During all these years of
research and experiment Brazil knew little and cared less about
what she was soon to know, to her sorrow, as the great "seed
snatch." The world's demand for rubber increased by leaps and
bounds; black gold poured down the Amazon and its tributaries
in an unending stream; and Brazil was undisputed mistress of this
new and lucrative commercial kingdom. In 1910 the total world
output of all kinds of rubber was ninety-four thousand tons, and
Amazonia supplied more than half. Small wonder that the lights

306 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

burned brightly and the coin clinked merrily in the counting
houses of Iquitos, Manaos and Para.

But the annals of this jungle Never-Never-Land of glory, gold
and opera houses were destined to be as brief as they were
spectacular. In 1911 the first large cargos of East Indian rubber
were dumped on the world market, and in an astonishingly short
time the center of caoutchouc production had shifted from the
valley of the Amazon to the other side of the world. Brazilian
rubber had always grown wild neither capital nor labor was
ever available in sufficient quantities for the establishment of
plantations and though its quality was the highest its supply
was uncertain and its exploitation haphazard in the extreme. In
competition with the new eastern rubber, grown scientifically
on plantations and marketed by highly organized business meth-
ods, it did not stand the ghost of a chance. Year after year the
Amazonian output declined, until in 1934, when the world hit
its all-time rubber-producing peak of 1,019,000 tons, Brazil con-
fributed less than one percent of the total. The twentieth cen-
tury world of organized industry and high-speed mass produc-
tion had caught up with it and passed it by.

Amazonia would probably have been permanently abandoned
to its economic fate if it had not been for an anomalous situation
which soon developed in the new rubber empire. Although Eng-
land and the Netherlands controlled production, the United
States was far and away the largest manufacturer and consumer,
and its industrial tycoons began to feel the need of providing
their own raw material. In the early 1920*5 Harvey Firestone
began large-scale plantation operations in Liberia and a few years
later followed up by financing a United States government
survey of large sections of the Amazon Valley. He never acted
on the findings of the survey, but his close friend and associate,
Henry Ford, did. Never a rubber manufacturer, but by all odds
the greatest rubber consumer in the world, Ford had long be-
lieved in producing as many of his own raw materials as he
could, and the great Brazilian forests seemed to him to be the
answer to one of his major needs. In 1927 he obtained a conces-

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 307

sion of three million acres of jungle land on the banks of the
remote Tapajos, and the great experiment of Fordlandia began.
To date the experiment has been of the "noble" rather than of
the successful variety. Of the three million acres in the concession
less than twelve thousand have been planted, and up to the begin-
ning of 1937 not a single pound of rubber had been taken out.
Though on a vastly greater scale and backed by vastly greater
resources than any previous enterprises in Amazonia, Fordlandia,
in the ten years since its establishment, has encountered the same
difficulties as its predecessors. Floods, heat, disease, hostile natives,
lack of transportation facilities; all of these have plagued and
retarded the project; but greatest of all obstacles, as always, has
been the shortage of labor even though workers are offered
wages hitherto unheard of in that part of the world. There have
been many rumors in the past few years that Ford has soured
on his Brazilian white elephant and would soon abandon it; but
so far, in spite of oceans of red ink, he has stuck by his guns.
And in his sticking Amazonia sees its hope for the future. Al-
though its commercial importance at the present time is nil,
Fordlandia is still the one and only venture in the production of
plantation rubber to be found in the Western Hemisphere, and
on its ultimate success or failure depends the commercial fate of
half a continent. It will be a red-letter day for the great river
and its people when the first cargo of raw rubber sets out from
Boa Vista on the Tapajos on its journey to the land of the V8's.

Below Santarem the Amazon assumed proportions that made it
seem less a river than a great inland sea. On the second morning
out distant, table-topped mountains appeared far to the north-
so low and inconspicuous that they would have passed almost
unnoticed under ordinary circumstances, but seeming positively
spectacular after almost three thousand miles in which the horizon
had never once risen above the tree tops of the green forest
ocean. At a tumble-down mudbank village called Monte Allegre
the Cuyaba took on, in addition to its ration of lenya, two Ger-
man zoologists, complete with butterflies, parrots, armadillos,

308 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

guns and whiskers. They spoke no English, and our conversa-
tions with them were limited to strangled mutterings; but they
or rather their collection of animals nevertheless filled an impor-
tant gap in our South American education. It would hardly have
done for Herman and me to return to the salons of Manhattan
and Muscatine and be forced to confess that, in crossing three
thousand miles of the world's wildest jungle, we had seen a grand
total of one snake, two sloths and a dozen alligators. Now, how-
ever, we were safe, and by the time we reached Para were able
to talk as glibly of guaribas, mucuras, agoutis and sucurujus as
if we had personally wrestled all of them into submission. Even
photographs could be taken, if one were careful, in which the
bars of the cages did not show.

The night after leaving Monte Allegre we could have sworn
that the Cuyaba had somehow slipped past Para and was out in
the open Atlantic. The last vestiges of land had disappeared, and
we steamed along in the center of an unbroken ring of sky and
water. It was, therefore, with something like astonishment that
we awoke the following morning to find ourselves threading a
narrow channel of a few hundred yards' width, along which the
river-bank foliage almost scraped our decks as we passed. This
was no longer the great lower Amazon to which we had become
accustomed, but the Amazon we had known on the other side
of the continent, when it bore the names of Pichis, Pachitea and
Poucartambo. About two hundred and fifty miles from the
Atlantic the main river sweeps sharply to the north, emptying
into the sea directly on the equator. All its waters, however,
do not follow this current, and for hundreds of miles south of
it the jungles are broken by a network of small streams and
channels as its excess forces its way through them to the sea.
Para itself lies some hundred and fifty miles from the mouth of
the main river, and we were therefore taking the shortest route
toward it through a tortuous labyrinth of narrow streams.

Throughout a whole day we progressed along the shores of
the island of Marajo, a body of land larger than the state of
Rhode Island, which lies in the mouth of the Amazon and

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT 309

separates the main current from the smaller streams which
emerge at Pard. For perhaps six hours we threaded our way
through the narrows; then gradually the banks began again to
recede, and by nightfall the land to the south had entirely dis-
appeared. We were passing the mouth of the Tocantins River,
the great waterway of eastern Brazil which flows from the south
and meets the Amazon system less than two hundred miles from
the sea. From this point on we were, strictly speaking, not on the
Amazon at all, but on the estuary of the Tocantins, which is
called the Para River. But nobody on the Cuyaba least of. all
ourselves was willing to admit it. For two months and thirty-
five hundred miles we had traversed a continent on the waters
of the great Amazon, anticipating as if it were the millennium
the great day on which it would at last reach journey's end in
the Atlantic; and we were not going to let it be cheated of its
royal prerogatives by any upstart Para or Tocantins. True, we
were emerging by the side door rather than the majestic main
entrance two hundred miles to the north; but we were still on
the same continuous waterway, and at least part of the great
yellow-brown stream beneath our keel had come from almost
within sight of the Pacific in the Andes of Peru.

