by B. TRAVEN
3
Whatever was responsible for the creation of the pass of El Calvario, whether it was the good God in heaven above or an earthquake or a slow contraction of the earth’s crust—whoever or whatever it may have been was not niggardly. He or it made one of the marvels of nature.
The road wound up in over fifty hairpin bends to the rocky summit. Perhaps there were eighty or a hundred and twenty. Quién sabe? Who knows? Nobody counted them. Or if he started to, he soon lost count; for there were more important things to concentrate his attention on at the moment than topographical observations.
The climb began before you were out of Chiapa de Corso. The last church of the town was already on such high ground that those of the pious who were short of breath could not get there. The streets of the town were well paved with rough cobblestones. But as soon as the last paved street was left behind, the torments began which never ceased until, after nearly a hundred kilometers, the next town with paved streets was reached.
Leaving the tropical plain where streets and squares were bordered by tall palms, where fields, gardens, and large cultivated estates were luxuriant with the plants and flowers, bushes and trees of the torrid zone, the road wound up to the cool highlands of the Sierra where the conifers grew as tall and straight as in northern Ohio.
On the left hand the sheer drop to ravine and precipice increased step by step in height; on the right, for nearly the whole distance, there was the steep cliff face of the Sierra, diversified only by the various plants and thorny scrub which clothed it.
Once up on the pass you saw spread out at your feet the whole expanse of the tropical plain. Far away in the greenish-blue shimmer of the horizon rose the long mountain chain of another arm of the Sierra with its high peaks touching the clouds. Like a silver thread woven in a gigantic carpet, which has no shape or pattern or design of any sort, the Grijaiva River lay apparently motionless and apparently meaningless across the flickering expanse.
The irony of it was that just at this spot, where a man could forget himself altogether in the contemplation of the extravagant generosity of nature, the bandits with revolvers, rifles, and knives were likely to be closest at hand. For it was just at these places that travelers and caravans could neither give ground nor turn and flee. On the left hand there was the sheer descent of two or three hundred meters; on the right the abrupt face of the cliff, so steep and rugged and so dense with thorns and finger-long spikes that even a goat would have hesitated to attempt an escape there.
It was easy to see why many travelers on reaching the pass called out: “Ayúdame Purísima—help me, Holy Virgin.” But since the bandits too were good Catholics and also invoked the Purísima, so that they might have a good catch that day, the prospects for both parties were fifty-fifty.
4
Knowing well the countless dangers of the road, the carreteros were in the habit of waiting at a camping place outside Chiapa de Corso until enough carretas had collected to form a long train.
A long train of carretas could be held up for a time by the bandits, but it could not be successfully attacked and looted. As soon as they fell on the first carreta and a single shot was fired—or even at a shout from the carreteros who had been attacked—the whole train came to a standstill, and the drivers in the middle and at the rear, well covered by the carretas, advanced with their firearms, machetes, bludgeons, spokes, stones, and whatever else they could lay hands on. Then the bandits had short shrift unless they cleared off in good time. If they attacked the hindmost carreta, it was the same thing with only a change of front. It sometimes happened, when the bandits knew that carretas were loaded with specie, that a caravan was attacked simultaneously at the front and the rear. In the wild melee that ensued they would succeed in hurling some of the carretas over the precipice after rapidly cutting the oxen loose, and in looting a few of the carretas and throwing their contents into a ravine where they had some of their number posted. But by then it was high time for the bandits fighting above to take to their heels and convey their own skins into safety, for half of them were wounded, some lacking portions of their anatomy. They had to give up the fight, without having got possession of, or as much as set eyes on, the well-hidden and well-guarded coin the carretas were carrying.
If the carretas were laden with goods of no great value in themselves, such as salt, tiles, books, bottles, or with goods that the bandits could not easily sell, such as machine parts, tin plates, iron stakes, then the carretas went in small trains of five or six. The carreteros themselves had little money on them, perhaps sixty or seventy centavos apiece, and this they knew how to hide where no bandit could ever find them.
On the other hand, when they were transporting valuable goods, such as silks, clocks, clothing, articles of adornment, wines and liqueurs, revolvers, sporting rifles, ammunition, they went only in large trains of forty, sixty, and more.
But these large caravans, however good as a protection against bandits, had many disadvantages. Their pace was much slower and this made the freightage more costly, for every day there was the fodder for the oxen and the wages of the men; also, a day’s delay could mean the loss of his market for a merchant. A large caravan, too, increased the difficulty of obtaining fodder for the oxen. In a large caravan there were more broken axles than in a small one, and the whole caravan was held up while an axle was mended. These large caravans were only for protection.
5
The carretas were stout, heavily built, two-wheeled carts. The wheels were very high on account of the rivers and marshes that had to be crossed. The body of the carreta was narrow—about twice as long as it was broad. It was provided with a rounded awning on a framework of hoops.
