Saludos

Do you like this hotel?” asked Sandoval, the Indian. He smiled his slow, dark smile, and picking up my duffle bag from the stern of the dugout canoe, tossed it on the sandy river bank.

“Oh, very much,” I replied, looking at the three frail huts that stood on the sands close to the encroaching wall of jungle green. They were built like pup tents, open fore and aft, made by the simple expedient of sticking in the earth about five or six large palm fronds on each side and overlapping them on top.

“Would you like this one?” he asked graciously, depositing my camp cot and bag before the seemingly most substantial one. I nodded; and as he returned to the canoe for the rest of the gear, he said gravely over his shoulder, “I shall send someone with the menu and the wine list.”

This was the beginning of a game that Sandoval, my guide, and I played in some of the wildest spots of South America, and this was not the least of them. We had been journeying for many days now… first there had been the long trip from Lima up over the westernmost Andes, crossing a 16,000-foot pass on the highest railway in the world, then over a goat trail in a truck, rocketing over a 15,000-foot pass in darkness—down among the hanging terraces of the Incas, up again to the glaciered heights and a 14,000-foot pass, and down, down to the lush jungles.

At what had seemed the end of the world to me, we took to the rivers, El Rio Tambo in particular, which is a tributary of the thousand-mile long Ucayali, which, in turn, is a tributary of the two-thousand-mile Amazonas, in the heart of South America, close to the Brazilian border in Peru. We had been supplied with a dugout canoe at the end of the mule trail by mestizo nuns who had a tiny settlement and a school for the uncivilized forest Indians. They had also supplied us with two of their star pupils … copper-skinned boys who painted their smooth cheeks with the juice of a berry that was the color of Chinese red lacquer, whose straight black hair was cut page-boy fashion long over their shoulders, and who wore a single loose garment that fell to their heels like a species of negligee. These boys who looked like girls were excellent river men, and knew every rapid and whirlpool in 200 miles of the treacherous Tambo.

The Indians went all day without food, paddling rhythmically, but Sandoval and I lunched well on oranges, bananas, and roast Guinea pig, which, when properly prepared, is rather a delicacy, and which had been given us, carefully wrapped in silky banana leaves, by the nuns. For drink we dipped up the river water, which was cool in spite of the fact that we were only ten degrees below the equator … fresh because it had come direct from the Andean glaciers.

Now at nightfall—and the heavy darkness descended swiftly after we had beached the canoe—we were camped before our “hotel” on the beach which Sandoval said was called the Mother of Winds, so named because around the mountain which loomed on the opposite side always eddied cool winds in a strange jungle pocket—winds that drifted down from the high snows. Our uncivilized Indian companions tucked up their long skirts and soon had a fire on the ashes left by infrequent travelers, and were roasting their green bananas and yuca, chattering softly.

Our own larder, carried in an unbleached muslin bag, contained very little … tea, some cold tortillas, and the scanty remnants of a roast chicken. I had gone carefully into the matter of food at the last outpost where it was possible to buy provisions, but Sandoval had quietly advised me that we’d better “live on the country,” because of the very limited means of transportation.

Sandoval came back from the river with water in a cooking pot which he put on the fire to boil for tea. He crouched, feeding dry twigs to the fire, and I sat cross-legged on the sand, smoking a cigarette, listening to the jungle whisper.

“What,” I inquired, in my most elaborate and formal Spanish, “shall we order for dinner? What would you particularly like?”

Sandoval thoughtfully extracted a cigarette and, lighting it, said, “Have you ever read the novels of Eugenio Sué?”

I had to admit that I hadn't.

“There are seven in one series,” he explained in his cultivated Spanish, “dealing with the seven deadly sins. In the one called La Gula … gluttony … he mentions a dish which some time I should like to try.”

“Which is…?”

“First you must have an olive stuffed with anchovy,” he said, “with which you stuff a lark; then put the lark in a dove, the dove in a partridge, the partridge in a turkey, and the turkey in a wild boar. Roast and serve.”

“Oh,” I said. “And what will you have to drink with this?” I handed him a tortilla I had heated over the blaze.

“I am very fond of the Chilean dry white wine On-durraga,” he said, thoughtfully.

“Delicious,” I replied, “but don’t you think that a red wine would be better?”

“Como no, como, no… of course!” he exclaimed. “How about the dry red wine, Santa Clara, that comes from the grapes they grow in the Mala Valley?” He smiled and handed me a battered enamel mug of strong tea.