Even the Cuyabcfs phlegmatic Roman senator of a captain
seconded our sentiments.

"Amazonas" he declared stoutly. "Realamente Amazonas"
No man can sail the River Amazon and not be proud of it.

We were to reach Para in the early morningthe sixth since
leaving Manaos, the fifteenth since leaving Iquitos. For the last
time Herman and I swung indolently in our hammocks on the
top-deck, watching the stars and the distant, palm-fringed shores.
At one and the same time we were happy and unhappy glad at
the prospect of journey's end, sorry as one is always sorry when
a good chapter is about to be concluded, a good book closed. I
have said that no man can sail the Amazon and not be proud
of it; but I can go farther than that. No man can live, for how-
ever short a time, within the three million square miles which

310 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

its great arms encompass and not have his thoughts and feelings-
even his very life prof oundly influenced by it. For the Amazon
is more than the greatest river in the world, more than a mere
geological phenomenon performing its age-old, ageless functions
according to the laws of time, gravity and erosion. It is the blood
stream of a continent. It, and it alone, gives accessibility, energy,
pattern and meaning to the vast wilderness which it traverses. It
alone makes life possible in the trackless world of interior South
America between Venezuela and the Argentine, the Andes and
the Atlantic. The Mississippi rolls majestically on its way, but
swift trains roar beside and across it, and it has long since out-
lived its function as the indispensable central artery of the United
States. The Nile, Ganges and Yangtze-Kiang are great rivers, but
they have long since been tamed, dammed and domesticated to
the uses of men and are no longer essential to communication
and transportation. But the Amazon has been neither conquered
nor rendered obsolete. No man can penetrate its domain except
by following its waters; it is unsubdued and uncontrolled by any
of the devices of men, but all men within its sphere of influence
are dependent upon it for virtually every act and function of
their lives. Certainly it was apparent to Herman and me, as we
neared the end of our long journey, how constantly and com-
pletely dependent we had been upon it. We had drunk of it,
bathed in it, traveled on it, taken our food from it, found our
way by it, been protected from heat, insects and animals by it.
Without it our crossing of the continent could not even have
been contemplated much less completed. Without it neither we
nor any living thing we had encountered could have lived or
moved. The Amazon had not been merely the river on which
we traveled. It had been the world in which we lived.

The soft night wind ruffled the tassels of my hammock. It was
the same east wind of Amazonia that had purred through the
rigging of the Hwma Capac, Melita and Suyaba throughout our
entire crossing of the continent. The same, and yet I suddenly
realizednot the same. For now, faintly but unmistakably, it bore
with it the clean, clear breath of the ocean. It was strangely

THE BLOOD STREAM OF A CONTINENT

difficult to realize that our journey was almost over that the
great flowing highway which had borne us so long and so far
was at last to reach its end and that the next morning we would
be out of the ageless, changeless jungle world and back in the
twentieth century of men and machines.

After a while I clambered from my hammock and walked
forward to the bridge. No light was visible anywhere on the
horizon; only the night with its stars, the dark, leaning palms
along the distant shore and the heavy waters flowing. The
Cuy&btfs passengers had retired early, to be well rested for the
great events of the morning, and the only illumination on the
top-deck was the red and green navigation lights and -a faint
glow from the captain's cabin behind the bridge. He was listen-
ing, as he often did at night, to his radio. It was playing a thin,
plaintive tune a song of indolence, starshine and the scented
tropics and its sound passed softly along the deck where I stood
and out into the night. It was the perfect accompaniment to the
time and the place. Tomorrow, I thought, my eyes will again be
surveying banks and bathrooms, factories and film palaces; my
ears will be full of the sound of grinding gears and the voices of
people trying to sell me something. But tonight I am still free.
Tonight that world has not yet encompassed me and taken me
back to itself, and all that exists between heaven and earth are
the river and the palms and that thin music floating

But no something had happened to the music. It had faded,
disappeared. Strangled, metallic rumblings came from the cap-
tain's cabin, and I knew he must be fingering the dials. The
sound swelled and roared, crashed out in the angry dissonance
of a tropical hurricane. Then, suddenly, sharply, clear and com-
manding as the voice of an archangel:

"On Saturday afternoon the popular Boy Scout leader, Mr.
Tinker Scrod, will speak here at Town Hall. The scoutmaster's
talk is called, 'Does the Altitude Bother the Growing Boy Play-
ing Leapfrog?' On Sunday"

"Hello, Mr. Allen."

"If it isn't Portland! Well, sir-they laughed at me when I

312 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

walked into the turkish bath with two dozen clams. They didn't
know I was going to have a snack in the steam room."

Home is the sailor

As I walked back to my hammock the voice faded, and soon
it was gone. I lay for a while watching the river, the palms and
the sky, and soon I was dropping off toward sleep. Faintly I
heard the ship's gong sounding. Six bells Bulova Watch Time.

X

HOW LIKE A GOD

THE thing had me by the throat. Beads of sweat stood
out on my face and my breath came in short, labored
gasps as sinuous green-striped coils tightened inexorably
about my neck. The blood swelled and pounded in my temples.
Was this, I wondered, to be the end? Had I journeyed three
thousand miles across a jungle continent, had I escaped the
menacing clutches of wild beasts, fevers and cockroaches, only
to meet death thus ignominiously in a bedroom in Para's Grande
Hotel? Desperately I tugged at the green horror that was knotted
against my windpipe; grimly I struggled against extinction

The bathroom door opened and Herman emerged, complete
with Barbasol and Corona Perfecto. He examined me critically,
"Your necktie's on crooked," he said.

It was a time of many wonders, that first night in Para. One
by one we rediscovered the marvels of modern civilization,
which for two months we had not only renounced but almost
forgotten. Not only were there neckties that throttled us; there
were soft mattresses that yielded to weary posteriors, hot water
taps from which hot water actually emerged, trousers with
creases in the right places, linen that crinkled, razor-blades that
cut, windows that opened, bells that rang. We devoted our first
two hours in the Grande Hotel almost exclusively to ringing
bells. That there were bells at all was exciting. That they rang
was astonishing. But that they were answered stretched credulity
to the breaking point. Valets, laundresses, bellhops and waiters
formed an endless procession through die room. Perhaps half
the things we asked for we actually wanted; the other half we

313

314 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

requested only for the strange, sweet satisfaction that they could
be had.

The CuyabcLy the sights, sounds and smells of Amazonia, were
far away. Para lies directly upon the estuary of the great river,
but in the neat indoor world of carpets, columns and shiny furni-
ture in which we found ourselves it was remote and unreal. True
enough, the untracked jungle stretched endlessly away on three
sides of us, and on the fourth lay the barren wastes of the ocean;
but within the tight bright confines of the city genus homo
ruled the roost, and the pleasant illusion persisted that all nature
had been designed only as a useful supplier of his needs and an
artistic background for his activities. To eyes long accustomed
to the dim glow of the stars the blatant mazdas of the Avenida
Independencia were the lanterns of fairyland. To ears inured to
a nightly chorus of howler monkeys the rumbling and screech-
ing of the passing trams were sweet music from a well-remem-
bered song.