In a string of twenty carretas there would seldom be two with awnings of the same material. One might be covered with stout canvas, another with rush matting, another with plaited palm leaves, another with doe or antelope, lion or tiger skins, another with a patchwork of scraps—old shirts, cotton trousers, tattered blankets. Then there was perhaps a roof of basketwork and others of brown, well-tanned hides of cows, goats, or sheep.
Each carreta was drawn by a pair of oxen—big long-horned beasts. Many of them looked so heavy and powerful that they might have been taken for elephants in disguise.
The two oxen that made up the pair were stood side by side, and then a heavy tie beam was put over their heads, close behind their horns. This beam alone was so heavy that it was all a strong man could do to lift it. When the beam was in the required position, with the oxen at the proper distance from one another, it was lashed to their horns with thongs of tanned hide. Sometimes the horns were pierced, so that the thongs could be more securely lashed and thus not shift. When this yoke beam had been tightly lashed to the horns, it in turn was lashed to a pole. The pole was fixed rigidly to the carreta.
The oxen did not pull the yoke with their necks and shoulders but with their mighty foreheads. Neither beast could move its head on its own; each movement of the one necessitated a corresponding movement of the other. They could do nothing while on the road to protect their forequarters from the bites of the large flies and other insects which swarmed in thousands around the carretas. They could not lick themselves—could not even shake themselves. They had to bear the inflictions laid upon them by these ferocious insects. And so on days when rain threatened or when for any other reason the insects were peculiarly ravenous and bloodthirsty, blood trickled incessantly in innumerable thin streaks over the oxen’s tortured forequarters.
With their large glazed protuberant eyes fixed on the road before them, with scarcely a movement of the eyeballs, they moved lumberingly along, step by step, drawing their carts behind them. Their tread was extremely slow but as regular as a machine.
The oxen were urged on by a long goad, not a whip. The goads, made of hardwood, were sharpened at the tip; some had a nail instead of the sharpened point. The carretero, when he had to quicken their pace, goaded the oxen in their hindquarters. What the insects could n
ot do here because the oxen were able to swish them off with their tails was done by the carretero with his sharp goad. When the going was hard and the oxen too weary and hungry to get on as fast as the carreteros wished, the beasts’ hindquarters too were streaked with trickle after trickle of blood.
The carreteros in their turn were pricked and goaded and cursed by their employers and threatened with the sack if they were too long on the road. So the oxen had at least the satisfaction of seeing that the world was a complete and ordered system and that God was just and evenhanded.
In the dry season the road was inches deep in a layer of very white, fine chalky dust, which burned in the eyes, nose, and mouth like a consuming poison. In the rainy season the road was a foot or more deep in a layer of stiff tenacious plaster, which gripped the wheels of the carretas and the feet of the oxen as in a vice. But whether in the dry or rainy season, the road was never anything but an unrelieved martyrdom, with its thousands of holes, ruts, and pits, with its millions of stones, boulders, and projecting spars of rock, with the thick roots of gigantic tropical and semitropical trees laid bare by floods, with the landslides along whole stretches of its course, and the crashing down of chunks of cliff and trunks of trees whose roots had rotted or been washed out of the ground. There was neither mercy nor pity for man or beast, no pause in the rain of sufferings that descended on carretero and oxen alike. In Suchiapa, Tuxtla, Chiapa de Corso, Ixtapa, Jovel, Balún-Canán, Sapaluta lived thousands of people who wanted salt, clothes, boots, mandolins, locks, liqueurs, clocks, shoes, typewriters, phonographs, porcelain cups, silk shirts, earrings, photographic apparatus, perfumes, felt hats, matches, cinnamon, aspirin, oil paintings, crochet hooks, bottled beer, pencils, safety razors, spectacles, rubber teats, screws, tear-off calendars, buttons. Without transport there is no civilization.
6
A caravan of carretas on its way up to El Calvario moves with such an orchestration of noises as no composer could ever achieve; for, discordant as all the various notes are, they produce in combination a wonderful harmony.
The panting and sometimes the lowing of an ox, the grinding of wheels, the squeaking of axles, the wheezing of leather thongs, the creaking of the hooped awnings, the jingle and rattle of articles badly packed in boxes, the jarring and bumping over stones, the shriek of a wheel sliding off smooth rock, the lurch or collapse of one side of a carreta into a pit in the road, the collapse into trenches mined by water, the rattling over stretches of knobby rock, the rumbling over thick roots, the shouts of the carreteros cursing, quarreling, swearing, urging on the beasts, while one whistles a tune, another sings, another hums to himself. A carreta gets stuck in a hole and won’t budge. The men from before and behind run up to give a hand and with much shouting and heaving the carreta is hoisted out. The whole caravan goes heavily forward again. By the sides of the road, in the bush and the grass, crickets and grasshoppers chirp shrilly, some birds are singing, bees hum through the quivering air, butterflies eddy to and fro in the wake of the caravan, waiting for the moist dung of the oxen.