The boatmen had finished their roast yuca and bananas, and rose to go to their hut for the night, their faces glistening like painted idols in the firelight. One raised his head in a quick gesture, listening. Then the sound came to my ears, too … first a faraway, low music through the mysterious jungle night that was cool with the breeze drifting down from the Andes. It rose and swelled like organ music, dying to faint minor chords, crescendoing. I looked at Sandoval, my eyes wide with astonishment.

“The trompeteros,” he whispered, his dark face rapt and his eyes dreamy with the Indian sense of wonder.

Afterward Sandoval, for he was a naturalist, gave me the scientific classification of these beautiful wading birds, which meant little to me then; but later in an Indian encampment I became well acquainted with a tame one.

Just at daybreak (and in this equatorial region the days are equal … the sun rising at six and setting at six) I was awakened by the music of the trompeteros; perhaps it is their hymn to the dawn. The boatmen had already been stirring, and most of our gear was stowed in the dugout. There was no thought of stopping for even a meagre breakfast, as we had a hundred miles of lonely river to traverse that day.

So as we paddled on in the cool, early morning, Sandoval and I ate the last of the cold tortillas and drank river water. The boatmen munched their left-over yuca, which to the forest dweller is the staff of life. At first this large tuber, which bears no relation to our yucca, being a big shrub with rather oak-like leaves, seems tasteless; but roasted in ashes and well seasoned with salt and pepper, and generously buttered, it is delicious. Alas! butter in the jungle is scarcer than whipped cream under rationing.

About mid-morning, when I was beginning to dream of civilization and toast and jam, Sandoval turned to me and said, “Around the next bend in the river there is a house where people known to me live. We shall stop for coffee.”

Never have I heard sweeter words. “It is,” he said, “one of the three plantations on the Tambo.”

It seemed, however, that even in the jungle the rules of etiquette are rigid. We eased into the sandy bank above which, in a tiny clearing, stood a cane-walled, thatched house on stilts. I, thinking of coffee, eagerly prepared to climb ashore. Sandoval looked at me and said hesitantly, “Señora, I think you’d better put on your shoes.” Embarrassedly, he went on, “Even though the people here may not have shoes, they will look down on you if they think you haven’t any.” So I laced on my wet rope-soled sandals which I had put in the sun to dry.

An old woman who must have been almost pure Indian (but proudly civilizada, as sharply distinguished from the “savage” forest Indians who have never accepted Spanish culture or language) came down the steps of the house.

She greeted Sandoval warmly, and explained that all her menfolk were away in the jungle hunting sajino, the wild boar whose skins they exported; and although she must have been astonished and curious at seeing a Gringa, her wrinkled, leather-brown face showed no surprise. She hastened to offer her hospitality and hurried off to the kitchen which lay beyond the house … a thatch mounted on poles. She gave orders to her servants (and she was barefooted), who were a large family of salvajes that lived in a nearby hut.

Naked babies and mongrel pups tumbled about under the thatch, and from a perch near the roof an extravagant blue and gold parrot screamed his disapproval of Sandoval and me. A pretty, young Indian woman, dressed exactly like our girlish canoe men, except that she wore a red kerchief over her hair, took a blackened clay pot, filled it half full of green coffee beans, and put it over the smoldering logs on the ground. She blew the embers into a blaze, and stirred the beans with a crude wooden spoon. Shortly, the odor of fresh roasting coffee filled the still air. When the beans were almost black, she took the pot from the fire and handed it to an old crone who squatted on the ground. She poured the beans, hot and fragrant, on a big, slightly hollowed flat stone; and taking up a polished round rock, she proceeded to grind the beans to fine powder.

Water was boiling by the time the coffee was crushed. The coffee powder was put in a long, thin cotton bag that was fastened to a green willow stick bent into a circle, and the water was allowed to drip through only once. It must have taken at least a quarter of a pound of coffee for each cup of that pungent brew.

As we finished the coffee and prepared to depart, the woman insisted on making us gifts of everything she could find … dried beans, papayas, bananas … and then her face suddenly wrinkled into smiles. She had another gift for us.

Sandoval and I followed her through the tangle of coffee shrubs on which the jungle seemed to be encroaching, to a little tributary stream of the river. There she pointed to a great tree with glossy broad leaves laden with a large and rusty-green fruit. It had just come ripe in the last few days, she explained.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Tapariba,” answered Sandoval, which left me as much in the dark as ever.