Deliberately and self-consciously we savored each new thrill
with which we were presented. After two hours of dressing and
admiring ourselves in the pier-glass we left our room and de-
scended to the main floor in an elevator. We nodded to the
desk clerk, and the desk clerk said, "Good evening, gentlemen."
We passed through the reading room and saw the headlines of a
New York newspaper that was only four days old. We said
"sidecars" to the bartender, and the bartender knew what side-
cars meant. We dined without benefit of beans, rice or chicken
feathers. We wiped our hands and mouths on napkins. And later
we strolled the principal streets and squares of the city, with
lights overhead and paving underfoot. We stared at the un-
familiar phenomena of policemen, taxicabs, newsboys, billboards
and painted ladies. We stepped gingerly across the gutters, lest
we soil our immaculate shoes. We stopped off in every cafe we
passed, lest we miss any aspect of the busy night-life about us.
We discoursed softly and circumspectly to waiters and hackmen,
lest we suddenly forget that we were now civilized, cosmopoli-
tan gentlemen and give vent to a loud and unseemly pasta fazool.

HOW LIKE A GOD 315

I am rather afraid that we were two rather ridiculous and self-
important twista as we rediscovered civilization on that first
fabulous night in Para. But we were also two well-scrubbed,
well-dressed, well-fed, well-lubricated turista, and I am chari-
table enough to think that we were perhaps entitled to our
aberrations.

"Not a Goddam tree in sight!" exulted Herman as we emerged
from a bar. "Not a palm, not a mudbank, not a cockroach!"

We stood for a moment contemplating the beauty of the scene
before us: stone walls, a cobbled street, lamp posts, trolley tracks,
telephone poles, and in the distance the outline of a factory
chimney. As we started off down the Rua San Antonio we burst
into song. The bright lights of the Praa da Republica beckoned
gaily ahead. God was in his heaven, and Marlene Dietrich was at
the Cine do Brasil.

After our first night of sartorial and gastronomical debauchery
neither Herman nor I, I am afraid, were in quite the right mood
to investigate or appreciate Para. In the first place, of course,
there were hang-overs. In the second place, there were nego-
ciaciones to be made. Neither of us had anticipated that our
Amazonian adventure would consume a full two months, and it
now behooved us to get about our respective businesses as
quickly as possible: Herman to Rio and Buenos Aires on behalf
of the button trade, and I to New York on behalf of my future
solvency. By the Pan-American clipper ships, which departed
bi-weekly from Para, home was only three days away, and the
prospect presented a strong temptation to throw discretionand
express checks to the winds. But I resisted the urge, and by
noon of our second day in Para found myself in possession of a
ticket for the Booth Line freighter Clement, which was to sail
before the end of the week. Herman meanwhile bought passage
on a southbound Brazilian coastal vessel, which would leave,
fosiblimente, two days after mine. Knowing the vagaries of
South American transportation, however, he had already re-
signed himself to a fortnight or better in Para.

316 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

Our transportation secured, our next activities were in the best
turista tradition. I had traveled enough before to know that a
returning voyager cannot warm the hearts of family and friends
with tall tales alone, and although I had now been in South
America for more than three months I had yet to buy a single
gift. The grim work of rectifying this state of affairs began at
nine in the morning and continued until well past nightfall,
leaving me exhausted but triumphant. Not only was there a neat
checkmark opposite every name on my list, but I had even ac-
quired a small, floating surplus to cover the contingency of un-
expected births and marriages. All that remained now was to
compose the stories to accompany the gifts. It was not difficult.
The pocketbooks and wallets were from the hide of an alligator
I had shot at dawn on an inlet of the River Napo. The cigarette
boxes had been made from a giant ceiba tree in whose branches
I had sought shelter from a tropical hurricane. The stuff ed three-
toed sloth I had strangled with my bare hands while hiding in
the forest from the poisoned arrows of the Chuncho Indians.
And so on. I could check over the details on the voyage home;
and I mustn't forget to remove the price-tags.

While I was big game hunting on the Rua San Antonio
Herman repaired to the town's largest photographic establish-
ment to supervise the developing of the photographs we had
taken. Both of us had carried cameras on the journey, and I had
felt rather proud of my conscientiousness in putting mine to
frequent use; but in comparison with my companion's my total
output was negligible. By the time we reached Para the Man
from Muscatine had accumulated enough exposed celluloid to
supply the entire needs of The Daily N&ws, Life, Look, Pic and
the National Geographic for the next decade. As a result, his
labors at the photographer's extended over some three days
before he at last staggered into our hotel room with the com-
plete fruits of our transcontinental clicking. I had a few uneasy
moments as we pored through them. I can enjoy a fine photo-
graph as well as the next man, but years of reluctant association
with amateur camera fans have taught me to be wary, and I

HOW LIKE A GOD 317

dreaded that at any moment that lunatic Leica glint might come
into Herman's eye and I would forthwith be subjected to a
passionate discourse on angles, filters, composition and chiaro-
scuro. But by this time I should have known my companion
better than that.

"Which ones do you like best?" I inquired timidly when we
had gone through the lot.

"The ones I'm in," he replied promptly.

At last we got around to seeing Para. (Or, if you prefer,
Belem. Technically the latter is the correct name of the town,
Para being the state of which it is the capital and metropolis;
but virtually no one except government officials and the Pan-
American timetable refer to it as such.) By either of its names it
was the first city of size or consequence we had seen since leav-
ing Lima, and coming to it fresh from three thousand miles of
jungle-rivers and thatched villages its attractions were of course
magnified to our eyes. By any standard, however, it was an inter-
esting and pleasing community. Known to the ttirista guidebooks
as "the Paris of the Jungle," it does its humble best to live up to
the extravagant comparison. No one would mistake the Grande
Hotel for the Edouard VII, or the Pra?a da Republica for the
Place de l'Op6ra, but the imposing public buildings, clanging
trams, broad, tree-shaded .avenues and crowded sidewalk caf6s
make a brave showing for a city in a tropical swamp one degree
removed from the equator.

