ing cattle here and there. In time the In time the forest opened out so that a breeze drifted across to temper the midsummer heat. The way lay so straight across the floor-flat country that the line of telegraph-poles looked like a single one clear to the horizon. There were many huts now, roofed and even entirely made of palm-trees. The jungle ahead was so flat and green, and banked by clouds beyond, that one constantly had the feeling that the sea was about to open up ahead. Ponderous ox-carts crawled by noiselessly through the deep sand, solid wooden wheels behind three and even four pairs of drowsy oxen. Once in passing a hut I was startled by a cry of "Se vende pan!" and went in to buy of two females whose faces were a patchwork of gnat-bites some tiny, soggy biscuits at a price still to be wondered at when one knew that the flour came all the way from Tacoma, and paid duty not only to enter the republic, but every department. Everything moved leisurely now, even the breeze, as is proper and fitting to the tropics, where even the white man finds it a task to wash; and a week's lack of shave veiled our sun-toasted features. We loafed languidly on, yet though there were other evidences that we were approaching a city, there were no more visible signs of it than in approaching Port Saïd from the sea.

At last, so gradually that we were some time in distinguishing it from a treetop, a dull-colored church tower grew up down the green lane just in line with the vista of telegraph-poles, and finally, amid gusts of Scotch mist and under heavy skies, we drifted inertly into a sand-paved, silent, tropical city street, past rows of languid stares, and on the last afternoon of the year, with Cochabamba 335 miles behind us, we sat down dripping and sunburned in the central plaza of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.

The capital of all the vast tropical department of eastern Bolivia owes its fame largely to its isolation. Far away one hears much of it; once there, one finds little. Like the eminent men of many secluded corners of South America, it is

important only through the exceeding unimportance of its neighbors. Tommy had heard so many stories of the unrivaled generosity of the Cruceños that he was astonished to get clear to the plaza without being invited from some doorway to come in and make his home there. It is a city of silence. Not only its bare feet, but its primitive ox-carts, make not a sound in the sand streets. There is no industry to add its strident voice, and every street fades away at each end into the trackless, whispering, jungled montaña.

In this rainy season, which begins in earnest with the new year and lasts through April, it had many muddy pools and ponds, along the edges of some of which the streets crawled by on long heaps of the skulls of cattle, bleached snow-white by the sun. The larger ponds. were almost lakes, and carried the mind back to Kandy, Ceylon. Frequently the streets were flooded deep for an hour or more until the thirsty sand had drunk up the tropical deluge. For these eventualities the town has a system of its own. At every street corner four rows of weatherblackened piles protrude a foot or more above the sand, and along these steppingstones the shod minority passes from one roofed sidewalk to another.

The houses invariably consist of a large room, by day opening directly on the porch sidewalk, though the best of them are rather bare in appearance despite a small forest of frail cane chairs, black in color, as the best provided cruceño family is not rich by our standards. From the dull whitewashed mud walls protrude several pairs of hammock-hooks, for beds are virtually unknown in Santa Cruz. Many have a little hand sewing-machine set on or near the floor, and all but invariably a few crude wooden tubs of bananas, tropical fruits, soggy bread cakes, and native sugar of all kinds except refined white sit near the door; for there are few even of the "best families" that do not patch out their existence with a bit of amateur shopkeeping.

The rumors that seep up out of Santa Cruz of her beautiful pure-white types

are largely of artificial propagation. It is true that she has a larger percentage of Spanish blood than any other Bolivian city; but this is rarely found in its unadulterated form. A mongrel mixture is all but general, thanks largely to a lack of social tautness and to the overstock of one sex, due chiefly to the young men going down into the rubber districts of the Beni and not so frequently returning, that makes the percentage of Cruceños born out of legal wedlock high even for Bolivia.

HERE Tommy fell victim to that loathsome ailment popularly known as "cold feet." An attack of fever and the nebulous promise of occupation for his trusty trowel may have been among the causes, but the inoculation was chiefly due to the replies to our inquiries about the road. ahead. These were not exactly reassuring. There is one of the sand streets of Santa Cruz de la Sierra that does not run out to nothing in the surrounding jungle, but dwindles to what is locally known as the "camino de Chiquitos," and pushes on to the eastward more than four hundred miles to the Paraguay, forming an important, but little known, exit from Bolivia

since she has been cut off from the Pacific. But "road" in this case does not mean anything like a traveled route. For the first week travelers must carry all supplies; stories were legion of the unending pest of insects, of the danger of snakes and "tigers"; the route was said to abound in chest-deep chest-deep mud-holes and mile-long swamps, and in this rainy season the last twenty leagues or more nearest the Paraguay was commonly completely inundated. Moreover, beyond the Rio Guapay, a day east of the capital, stretched the famous Monte Grande, the densest of unbroken forest, where roam a tribe of wild Indians that, seated, shoot with their feet a sixfoot arrow of chonta, or black-palm, from a bow of the same material, with such entirely through the

force that it passes body of the victim. This was said to be quite unpleasant. Nor could this information be treated as an idle rumor, for we had only to drop in on any one of several men in town, some gringos among them, to see relics of recent attacks in which even horsemen traveling in parties had been lost.

