10 THE ANDES OF SOUTHERN PERU 



ous than Major Powell's famous descent of the Grand Canyon in 

 1867 — an obvious exaggeration. He lost his canoe in a treacher- 

 ous rapid, was deserted by his Indian guides, and only after a 

 painful march through an all but impassable jungle was he finally 

 able to escape on an abandoned raft. Less than a dozen have 

 ventured down since Major Kerbey's day. A Peruvian mining 

 engineer descended the river a few years ago, and four Italian 

 traders a year later floated down in rafts and canoes, losing al- 

 most all of their cargo. For nearly two months they were 

 marooned upon a sand-bar waiting for the river to subside. At 

 last they succeeded in reaching Mulanquiato, an Indian settlement 

 and plantation owned by Pereira, near the entrance to the last 

 canyon. Their attempted passage of the worst stretch of rapids 

 resulted in the loss of all their rubber cargo, the work of a year. 

 Among the half dozen others who have made the journey — Indians 

 and slave traders from down-river rubber posts — there is no rec- 

 ord of a single descent without the loss of at least one canoe. 



To reach the head of canoe navigation we made a two weeks' 

 muleback journey north of Cuzco through the steep-walled granite 

 Canyon of Torontoy, and to the sugar and cacao plantations of the 

 middle Urubamba, or Santa Ana Valley, where we outfitted. At 

 Echarati, thirty miles farther on, where the heat becomes more in- 

 tense and the first patches of real tropical forest begin, we were 

 obliged to exchange our beasts for ten fresh animals accustomed to 

 forest work and its privations. Three days later we pitched our 

 tent on the river bank at Rosalina, the last outpost of the valley set- 

 tlements. As we dropped down the steep mountain slope before 

 striking the river flood plain, we passed two half-naked Machi- 

 ganga Indians perched on the limbs of a tree beside the trail, our 

 first sight of members of a tribe whose territory we had now en- 

 tered. Later in the day they crossed the river in a dugout, landed 

 on the sand-bar above us, and gathered brush for the nightly fire, 

 around which they lie wrapped in a single shirt woven from the 

 fiber of the wild cotton. 



Eosalina is hardly more than a name on the map and a camp 

 site on the river bank. Some distance back from the left bank of 