In the three-hundred-odd years of its existence Para has
shared the ups and downs of the vast jungle region at the front
door of which it stands. The key city of the rubber boom (it
gave its narfte to the finest variety of rubber known) it grew,
in the early years of this century, to a population of almost
250,000, and somehow, in spite of the subsequent economic col-
lapse of Amazonia, it has succeeded in holding it. Its inhabitants
today are probably as variegated racially as any city in the
world outside of New York. The predominant white strain is
Portuguese, but for centuries this has been mingled with other

318 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

strains, as men of all nations have come and gone, pressing up
the great river in search of their diverse El Dorados. Negroes
have been numerous since the earliest slave-trading days, and the
aboriginal Tapuyas Indians, one of the strongest South American
breeds, have survived the ravages of time and white domination
in considerable numbers. With the fall of rubber Para lost its
position as one of the great seaports of the western world; the
big liners Munson and Furness now give it a wide berth as
they steam down to Rio and B.A.; but the city still hangs on.
Its squares, boulevards and buildings are old, but still beautiful.
Its harbor is still the bottle neck to three million square miles of
unimaginably rich and unexploited country. Para firmly believes
the day will come when it will not only regain, but far surpass,
.its former commercial importance. And meanwhile the sun is
warm, the nights are fragrant and golden with stars, and the
bananas and mangos hang heavy from the trees.

Indeed, we soon discovered that the mangos are apt to hang
too heavy from the trees. During the afternoon rains it was al-
most dry in the streets beneath the thickly intertwined branches,
but the unwary passer-by, though safe from raindrops, was often
subjected to a barrage of plopping mangos, loosened from their
moorings by the storm. Aside from this habit of aerial bombard-
ment, however, the trees of Para were exemplary. The squares
were a riot of multi-colored foliage, and the principal avenues
were wide, green tunnels, cool even at midday beneath arching
sunshields of leaves and blossoms. Except in die very center of
town, where the hotels and shops were clustered, the surround-
ing jungle made its influence felt. At the end of every street was
a green wall of vegetation. At every break in the pavement ferns,
mosses and tiny flowers pressed themselves upward into the sun-
light. There were times when one could almost feel the vast
stirring of life beneath the slabs and cobbles of the city. There
was fire in the earth beneath Para: not the fire of molten rock,
but of living, growing seed.

The official show places were few in number and easily dis-*
posed of in a morning's conscientious rubbernecking. Architec-

HOW LIKE A GOD 319

turally the town's pride is the Paz Theater, located in the central
square, the Praga da Republica, directly opposite the Grande
Hotel. Even larger, though less spectacular, than the Manaos
opera house, it has in recent years suffered the same sad fate as
its up-river counterpart and stands today more as a monument
to former glory than as a useful public institution. Close beside
it stands the Commercial Museum, cavernous and deserted, but
containing exhaustive exhibits of the wild and manufactured
products of Amazonia. The praga itself is as lovely a public
square as can be found anywhere. Broad, tree-lined avenues de-
bouch into it from all sides, and in its center is a green park in
which palms, ferns and all manner of tropical vegetation flourish
in luxuriant but carefully tended profusion. Through them the
white shapes of the theater, museum and many monuments stand
out in clear and symmetrical relief, like temples in an antique
Grecian glade.

Churches, of course, abound in Para, as in any Latin- American
city, but the cathedral on the Praga Frei Caetano Brandao is the
only one of particular interest. Built in 1710, it is an admirable
example of Portuguese colonial architecture and contains most
of the art treasures which the city has accumulated during its
colorful, checkered history. The only building which outranks it
in age is the nearby Castello, a venerable fortress overlooking
the harbor, which the earliest settlers erected to insure their con-
tinued domination over the mouth of the Amazon. Brazilian
soldiery still patrol its battlements, but presumably only for the
exercise, as in its present state the entire structure could easily
be demolished by a well-aimed squirt from a water-pistol.

Stretching eastward from the Castello along the broad curve
of the water front is the most interesting and colorful section of
the city. Boasting only one railroad line, with a total trackage
of one hundred miles, Para's commercial contact with both the
outside world and interior Brazil is maintained exclusively by
shipping, and its docks are the hub and mainspring of its life.
Over diem pass not only the materials which it itself produces
or consumes, but literally every individual article that enters or

320 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

leaves the valley of the Amazon. Down from Iquitos, Manaos
and the smaller river towns flows a steady stream of rubber,
batata, nuts, fruits, timber, hides and fish, bound north to the
United States, east to Europe, or south to the large cities of
lower Brazil. And in the opposite direction pass the manufactured
products of the civilized world; but in lesser quantity. For
although Amazonia has great need for machines and machine-
made goods it has little money with which to pay for them. In
addition to its through traffic the harbor enjoys considerable
local commerce of its own. For every ocean-going freighter
alongside its docks there were a hundred little sailboats with
gaily colored sails, darting about the roadstead or lying gunwale
to gunwale along the wharves. The nearby open markets were
filled with the cargos they had brought in: huge mounds of
castmhctS) the ubiquitous chestnut or Brazil nut; sacks of beans,
cocoa and farinha; piles of drying fish; hides of alligators, frogs
and snakes; jaguar pelts; monkeys and parrots, stuffed and alive;
and painted gourds, armadillo shells and alleged poisoned arrows
to attract the sporadic turista trade. The scene was alive, color-
ful and vivid particularly to the nostrils. The fact that there
were at least ten vendors to every purchaser seemed to make no
difference to anyone, and the water-front merchants, lazily call-
ing out their wares or dozing in the shade of their sheds, seemed
to be having a good rime, if not a particularly profitable one.

Our other expeditions about Para brought us to the zoo, the
Goeldi Museum (zoological and botanical) and the Bosque, a
park near the city's outskirts in which virgin jungle, goldfish
ponds, free-wandering tapirs and lemonade-stands are bewilder-
ingly scrambled together. By this stage of our journey, however,
we were quite willing to leave the Amazonian flora and fauna
to their own devices, and we spent our last few days in town
chiefly in the company of the gringo crowd which frequented
the Grande Hotel cafe. After two months of jungle sights and
sounds a traveling salesman with a clean collar was a visitor from
Olympus and a "pleased to meetcha" in purest New Yorkese fell
on our ears with the richness of a symphony.

PARA ALSO BOASTS A SEAGOING JUNGLE

A TUNNEL OF MANGO TREES ON THE PRACA DA REPURT.Tr.A

HOW LIKE A GOD 321

Nortamericanos and Inglesas were anything but numerous in
Para. Unlike the west coast, where the wealth of the Andes
offers tempting inducement to large-scale exploitation, down-at-
heel Amazonia at the present time possesses little that is of interest
to foreign capital, and with the exceptions of Fordlandia, the
Booth Line and Pan-American Airways there is not an enter-
prise within a two-thousand mile radius that could properly be
called Big Business. We soon discovered that it required only
an hour at the small tables of the Grande's caf6 to meet every
gringo in town. There were more Englishmen than Americans,
most of them clerks in the local Booth office or officers from the
Clement, on which I was when it got good and readyto sail.
Parsons, our steadfast mentor from Iquitos onward, scarcely had
time to present us to his colleagues and seal the introductions
with a festive gin-and-ginger before boarding an outbound Liver-
pool freighter, with the disconsolate Bouchers trailing in his
wake; but by that time after a full twenty-four hours in town
we were, by expatriate-gringo standards, old-timers in the com-
munity and practically blood-brothers to every paleface in Para.

