Airway Down the Andes
I
WE are up long before dawn. We are beginning to realize that early rising is part of the pattern of a flight around South America. The scream of the alarm clock, the protesting yawns, the hasty wash, the tiptoe exit down the dark and silent corridors, the waiter who is dark and silent too, the speed-mad jitney that conducts us to the airport — all is to become familiar to us.
But this is a memorable dawn. We meet it high above the Panama Canal, where the Culebra Cut carves a dark trough between two continents. Behind us, the Atlantic Ocean; ahead, where distant ships and masts float double on a satin sheen, a flaming bonfire of a sun is lifting slowly out of the Pacific. Surely this is some optical illusion? We check up on the map and find that it is not our eye that is at fault, but our geography. For at this point the Atlantic is to the west of the Pacific; we are approaching the West Coast, yet we are flying east. It is too complex for the early-morning mind.
The world explodes into the gorgeous colors of a tropic sunrise. The inky ditch below — small and unpretentious to have cost so many lives — has vanished in a haze of gold. The sky behind Balboa is on fire, and newborn light is like gold lacquer on the jungle hills.
Here is the first hint of the parade to come, the pageant of the Andes that we shall follow for five thousand miles. We slip across the Continental Divide. We shall recross it in a week, not above rolling hills like these, but over the snow-bound Cordillera and at eighteen thousand feet.
II
Four hours, four hundred miles from Panama, we turn in from the blue Pacific and cross the beach at Cape Chirambira. The jungle is so dense that, from above, it is a solid sea of thatch. There is no movement. We drop down to a red-brown river and fly along its windless surface. The jungle reaches well above us on each side, and from the trees issue flocks of gay-plumaged birds. The scene is all brazen color.
The pilot points ahead. We look down, and as we look our heart skips a beat. The window, for a moment, has framed the picture of an Indian hunter.
He is naked except for the blowpipe that he carries on a chain of beads around his neck. He stands beside the river that coils like a lethargic snake between the hostile jungle walls. The bamboo hut behind him is his home; his world is bounded by the paddle of his rude canoe. We have roared down on him like a flying dragon and he is gazing back at this bolt of science. He has missed an entire cycle of progress, has never seen a road, a horse, a train, a car; and our machine to him must be strange magic. He stands there with his blowpipe, his polished wooden spears, a scant fifty feet from the pilot, but they stare at each other from opposite poles of civilization. . . .
Orange, purple, green, vermilion — there are no half tones. Every second is packed; every curve, as we swing around it, offers something new. Unbelievable that a few hours ago we were in an up-to-date hotel, with telephones and elevators and electric light, or that we are not on some elaborate trip of exploration. Here we sit snugly in our flying seats, safe even from mosquitoes, while out there, in that ambush of brilliant fever-laden jungle, is death in a hundred ugly guises. Primeval forest, primeval menace — plagues, fevers, poison arrows, jaguars, the ruthless coils of the great boa constrictor.
Too soon the chapter ends. There is a deepened roar from the engines, we soar high above the trees, and the river is taken back into the jungle.
III
Crocodiles! We are low over a mangrove coast line. Creeks and rivers meet the sea in sluggish succession. The whole area is covered with the tracks of feet and tails, and the crocodiles themselves are sunning idly on the sand banks, huge gray-green hulks supported on inadequate legs. A few rush into the water at amazing speed, but the majority decline to be disturbed. These are estuarian monsters, not the zoo exhibits we are used to. The species is the largest in the world, and even the runners-up in size will be anywhere from twenty-three to thirty feet.
‘Engines used to scare them,’ scribbles the pilot; ‘now they’re airminded!’
Another colony has come in sight. We curve on a banked turn over them, but the air-minded crocodiles stand their ground, their huge jaws open in a hideous grin.
It is after three o’clock when we cross the equator. We are unprepared for the diplomas in black and gold which the pilot solemnly distributes to the cabin. Across the printed legend in old English lettering he has filled in our name in ink, and underneath we read: ‘Crossed at 3.25 P.M. Alt. 500 ft. At sea. Cloudy and cool.’