The first indispensable requirement of preparation was to get a cloth hammock,

with a mosquitero of a material finer than cheese-cloth as a protection against tiny, but powerful, gnats; for the only sleepingplace on most of the journey was that which the traveler carried with him. In addition I must hacer tapeque, as they say in Santa Cruz, or "pack" a bag of rice of ten pounds and a few sheets of charqui, or sun-dried beef. Add to this the indispensable clothing, sealed tins of salt and matches, kitchenette, photographic and writing materials, and various unavoidable odds and ends and it will be readily understood why I staggered heavily across town on January 8 to begin the longest single leg of my South American journey.

But it was my good fortune to find another traveler bound in the same direction. Heinrich Konanz, born in Karlsruhe, had served the last of his three years of military service in the expedition against the Chinese Boxers, and had since worked as a carpenter in China and California until he had concluded to seek a permanent home as a colonist in some region where population was less numerous. He was largely innocent of geography, spoke habitually a painful cross between his once native tongue and what he fancied was English, with a peppering of Chinese, and knew virtually no Spanish. The mule that had carried him from Cochabamba he found it necessary to turn into a pack-animal for the tools, provisions, and materials purchased in Santa Cruz, and was to continue on foot. He had placidly been making plans to push on alone until suddenly rumors reached him in his own tongue of the Monte Grande and its playful Indians. His first inclination was to return to Cochabamba; but his hotel room was heaped with the supplies sold to him. by his wily local fellow-countrymen, who would not take them back at a fourth of the original cost. In the end he made a virtue of necessity, added a new rifle to the revolver and shot-gun he already carried, and found room on his mule for the heavier of my baggage in return for the reassurance of my company.

It was a brilliant day when I shouldered the German's rifle, my own revolver

well oiled and freshly loaded, and led the way out of town. Mud-holes along which we picked our way on rows of whitened cattle skulls soon gave place to a great pampa, with tall, coarse grass and scattered trees, across which lay a silent sand road so utterly dry that we had already suffered considerably from thirst before we reached at noon the first "well," a slimy mud-hole in a clump of trees. In the afternoon the forest closed in tightly. about us except for the deep-sand cartroad, with frequent long stretches of watery mud. Twice during the day we met a train of heavy, crude ox-carts roofed with sun-dried hides that recalled the "prairie schooners" of pioneer days, eight oxen to each, creaking slowly westward. Soon all the forest about us was screaming like a dozen suffragette meetings in full session, and fancying the upcame from edible wild fowls, I crept in upon them rifle in hand. To my surprise, I found a band of small monkeys in a huge tree-top shrieking together in a sort of incessant Greek chorus. A monkey steak would have been highly acceptable, and I fired my revolver into the branches. Instantly there fell, not the ingredients of a sumptuous evening repast, but the most absolute silence. The little creatures did not flee, however, but each sprang a limb or two higher, and watched my slightest movement with brilliant, roving eyes.

roar

We pushed on through incessant forest, punctuated with mud-holes. On the afternoon of the second day a yellow youth overtook us and asked if we needed a pelota. We did, and he stopped at a hut some distance on, to reappear carrying on his head an entire ox-hide, sun-dried and still covered with the long red hair of its original owner, folded like a sheet of writing-paper. For a mile or more he plodded noiselessly behind, until suddenly the notorious Rio Grande, or Guapay, opened out before us. It was a yellow-brown stream as wide as the lower Connecticut, flowing swiftly northward to join the Mamoré and Madeira on their way to the Amazon. We splashed half a mile or more up along its edge to offset the dis

tance

we should be carried

down-stream before striking a landing opposite. Here two brown men, completely naked but for a palm-leaf hat securely tied on, relieved the youth of his burden and set to turning it into a boat. These pelotas de cuero (leather balls) are the ferries of all this region, being transportable, whereas a wooden boat, left behind, would be stolen by wild Indians. Around the edge of the hide were a dozen or more loop-holes through which was threaded a cord that drew it up in the form of a rude tub. To obtain firmness, the hat-wearers laid a corduroy of sticks in the bottom, then piled our entire baggage into it, set the German atop, and dragged it down the sloping mud-bank into the water, while the youth coaxed the mule into the stream and swam with it to the opposite shore. This would have seemed load enough and to spare, but when I had fulfilled my duties as official photographer of the expedition, I, too, was lifted in, as they no doubt would have piled in Tommy also, had he been with us, and away we went, easily five hundred pounds, speeding down the hurrying yellow stream, the naked pair first wading, then swimming beside us, clutching the pelota, the gunwales of which were in places by no means an inch above the water. Had the none-too-stout cord broken, the hide must instantly have flattened out and left us for an all-toobrief moment, like passengers on the magic carpet of Oriental fairy-tales.

Before and high above us, where the craft was coaxed ashore, stretching like an endless green, giant wall farther than the eye could follow in either direction, stood an impenetrable forest, the famous Monte Grande, or "Great Wilderness," of Bolivia. Here was the chief haunt of the wild Indians of the penetrating arrow, a

region otherwise absolutely uninhabited, through which the endless "road" squeezes its way for hundreds of miles without a break and almost without a shift of direction. We swung our hammocks under saplings in the extreme edge of it, for the journey through the Monte Grande is fixed in its itinerary by the sites of the four "garrisons" maintained by the Bolivian Government some five leagues. apart as a theoretical protection against the nomadic Indians.

In the morning we deployed in campaign formation. With our revolvers loose in their holsters, the German marched ahead with his shot-gun, closely followed by his affectionate "mool," while I brought up the rear with the new Winchester. This was the place of honor and most promise, for the Indians do not face their intended victims, but spring from