Though commercially ignored, the lower Amazon has for
years been a mecca for American scientists. Much of the best
work of the Rockefeller Foundation has been done along the
thousand-mile stretch of river between Para and Manaos, and
each new year brings with it two or three expeditions from
other institutions bent on botanical or zoological research. The
group currently in Para was concerned with the investigation
of the nature and habits of electric eels, on behalf of the Ameri-
can Museum of Natural History. They were a pleasant and
interesting group of men, but it was obvious from the moment
we met them that they were not going to let us out of their
clutches until we accompanied them to their laboratory in the
Goeldi Museum and permitted ourselves to be convinced that
their pets really had what it took. We consented to five shocks
apiece in the interests of science, but drew the line at becoming
involved with the largest eel in the collection an ugly black
fellow more than three feet in length who looked capable of

32O THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

leaves the valley of the Amazon. Down from Iquitos, Manaos
and the smaller river towns flows a steady stream of rubber,
balata, nuts, fruits, timber, hides and fish, bound north to the
United States, east to Europe, or south to the large cities of
lower Brazil. And in the opposite direction pass the manufactured
products of the civilized world; but in lesser quantity. For
although Amazonia has great need for machines and machine-
made goods it has little money with which to pay for them. In
addition to its through traffic the harbor enjoys considerable
local commerce of its own. For every ocean-going freighter
alongside its docks there were a hundred little sailboats with
gaily colored sails, darting about the roadstead or lying gunwale
to gunwale along the wharves. The nearby open markets were
filled with the cargos they had brought in: huge mounds of
castanhas, the ubiquitous chestnut or Brazil nut; sacks of beans,
cocoa and farinha; piles of drying fish; hides of alligators, frogs
and snakes; jaguar pelts; monkeys and parrots, stuffed and alive;
and painted gourds, armadillo shells and alleged poisoned arrows
to attract the sporadic turista trade. The scene was alive, color-
ful and vivid particularly to the nostrils. The fact that there
were at least ten vendors to every purchaser seemed to make no
difference to anyone, and the water-front merchants, lazily call-
ing out their wares or dozing in the shade of their sheds, seemed
to be having a good time, if not a particularly profitable one.

Our other expeditions about Para brought us to the zoo, the
Goeldi Museum (zoological and botanical) and the Bosque, a
park near the city's outskirts in which virgin jungle, goldfish
ponds, free-wandering tapirs and lemonade-stands are bewilder-
ingly scrambled together. By this stage of our journey, however,
we were quite willing to leave the Amazonian flora and fauna
to their own devices, and we spent our last few days in town
chiefly in the company of the gringo crowd which frequented
the Grande Hotel cafe. After two months of jungle sights and
sounds a traveling salesman with a clean collar was a visitor from
Olympus and a "pleased to meetcha" in purest New Yorkese fell
on our ears with the richness of a symphony.

PARA ALSO BOASTS A SEAGOING JUNGLE

A TUNNEL OF MANGO TREES ON THE PRAA DA REPUBLICA

322 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

supplying enough "juice" to operate the New York subway sys-
tem. The next day, we learned, one of the helpers in the labora-
tory inadvertently touched him while cleaning out his tank and
came to half an hour later.

The other members of our round-table society were men of
diverse interests. One was the American vice-consul; another was
in the tropical fish business; another was an official of Interna-
tional Rotary, who was circling South America to promote good-
will and whatever else Rotary promotes. And on two occasions
we were joined by Pan-Air pilots, in town overnight between
hops on the long flight between Miami and Buenos Aires. As
their schedules required them to take off in the early morning
they confined their drinking to ginger ale and gwtrma, alter-
nately feeling morose and noble in their abstinence. To refrain
from liquor back home may mean one of many things: economy,
a rebellious liver, moral scruples, or simply not wanting a drink.
But in South America it can mean only one of two things: you're
a pilot or you're a missionary.

Two topics of conversation, we soon discovered, held undis-
puted pre-eminence in Para's cafe society: yellow fever and
Lampion. The vast swamps that surround the mouth of the
Amazon are an earthly paradise for mosquitoes, and from the
earliest days of its history the city has been subjected to recur-
rent waves of attack from the dread Yellow Jack. During the
past twenty years, since the first energetic campaigns of the
Rockefeller Foundation and other public health agencies, there
have been no severe epidemics. Occasional cases of the fever are,
however, still reported, especially in the nearby river towns and
villages, and in spite of all the efforts of the Brazilian government
and foreign medical missions, Para and its vicinity remain the
only region in the entire western hemisphere in which the
danger of widespread infection still remains. Uncomfortably
aware of this, the inhabitants have developed a tendency to look
for the worst; the mildest and most common tropical fevers are
rigidly investigated by the city authorities, and even the most

HOW LIKE A GOD 323

unhypochondriac of gringos is apt to develop in short order into
a chronic temperature-taker and pulse-feeler.

Lampion, Topic Number Two on the cafe agenda, was not
strictly speaking a disease, but incontrovertibly he belonged in
the general category -of tropical scourges. A brigand and bad
man par excellence, he enjoyed in northern Brazil at the rime
of our visit a position of pre-eminence such as, in their day,
Villa held in Mexico and Capone in Chicago. The exploits,
famous and infamous, that were credited to him were legion,
and rare indeed was the story told over the gin-and-gingers,
whether its subject was international trade, the weather or Yale's
football prospects, that did not culminate in a Lampion anecdote.
Many of the yarns were obviously apocryphal: Lampion was a
former sailor in. the United States Navy; Lampion was a scion
of the deposed royal house of Portugal and was trying to re-
establish an empire in Brazil; Lampion was secretly building a
fleet of warships to attack Rio de Janeiro; and so on with em-
bellishments a dime a dozen. At least one, however, had elements
of plausibility, and even if not true is amusing enough to be
repeated. It seems that some two or three years back, while en-
gaged in his favorite pastime of looting a village near Para, the
great man was careless enough to allow himself to be shot in the
leg. Having no medical man in his own entourage he adopted
the simple expedient of kidnaping the local doctor, whom he
carried off to his camp in the jungle and forced to stay in
attendance until the wound had healed. This took about two
weeks, and at the end of that time he told the doctor he might
pack himself off to his home. The latter, overjoyed, was about
to depart when Lampion stopped him.

"Can you play the piano?" he asked.

Unfortunately for himself, the doctor was a man of diverse
accomplishments. Bewildered but unsuspecting, he confessed that
he could.

"Can you play "Onward, Christian Soldiers 7 ?"

He could.

324 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

"Play it," ordered the bandit, pointing at a small instrument
that stood in a corner of his tent.

The doctor did as he was told. When he had finished Lampion
smiled and clapped him on the shoulder.

"You will not be going home after all," he said.

In amazement and despair the doctor asked why.

"For three years," his captor explained, "I have been carting
that piano with me on my travels. All my life I have loved
'Onward, Christian Soldiers,' but neither I nor any of my men
know how to play it. Now I have found someone who does.
You will remain with me as my personal musician and play
'Onward, Christian Soldiers' for me while I am eating and before
I go to bed."

