24 THE ANDES OF SOUTHERN PERU 



large shallow-rooted tree has come crashing down across the 

 trail and with its four feet of circumference and ten feet of 

 plank buttress it is as difficult to move as a house. A new trail 

 must be cut around it. A little farther on, where the valley 

 wall steepens and one may look down a thousand feet of slope 

 to the bed of a mountain torrent, a patch of trail has become 

 soaked with water and the mules pick their way, trembling, 

 across it. Two days from Yavero one of our mules went 

 over the trail, and though she was finally recovered she died of 

 her injuries the following night. After a month's work in the 

 forest a mule must run free for two months to recover. The pack- 

 ers count on losing one beast out of five for every journey into the 

 forest. It is not solely a matter of work, though this is terrific; 

 it is quite largely a matter of forage. In spite of its profusion 

 of life (Fig. 13) and its really vast wealth of species, the tropical 

 forest is all but barren of grass. Sugar cane is a fair substitute, 

 but there are only a few cultivated spots. The more tender leaves 

 of the trees, the young shoots of cane in the carrizo swamps, 

 and the grass-like foliage of the low bamboo are the chief substi- 

 tutes for pasture. But they lead to various disorders, besides re- 

 quiring considerable labor on the part of the dejected peons who 

 must gather them after a day's heavy work with the packs. 



Overcoming these enormous difficulties is expensive and some 

 one must pay the bill. As is usual in a pioneer region, the native 

 laborer pays a large part of it in unrequited toil ; the rest is paid 

 by the rubber consumer. For this is one of the cases where a 

 direct road connects the civilized consumer and the barbarous pro- 

 ducer. What a story it could tell if a ball of smoke-cured rubber 

 on a New York dock were endowed with speech — of the wet jungle 

 path, of enslaved peons, of vile abuses by immoral agents, of all 

 the toil and sickness that make the tropical lowland a reproach ! 



In the United States the specter of slavery haunted the na- 

 tional conscience almost from the beginning of national life, and 

 the ghost was laid only at the cost of one of the bloodiest wars in 

 history. In other countries, as in sugar-producing Brazil, the 

 freeing of the slaves meant not a war but the verge of financial 