Sandoval peeled the fruit with his pocket knife; the rind was thin but tough; the meat was a deep apricot color and so juicy that after I had finished eating one, I needed a bath. But never has a more intriguing flavor touched my tongue. Tart, yet sweet, a little puckery, but of a texture smoother than the Chinese peaches of longevity.

It was, however, a thing which nearly brought disaster on us, for we lingered eating tapariba when we should have been on our way down river. All day long we went, shooting shallow rapids whose strange sound always forewarned us to be ready to jump should the canoe be overturned. Sandoval, with his genius for picturesque Spanish, always turned to me and said, “Pescado fritando,” and that is exactly what the weird sizzling noise the water made over the stones sounded like … frying fish.

Toward late afternoon the river broadened and deepened, and there was no more danger from rapids; but to travel in the darkness with the possibility of striking a submerged log that could snap our frail craft in two was not pleasant. It could have been nothing less than the uncanny sixth sense in our girlish Indians which finally piloted us, well after dark, to a long, muddy beach, with a few yellow pin-points of light in the distance.

This was Atalaya, where the rivers Tambo and Urrubamba join to form the mighty Ucayali, which surely must be the fishiest river in the world. A thousand miles of river, packed, seething with fish.

Sandoval and I were quartered with civilized Indians in their spacious thatched house. After a breakfast of fried sungaro, a delicate white fish that has strange whiskers, and roasted bananas, we were invited to go fishing with our host, a fat, amiable man whose business was catching the huge paichi and drying it for export. Paichi is about as big as our cod, but more delicate.

The first step in the morning’s fishing was to crush, by pounding on a flat stone, a large quantity of the root called barbasco, which oozes a milky sort of substance. This was piled into the canoe, and we were poled up the river a little way, turning into a tributary stream that ran quiet and deep in the gloom of the overhanging jungle.

In a backwash near the shore, the roots were dropped overboard; they immediately turned the water a milky white.

Soon the surface was dotted with gasping fish … big ones, little ones, black and silver, mottled and striped. A river turtle charged to the surface and turned over, waving his flippers, strangling with the strange drug. Swiftly our host and the Indians scooped the fish up with nets or with their hands, and soon a slithering, flopping harvest lay on the bottom of the canoe.

From Sandoval, and later from other sources, I learned the strange history of barbasco, which the jungle-dwelling Indians have used since time immemorial, as they have other roots and herbs of which the white man still has no knowledge. Once an adventuring American, having seen the Indians fishing with it, became curious and had the root analyzed. The analysis revealed rotenone in such quantities as to make it commercially valuable. Rotenone is the perfect insecticide, being death to bugs (and fish), but harmless to man. Today, barbasco is raised in enormous quantities in Brazil and Peru, and is exported to the United States, where it goes into such staples as Flit.

The name commonly given to jungle Indians by whites and civilized Indians alike is salvaje—savage—but to me this term has always seemed a gross error, for the people who have the intelligence to seek out and use drugs, herbs, and all manner of lianas and leaves for their own well-developed pharmacopoeia, cannot to my mind be very “savage.” They are not, perhaps, civilized in the sense that we who place such high value on refrigeration and electric stoves are, but they do well without such things.

In the month that followed, in which Sandoval and I traveled the rivers with the Indians in their dugout canoes, and rose at dawn to bathe in the river and then breakfast on some strange and delicious fish grilled over a beach fire on a little platform of green leaves, and munched cold roast boar at noon, the jungle Indians did not seem to me uncivilized—much less, savage.

It was really, I think, when I took a house of my own in the village of Pangoa … a little thatched cottage which rented for about 76 cents a month, with the walls of the drawing room of halfcane, and the kitchen table a smoothed- off tree stump … that the housekeeping I did might have seemed a little savage—at least to my mother.

Nevertheless, if magic carpets existed, I would have invited certain friends from New York for dinner on the night I achieved a perfect filet of armadillo, done to a turn with roasted breadfruit. To say nothing of the time I made a kettle full of papaya jam (which didn’t turn out too well) of which Tzongiri ate half, then tucked up his skirts and disappeared into the jungles with his bow and arrows. He returned with a fine mess of young monkeys for dinner, which he pot-roasted and which he and Sandoval ate … not I. Or the evening when our home was a thatched bridge over an icy stream, and there was spaghetti and a species of pemmican … but that, after all, as Kipling says, is another story.