The rest of the story is shrouded in darkness. But Lampion
still roams the jungles, and the doctor hasn't yet come home.

The Clement was to sail at nine in the evening. The day and
hour of departure had been known to me for some time, but now
that it was actually at hand I had difficulty in believing it.
Although in the weeks just past I had crossed a continent and
encountered many varying kinds of scenes and men, all that I
had seen and experienced was now, as I looked back, bound
together on a single thread of vivid memory. The dust-dry ruins
of Cajamarquilla and Pachacamac, the gray desolation of the
high Andean passes, the damp green tunnel of the Pichis Trail,
the mud-yellow, endless gyrations of Pachitea, Ucayali and
Amazon; Jerry Blanchard and Casa Grace, Ted Waters and his
bridge, Enrico Sims and his imagination, Baldwin-Lopez and his
"Hula!", David Ball and his Old Toms, Sam Harris and his
amontillado from Manchester, the PhuD.'s and their electric eels:
all these things and people were still close to me and very real.
All of them, however various and unlike in themselves, were
part of a single pattern; they were all actors and scenes in the
same play; and through my recollection of them, like faint music
changing but unchanged, flowed the deep, smooth rhythm of
unbroken time. But now at last, I knew, time was to be broken.

HOW LIKE A GOD 325

In a week, a day, even in a few short hours, they would no
longer be close to me or very real. They would dwindle and
fade in my mind, just as the tall, leaning palms of the tropical
coast would fade from my sight as the Clement stood out to
sea. Soon I would have to struggle to recall them, or would
forget them altogether: the crimson achiote paint beneath the
Chunchos' sullen eyes; the taste of a cheese sandwich on a hill
behind Chosica; the great, golden shield of the moon transform-
ing the mosquito-hell of the River Napo into magic fairyland;
Daniel Boone Rover Merriwell-Quixote in full panoply of "kelly,"
ferns and lance astride his patient Wally; and the yellow flood
of the Amazon flowing, flowing. . . . The wind would come
up from the northeast, the sea would turn from blue to green,
the very air would carry with it a presentiment of the sights and
sounds of home. South America would be gone. The jungle, the
mountains and the rivers would be gone, and with them all the
men and things they held. And, most of all, a way of living
would be gone. Thought and will, book and picture, memory
and desire all the powers and devices man commands would
never get them back.

The vice-consul had asked us to dine with him, but we had
declined. I snapped the lock of my duffelbag, patted my pockets
to assure myself of the presence of passport and steamship tickets,
and followed the bellhop downstairs.

"I'll order dinner while you're settling," said Herman. "What
do you want?"

"Well, champagne's in order, I guess."

"Okay. What else?"

"Er turtle soup"

"And-?"

"Steak, French-frieds, salad, cheese, coffee."

"That all?"

"Sounds like plenty to me."

"Sure you haven't forgotten something?"

"Uh-huh."

"Sure?"

326 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

I looked at him closely and saw that his glance bore a gentle
reproof. For a moment I was puzzled; but then the great light
dawned, and together we shouted:

"Beansr 9

"Coma no?" applauded Herman.

We not only had them, but so strangely inconstant an animal
is man actually enjoyed them. Our old enemies looked strange
amid unaccustomed surroundings of snowy napery, burnished
pewter and tall glasses, and there must surely have been compli-
cations, both dietetic and social, when they found themselves in
the same gullets with Pommery & Greno, 1925; but our fare-
well dinner would not have been complete without them. His
fond memories stirred, Herman inquired of the waiter if he
might have a small order of chicken-feathers as garnishing, but
the request elicited only a stunned silence.

"Oh, well," he sighed, "you can't have everything."

The meal over, I dispatched my luggage to the dock in a cab,
and together we started out afoot. Our route to the Clement took
us first through the glittering, noisy, cafe-lined squares and ave-
nues of the town's center, then past long lines of closed and
shuttered shops, and finally into the heavy, squalid darkness of
the slums that line the water front. The night was quiet and very
clear. The only sound we could hear was the scuffing of our
own shoes against the uneven cobbles of the street.

"Sorry to be leaving?" asked Herman after a while.

"I'll be glad to see Ruth again."

"I asked if you're sorry you're leaving."

"You're damn right I am," I said.

We were silent for a block. I could tell from my companion's
expression that he was brooding or, at least, making as close
an approach to brooding as the MerriweU-Quixote disposition
would permit.

"You know, Jim," he said at last, "it's quite a place, this South
America. Big as hell, full of things, untouched. Sort of like-er
well, like a virgin, waiting for you-know-what. You and me,

HOW LIKE A GOD 327

we've come a long way now, haven't we? But we've hardly seen
anything hardly scratched the surface."

"You'll be seeing plenty more of it," I replied. "Rio, Buenos
Aires, the pampas all of that. There'll be new people, new
things."

"Yeah people and things. The whole damn' world's chock-
full of people and things. Only they're no good unless" He
fumbled and stopped.

"Unless what?" I asked.

"Unless you got a feeling about them. Know what I mean?
Unless all the faces and voices and cities and rivers and moun-
tains you see aren't just that only, but Aw, the hell with it!"

We walked a little farther. From down the street came sud-
denly a faint breeze, blown up from the river. Herman paused
to light a cigar and refrained from further conversation until it
was drawing to his satisfaction. Then suddenly he resumed:

"The thing that's got me down is that the longer I mooch
around down here the less I know about it. At least the less
I think I know about it. At the beginning everything looked
Sort of simple. You know there were gringos you had a drink
with and spiks you gave orders to. There were hotels that were
okay and hotels that were punk. There were some things you
did to make money and other things you did to have a good
time. But it isn't like that now. I guess there're still plenty of
gringos and spiks and hotels in South America all right, and
plenty of ways to make money and have a good time, but all
that isn't what South America is, Jim hell no! It's well, for one
thing, it's /// of everything, all balled up together. It's big and
rich and new and powerful and beautiful, and it's poor and igno-
rant and ugly and starving and lousy. It's like "

"Like that," I said, pointing.

Ahead of us the street opened out into the broad plaza of the
water front. There was only a thin crescent moon, but in its
faint light we could see the dreary expanse of cobblestones and
rutted mud that lay between us and the docks. High in the back-
ground loomed the Clement, her black hull hard against the

328 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

soft blackness of the night behind. A dark gush of smoke poured
from her funnel, and small, yellow lights winked on her decks.
Nearer us more yellow lights winked along the wharf, and
among them moved a shadowy confusion of men, bales, crates
and creaking machinery. And still nearer, slim and sudden in
the center of the deserted plaza, was a solitary palm tree. There
was a crumbled railing around it and a few mangy shrubs that
might once have passed for a small park, but the effect was of
the palm's springing full-bodied and alone from its bed of cobbles
and rutted mud. It was a tall tree. Its great bole tapered slant-
ingly across the hard blackness of the Clemen? s hull and its
green head nodded against the soft blackness of smoke and sky.
At its foot lay a man. His head was pillowed on a cobblestone,
and a battered wreck of a guitar lay across his belly. His clothes
were verminous rags; his hair was stiff with filth; his face was
that of an exhumed corpse, to which the earth of the grave still
clung. But with his hands he picked indolently at the strings
of the guitar, and from his lips there came a slow, sad song.
His eyes were open, staring upward, seeming to follow his music
as it ascended, up the long smooth bole of the tree, through the
green summit clump and out into the soft night. He was oblivi-
ous of us as we passed, and he was oblivious of the shrunken,
louse-eaten dog that suddenly sidled up, sniffed tentatively at his
extended bare feet and began to lick them.
"Yes," said Herman. "South America's like that."

