44 THE ANDES OF SOUTHERN PERU 



Thus arise suspicion, misunderstanding, plunder, and chronic war. 

 Had they been a united people their defense of their rough coun- 

 try might have been successful. The tribes have been divided and 

 now and again, to get firearms and ammunition with which to raid 

 a neighbor, a tribe has joined its fortunes to those of vagrant rub- 

 ber pickers only to find in time that its women were debased, its 

 members decimated by strange and deadly diseases, and its old 

 morality undermined by an insatiable desire for strong drink.* 

 The Indian loses whether with the white or against him. 



The forest Indian is held by his environment no less strongly 

 than the plateau Indian. We hear much about the restriction of 

 the plateau dweller to the cool zone in which the llama may live. 

 As a matter of fact he lives far below the cool zone, where he no 

 longer depends upon the llama but rather upon the mule for trans- 

 port. The limits of his range correspond to the limits of the 

 grasslands in the dry valley pockets already described (p. 42), or 

 on the drier mountain slopes below the zone of heaviest rainfall 

 (Fig. 54). It is this distribution that brought him into such in- 

 timate contact with the forest Indian. The old and dilapidated 

 coca terraces of the Quechuas above the Yanatili almost overlook 

 the forest patches where the Machigangas for centuries built their 

 rude huts. A good deal has been written about the attempts of 

 the Incas to extend their rule into this forest zone and about the 

 failure of these attempts on account of the tropical climate. But 

 the forest Indian was held by bonds equally secure. The cold cli- 

 mate of the plateau repelled him as it does today. His haunts are 

 the hot valleys where he need wear only a wild-cotton shirt or 

 where he may go naked altogether. That he raided the lands of 

 the plateau Indian is certain, but he could never displace him. 

 Only along the common borders of their domains, where the 

 climates of two zones merged into each other, could the forest 

 Indian and the plateau Indian seriously dispute each other's 



4 Walle states (Le Perou Economique, Paris, 1907, p. 297) that the Conibos, a 

 tribe of the Ucayali, make annual correrias or raids during the months of July, 

 August, and September, that is during the season of low water. Over seven hundred 

 canoes are said to participate and the captives secured are sold to rubber exploiters, 

 who, indeed, frequently aid in the organization of the raids. 



