South America Observations and Impressions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In no capital city have I felt so far removed from the great world, the European and Asiatic and North American parts of which are now so closely linked together, as here in La Paz. There may probably be an equal sense of isolation in Quito and Bogotá, there can hardly be a stronger one. To be enclosed between two lofty ranges and two deserts, to live at the bottom of a hole and yet be nearly as high above sea-level as the top of the Rocky Mountains or the Jungfrau are strange conditions for a dwelling place. Nevertheless it was a place in which one might do much meditation, for new sensations awaken new thoughts, and solitude helps one to pursue them. So it was with regret for everything except its climate that we quitted La Paz early one morning to resume our southward journey, bidding a long farewell to the Achachila43 of the majestic Illimani, to which we had offered orisons of admiration in each dawning and each departing light. After we had climbed to the rim of the Barranca in the electric car, an hour's run on the steam railroad carried us across the open plateau to Viacha, whence one route leads to Titicaca and over the lake to Mollendo, and another, now in construction, will in 1913 be ready to carry passengers down through the great Western Cordillera to the Pacific at Arica.44 As this will be hereafter the most direct way of reaching La Paz from the coast, Viacha may some day be an important railroad centre, like Crewe or Chicago or Cologne. At present it is inexpressibly bleak and dreary, standing alone on a dusty and treeless waste. But the traveller of the future who has to wait here to "make his connections" will, while he paces up and down enquiring how much the incoming train is behind time, be able to feast his eyes on the incomparable view of the great Cordillera Real, piercing the northeastern sky, and here ending towards the south in the snowy pyramid of Huayna Potosi, round whose flanks gather the clouds that rise from the moist eastern forests sixteen thousand feet below.

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

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

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

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

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