Chitres
The Padron offered to go up to the village, and send down animals to convey our traps. Meantime we waited on the bank. It was a forlorn place, and thickets shut off the view. We found a little opening of dried mud under a scrubby oak. Here we consumed an hour and the remainder of our grub, finishing also our last bottle of Chateau Margaux. I knew it was Chateau Margaux, because the label said so.
Then I drowsed. It was December. As extreme heat and cold are the same sensation, I was enjoying the same temperature as my friends north of the fortieth parallel. How charming is sympathy!
Pretty soon our messenger appeared with two animals. I am intentionally non-committal on the subject of their race. Their owners called them “bestias”; their brands gave no explanation; perhaps they were lamas. We placed our luggage on their backs, and walked forward. Our path soon brought us through the thicket on the river to a more open country. A thin, ferruginous soil supported a short, scanty herbage. Groups of shrubbery, with bushes of the fragrant flowering mimosa were scattered about. As we advanced, the landscape improved; we were entering Arcadia. Bright before us, verdant as a New-England valley in June, spread an emerald savanna. Its short grass was smooth as the turf of an English park. Trees of enormous shade stood in solitary expansiveness, or were grouped in graceful union. Under their shade the small but picturesque cattle of the country sheltered themselves from the ardent sun. Presently we began to see houses and corrals. These last were enclosed by stakes of the sidruelo, which, as soon as they are planted, sprout and grow up twenty or thirty feet in a single season, bunching at the top like pollard willows. The long shoots are trimmed off, and used in building huts, but the green tree palisade remains. Around these corrals the prickly pimula, or wild pine-apple, springs up, and, when they are neglected, this and larger plants form an impenetrable thicket. Within is the softest and most verdant grass; the cattle keep a narrow entrance open. When you find one of these deserted corrals far from any present settlement, it is like a fairy ring.
The houses were of most simple construction, — basket-work of withes covered with mud kneaded into consistency by means of long rushes. In the parching heats of the dry season, when everything green is gone, the cattle straying about find these rushes very convenient, and pulling away at them bring the houses down about the ears of the careless tenants, while often the rains of the rainy season do the same. Careless because it requires no heavy outlay of capital or labor to reconstruct. The owner goes to his corral, cuts down the tops of his fence in sufficient quantity, or cuts canes in the swamp. He then goes to the swamp and collects a boat-load of rushes. He builds a fire, puts on one enormous kettle of rice to boil and another of chicha, and calls in his neighbors to a raising-bee. They wattle the walls, and thatch the roof, and plaster the sides, all very speedily, and then sit down to a debauch on boiled rice, plantains, and chicha, Their revelry terminates, as in civilized countries, by a ball prolonged far into the night.
Near every house is a hanging garden on a small scale, a bed of earth raised six or seven feet on poles, for protection from cattle and reptiles, and planted with onions and vegetables. Occasionally, also, we found plantations of rice and maize. The latter gives three crops a year. Troops of pack animals constantly passed us, laden with enormous hide ceroons, filled with grain. The scene was pastoral.
Near the village we found a number of people collected for a raising-bee such as I have described, — a junto they would call it. The first operation was finished, and the house stood, a great square basket, like a crockery crate. A kettle four feet in diameter, filled with boiled rice, stood waiting the time of repose. In honor of the occasion, the women were freshly dressed in white, and decked with flowers.
It was now meridian; the sun came perpendicularly down; our shadows had sunk into our boots. Peter Schlemihl would have found fellowship among us. We were rejoiced to arrive at the Plaza of the village, and take refuge in the Padron’s hut, one of the principal houses of the town. The Plaza is a small square, surrounded by houses such as I have described, with tiled roofs extending down to form a porch. The church is distinguished from the others only by a cracked bell suspended outside.