Our farewells were brief.

"So long, Jim," he said.

"So long, MerriweU-Quixote." It was the first time I had ever
used the name to his face.

"How's that?" he inquired.

"I said, it's been fun."

"You're damn tootin' it has." As he was about to turn away
the old gleam leapt suddenly into his eye. "Say, I've been mean-
ing to ask you something for a hell of a time. Ever hear of the
Mackenzie River?"

HOW LIKE A GOD 329

"In Canada?"

"Yeah. It runs from near Edmonton clear up through the
Northwest Territory to the Arctic Ocean. I was thinking maybe
next summer or summer after we could"

"Get off this boat," I ordered, "before I throw you off."

"Okay," he said soothingly and began descending the gang-
way. But halfway down he turned. "Better make it summer after
next. The missus might get sore if it was this summer. Yep
that's it. Summer after next the Mackenzie. It's a date."

"Go to hell!"

He descended a few more steps, then turned once more.

"I understand there are very interesting shells in the Macken-
zie," he declared with dignity.

Then he was gone. Soon die wharves were gone too, and the
flickering lights, and the tall, proud palm, beneath which sat a
creature who once was a man, making soft, sad music in the
soft, sad tropic night.

Kipling would have been proud of the Clement. Not a large
ship, she was sound, solid and respectable from keel to crow's-
nest, and the broad, deep furrow which she cut in the southern
ocean bore the unmistakable, authoritative imprint of empire.
She was as English as Westminster Abbey. Although her
appointed rounds took her to the far places of the tropics and
her broad black hull had rubbed shoulders with all manner of
strange craft and wharves, nothing whatever of the faraway or
the exotic clung to her or intruded upon her immemorial, staid
routine. The variegated cargo of hides, nuts, rubber and timber
which she had received from the Cuyaba and other river boats
was relegated to the decent obscurity of her hold. The garish
colors of Amazonia had been supplanted by black and white iron
stanchions, its cacophony of shouts and songs by the rhythm of
clipped orders and the prim striking of the ship's bell, its weird
and mighty conglomeration of smells by the unvarying, un-
relieved aroma of fresh paint. As we crossed the equator and set
our course north by west along the wild Guiana coast we might,

330 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

for all we aboard could tell, have been plowing the Irish Sea
on a hot summer day, en route from Cardiff to Liverpool with a
cargo of doorknobs.

The Clement, though primarily a freighter, had hearkened to
the siren song of the turistct trade and provided accommodations
for some dozen passengers. On her current voyage, which took
her from New York to Bahia and back, she carried her full
complement, and whatever she herself lacked in color or dra-
matic values was more than made up for by her paying inmates.
I soon discovered that I was the only passenger to board ship
at Para; indeed, I was the only one who was not in the process
of making the whole round-trip. All the others had left New
York together two months before and had been constantly in
one another's company ever since. The result was that by the
time of my late arrival they had reached a point of almost
frenzied animosity and intrigue. Most of them were elderly
people, some single, some in couples, who had selected a cruise
on die Clement as a pleasant and inexpensive way of eluding the
rigors of the northern winter, but by this stage of the game
there was not one among them who would not wholeheartedly
have cast his vote for frostbite and chilblains as the lesser of two
evils. In two months they had become so thoroughly sick of the
sight of one another's faces and the sound of one another's voices
that they would, I am sure, have gladly resorted to violence and
bloodshed if they had possessed the necessary implements. Fortu-
nately, however, the only weapon on board was the captain's
revolver, and the captain, he himself explained to me, was keep-
ing that to commit suicide.

Caught between the withering crossfire of this grim warfare,
my first few days on the Clement were, to say the least, bewil-
dering. The elderly gentleman who sat at my right in the dining
saloon spoke neither to the elderly gentleman at my left nor to
the elderly couple across the table. The elderly couple, in turn,
refused even to pass the butter to the young red-headed woman
who was their neighbor, and the young red-headed woman
despised everyone so 4 thoroughly that she read novels throughout
the meals and never addressed so much as a word to anyone save

HOW LIKE A GOD 331

the steward. Before we were well out of sight of Para the con-
tagion had spread even to the officers. Encountering the ship's
doctor on deck the first morning out I inquired if he would
care to make up a foursome at shuffleboard with the captain, one
of the lady passengers and myself.

"I can't," he replied sadly. "The captain doesn't speak to me."

I soon discovered that it required more than an innocent heart
and a friendly smile to keep from being embroiled in internecine
warfare myself. When I fraternized with one group I immedi-
ately and automatically became de trop with another, and when
I subsequently wormed my way back into the good graces of
the second clan I was excommunicated as a traitor and scab by
the first. Before the voyage was one-third over I was so weary
of listening to half the passengers tell me what was wrong with
the other half that I wished a plague on all their houses and,
following the lead of the red-headed lady, carried a book con-
stantly with me in which I might bury my nose when the
barrages began.

The Clement sailed from Para on the twenty-second of March
and was due in New York on April second. Ten days, to be
sure, were an inconsiderable period of time in terms of the total
duration of my wanderings, but in terms of my impatience to get
home once I had left South America behind me they were a
fair imitation of eternity. Shuffleboard, detective novels and even
the finest of kidney stews and suet puddings could not but be
faintly anticlimactic after three months of Andes and Amazon,
and tie thrill of informing the lady passengers that I was really
Noel Coward disguised as Richard Halliburton wore off all too
quickly. The propellers churned and the funnel belched smoke,
but the pin on the smoking-room chart crept northward with
maddening leisureliness, and the latitude lines seemed to back
away before it. I wished wholeheartedly that I had thrown my
pinchpenny conscientiousness to the winds and returned home
by plane. Getting Back to It All is a performance that should
be accomplished as quickly and painlessly as possible.

There was little or nothing to distinguish the passing of the
days. The Clement's course lay well to the east of the outermost

332 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

West Indies, and at no time did we pass within sight of land.
On the fifth day six warships of the British Navy's West Indian
Squadron came up over our stern and passed us as quickly as
if we were going backward. On the sixth Easter Sunday the
captain read Mass, and we had tutti-frutti ice cream for dinner.
On the seventh we crossed the Tropic of Cancer. In between
these great events there were sporadic deck games and poker in
the bar. And that was all. By this time most of us were behaving
as if everyone else on the ship were invisible.