If you look down from just below the head of the pass, whence you can see many windings of the road at one view, you get the impression that some enormous and fabulous worm is crawling up the road. Each single carreta looks like one ring in the worm’s long body. And the impression of a great crawling worm is all the more realistic because the carts sway and lurch to and fro; and from that height you cannot tell that they are carts. The distance and the heat vibrations of the air which hover over the earth like a trembling white veil make you take for real and true what sober consideration would tell you was not real at all. But beneath the oppression of the tropical sun, wrapped in eddying clouds of dust, climbing on and on without a moment’s respite from the hardships and dangers of the road, even a man of normally clear mind loses all power to judge things soberly and see them as they really are.
7
As they emerge from the last gorge beneath the overhanging cliffs the carretas roll onto the wide plateau of El Calvario.
There were three ranchos on this plateau. The largest was the rancho El Calvario, looking with its numerous peons’ huts like a village. Another smaller one at the farther side of the plateau made, with its whitewashed walls and pillared portico, a clean, almost idyllic impression and usually served as an inn for travelers on horseback; for it lay just about midway between Tulum and Jovel. Travelers from Jovel always tried to get as far as this rancho because the stage from there down to Tulum seemed shorter than when they spent the night at the little town of Ixtapa.
The plateau was covered all the year round with grass. At the end of the dry season, certainly, the grass was poor in nourishment; but hard-driven oxen, mules, and horses very quickly forget to be fastidious on treks like these. They show every sign of delight at having reached the resting place at last. The sight of the welcome expanse of grass, however thin and wiry it may look, makes the animals neigh and low. The oxen in particular, accustomed all through their working lives to make their halt here, could not be driven a kilometer beyond it by the most expert of carreteros. The stage from Chiapa de Corso to the plateau was the longest in the whole trip from Arriaga to Balún-Canán; for there was nowhere on the road where the carretas could possibly halt. The track was too narrow and there was no fodder and very little water all the way.
8
Once on level ground the carreteros would like best to fling themselves down and sleep where they fall. They are tired; their exertions have drained them to the last dregs; but there is more work still before them.
With shouts and commands, all the carretas are drawn up close to one another, aligned side by side. The carreteros, like all Indians, have an inborn instinct for beauty: no artillery regiment could wheel its guns into line with a more beautiful precision than the carreteros do their carretas.
The oxen are then taken out from the carts, but it happens often enough that the carreteros are so dog-tired they don’t unyoke them. The beasts are left with the heavy yoke—the massive and ponderous yoke beam—behind their horns. They remain coupled two by two. Where one grazes, the other must graze. They can scarcely turn their heads from side to side, and if the one moves its head to the right the other must do the same.
There is sometimes a different reason for leaving the oxen yoked, in spite of the obvious and intolerable suffering it causes them. At certain halting places, where the grass is meager, the beasts may scatter far and wide in search of the best pasture. When they graze singly, they may stray as far as five kilometers from the camp. Then the carreteros have to go in search of them and sometimes have to bring them out of the bush into which they have penetrated in their preference for the foliage of certain trees. The search may cost the carreteros half a day, or even a whole one.
The carreteros are practiced hands at tracking runaway oxen. They can read every broken twig, every trodden-down shrub, every trampled tuft far more easily than many students can a spelling book. They know at once whether a hoof mark is a day or two weeks old and whether it was made by a free ranging animal from the herd of a neighboring rancho or by one of their own animals. Nevertheless, it sometimes happens that oxen are lost for a whole week, either because they are quick on their feet and try to make off for the rancho where they were reared or because they join a herd and go to the rancho where that herd belongs.
Time lost over runaway cattle has to be made up in some way or another. If they are too often late with their freight the men get badly told off by their employers and perhaps severely punished or fired. Then they have the reputation of unreliable carreteros and there is difficulty in finding another job.
One must not, then, be too hasty in accusing the carretero of cruelty to animals if he sometimes leaves his oxen yoked. Yoked oxen cannot go far; the heavy yoke beam across their necks collides with trees and holds them up.
Nevertheless, the carretero cannot risk leaving his oxen yoked at every stop, for they cannot feed sufficiently when they are not free. They st
ay hungry, fall out of condition, fail to pull properly, and perhaps even have to be left by the wayside. Nor is it practicable to take fodder along in the carretas and tether the animals at the halts. These are big animals who need a lot of fodder to keep them in working condition; and if the carreta is laden with it there will be no room for the freight. The maize which has to be taken along for the animals, because it cannot be bought at all places on the road, takes up enough room in any case and adds a lot of weight for its bulk.
So however much thought a good carretero may give to the task of doing equal justice to his employer, his beasts, and the merchant who requires his goods by a certain date, he is up against circumstances and conditions at every turn which are more powerful than he is and stronger than his best intentions.
6
The caravan had made its ascent. The carretas were neatly dressed in line. The oxen were taken out and unyoked, and no sooner were they free than they sought out a place to lie down. They were too weary to graze.
Each man joined his own group. On the road the carretas kept the order in which they happened to fall, but at the halts the carreteros of each employer formed groups. Don Laureano’s carreteros formed one group, don Nicasio’s another, and so on; for they made their meals of the rations their employers gave them for the road.