It was not something that happened, but something that all in
a moment, instantly and completely, iws. The stars had been
close and glowing; now they were infinitely remote. The wind
had poured, liquid-smooth, out of the night across the Clement's
deck; now it was whistling, gusty and askew, through the rigging
of the swaying masts. We had been in the tropics; now we had
reached the north. The change in the world about us or at least
our awareness of it could scarcely have been more sudden if we
had been bodily projected from Para to New York in the twin-
kling of an eye.

I circled the deck with my hands in my pockets. ... It was
cold. It was genuinely, incredibly, beautifully cold. I had almost
forgotten what cold was like: a tingling in the body, a stir of
blood in the cheeks, a clearness in the eyes. And a clearness in the
air, too; and in the sea and sky. Even the clouds were clear-
clean-cut and sharp creeping slowly like a glacier through blue-
black space. As I rounded the afterdeck I could see the foaming
avenue of the wake trailing endlessly southward. At the end of it,
perhaps, there was still South America. At the end of it, perhaps,
there were still nodding palms, dark jungle trails and alligators
dozing in yellow rivers. But they were gone now gone and
irrevocably lost on the wings of the keen, cold wind that beat
down upon us from the north. And in their place vivid and
compelling as if I had never left them were the responsibilities
of home. In three days this fine, fancy escape of mine would

HOW LIKE A GOD 333

have come full circle. In three days I would be back precisely
where I started, with four sets of scenery in Cain's Warehouse,
the curse of the critics upon my head, and those old enemies,
The Facts of Life, staring me balefully in the face.

I drew a deep breath and for the first time in nearly four
months I stared back at them.

Whatever it is I've got out of this trip it's not headlines in the
papers or money in the bank. Nor, I'm afraid, is it any notable
aggrandizement of my physical or mental resources. I was healthy
enough when I set out, and I'm neither more nor less so now
(unless, of course, the little malarial fellows are still lurking in
my corpuscles, in which case I'm less). I knew a little about the
politics and economics of South America before I went there,
and now that I'm back I must confess that I know very little
more. When my good friends who read the Herald Tribune ask
me about the outlook for Peruvian copper, I shall be busy blow-
ing my nose; and when my equally good friends who read The
Daily Worker inquire about the exploitation of peon labor on the
haciendas, I shall answer that I think the Yankees will again win
the pennant. Whatever else it may have accomplished my journey
has not made me into an expert or authority on anything.

And the Gilded Man? The elusive one, alas, remains just where
he was before the grim-visaged gentry who go down to their
seats on passes sent me scuttling to the ends of the earth in search
of him; just where he was before Sir Walter Raleigh came, and
Pinzon and Crellana and Pizarro and all the rest; just where he
will be when the last restless, dream-drunk wanderer of the
human race has come and gone and been forgotten. The bite of
wanderlust and a book of express checks are not the passport to
the fabulous land of El Dorado. The soul's peace and the heart's
desire are no more to be found in the remote green wilderness
of an equatorial jungle than in the booking office of Mr. Lee
Shubert's Select Theaters Corporation. For a short while I have
made my escape from many unpleasant realities, but I am unmis-
takably still the same fellow I was in the dark days before Chosica
and the Ferrocarril Central and Pichis mud and the clamless

334 THE, OTHER SII>E OF THE MOUNTAIN

Napo and Daiiiel Boone Rover Merriwell-Quixote swam pleas-
antly into my ken. By any addition, the sum total of my accom-
plishment and profit is a neat round zero.

An4 yet come hell, high water and a fate worse than "Stork
Mad" I know that this escape of mine was good.

It was good, I think, precisely for the reason that it had no
purpose, no profit and.no result. It was good, not in spite of, but
because of the fact that its end was neither the discovery of a
mine nor the building of a bridge nor the investigation of eco-
nomic conditions nor a better knowledge of the mating habits
of three-toed sloths. It was good because it was taken, purely
and simply, for its own sake.

George Leigh Mallory, who in addition to being the greatest
of Himalayan climbers was also a great man, was once asked
why he desired so desperately to climb Mount Everest. His
answer consisted of three words:

"Because it's there."

I like to believe that is why I went to the Andes and the
Amazon. Because they are there. And although, like the cele-
brated bear who went over the mountain before me, I saw only
the other side, I am content. For I had a hell of a good time
seeing it.

The storm picked us up some two hundred miles off Bermuda
and carried us well past Hatteras. For two days the Clement
staggered and wallowed; crew, passengers and furniture pitched
to and fro .in her groaning innards; and past and future were
equally forgotten in the grim but losing battle to retain one's
lunch. But on the third morning it was gone, and miraculously
in its place, far and faint across our port bow, were the long
white beaches of New Jersey.

It was the first day of April. The wind blew lightly from the
land, and the sun was slanting upward across the pale, rain-
washed sky. It was not the sun of the Andes nor the sun of the
Amazon. It carried no bright, flaming fulfillment, but only gentle

HOW LIKE A GOD , 335

promise. It sparkled with light dancer's toes upon the Clement's
plodding hulk, and not so many miles away, I knew, it was
sparkling upon the first shy hyacinths in suburban gardens, and
upon green turf where white balls were flying, and" upon the
new spring hats of lovely women as they emerged from the shops
of Fifth Avenue.

All day we followed the beaches. The long ribbon of sand
unrolled out of blue distance, and with it came piers and board-
walks and the frame and stucco fa?ades of homes and hotels
along the shore. At four in the afternoon we rounded Sandy
Hook. To the north and west of it the sea seemed to open out
again into illimitable space, but I knew this was merely an
illusion. Any moment now, out of the very, floor of ocean, out
of the thin veil of haze that clung to its surface, would arise-
home. Small, scurrying tugs and fishing boats crowded up at us
over the horizon. The clang of heaving buoys sounded louder
across the water. Suddenly from right and left the green shoulders
of Bay Ridge and Staten Island closed in upon us, and we were
in the hurrying, ship-jammed confusion of the inner bay. And
now, at last, up they came the topless towers of the gigantic,
beautiful city. My eyes drank in the incredible reality, as they
had every time before when I had come to New York through
its harbor and as they always would no matter how often I
should come again. How like a god was man, who could build
himself such a habitation out of the jungle of the world!

And how like a jungle was his work when it was done.

The Clement began swinging around toward its pier. I went
below to my cabin and completed my packing. All must be neat
and in order so that the customs inspector could enjoy himself
tearing things apart. When I reappeared on deck the gangway
was going down. At the opposite .end was a small huddle of
people, but I saw just one. A new spring hat, by God! A new
spring hat and two outstretched arms.

It may not have been the Gilded Man, but it was a damned
good substitute.

Q.E.D.

The New York Times
April 27, 1937

James R. Ullman, recently returned from South
America, announces the purchase of a aew play
by