The ‘ cool ’ is no exaggeration. Equator or no equator, we are shivering underneath a sweater and wishing that we had not shipped our coat home from Colon. It is better when the sun comes out again and stamps light and shade upon the lovely coast line. High orange cliffs have risen from the shore, and now we fly down mile upon mile of splendid yellow sands. No more crocodiles, no more swampy river mouths. The jungle here is high and hilly, a bright green selvage on the towering cliffs. Since our last refueling — two hundred and fifty miles behind us in Tumaco — we have not seen a sign of human life, not even a canoe. These are the most private beaches in the world, for there is no way to them through the jungle, nor any anchorage for ships.
Just as the sun is setting we swoop toward the yellow beach that we have trailed so long. Through the banking window we look down on a handful of wooden houses, palms, and pawpaw trees, fringed around the sand. On the seaward side the radio towers of the Airway thrust incongruously into the sky. This Is our overnight stop, Salinas, and we are on Ecuadorian soil.
The rest house is no Grand Hotel, but its ramshackle verandah, which overlooks the sea, is cool and quiet. All we ask is a chance to stretch our legs, to wash and eat and sleep, for to-morrow we must be up again an hour before dawn.
We amble down the beach, scuffing our feet in the loose sand, hoping to uncover an ancient Spanish coin. A ragged urchin has one in his hand, a heavy silver piece, washed up from treasure galleons that lie somewhere beneath these phosphorescent waves. Rumor has it that the sunken hoard runs into millions, so we scuff hopefully along. But there is none to spare for us, not one doubloon. Merely the glint of lamplight on purpura shells, the mocking whisper of the breeze among the palms. . . .
We tuck the mosquito netting around the rough bed and crawl inside. It is not nine o’clock, but everywhere the lights are out and from the other rooms come intermittent snores. They grow louder, more regular. They settle down to a deep, rhythmic drone, until our drowsy senses are unable to decide whether they are really snores or still the measure of a pair of aero engines.
Sleep comes at last. It comes advancing on us in chaotic waves in which are jumbled galleons and crocodiles, Indians and toucan wings, landings and take-offs — the thousand-mile kaleidoscope of our first day in South America.
IV
Salinas is a memory, already two hundred miles old. We have dropped mail at Guayaquil, and are heading for Cape Blanco, the westernmost point of South America.
This sea flight is spectacular — almost too much so for a pair of untrained eyes. We are at about a hundred feet. And as we fly we stare into the vast aquarium that lies beneath a sheet of clear blue cellophane. Giant rays, twenty feet and more across, move like black carpets just beneath the surface, uncanny monsters to be lurking in this smiling sea. Dolphins are playing all around . . . flying fish . . . submarine silhouettes of war — great oblong shadows that are sharks, lunging after lesser fish too small to be distinguished from our height. A school of tunnies moves solidly across our course. Patches of coral, violet through the lucent blue, flick into sight and out again. Once, protruding from the glassy surface like a mushroom, we catch sight of the broad curved back of a sea turtle.
The passengers are half out of their seats, pointing, exclaiming with excited gestures. It becomes a game to see who can discover a new wonder, to beat the lynx-eyed pilot to a find. Magic hours, hundreds of miles of this unstinting reservoir packed with a million marvels. We recognize perhaps a dozen, but we defy an oceanographer to have a more exciting time.
We are still out of sight of land when there flashes into view a little fleet of balsa rafts. We stare at them aghast — twenty, perhaps thirty of these flimsy, bobbing match sticks, floating awash. A school of sharks is a short way behind. We have an impulse to shout, to warn these fishermen teetering so blithely on their corkwood logs. The plane — an ark of safety by comparison — has come down just above the water while we note more details. The rafts are pitifully inadequate: a few logs clamped together, a basket for the fish, a stool, a mast, a rag of sail. . . . A forest of arms is waving at us, the faces of the fishermen are split with grins; the planes are their friends, for the watchful pilots have brought about innumerable rescues.
In a few minutes we are miles away, but not soon shall we forget the picture of the intrepid fishermen, hunting, but more often hunted, in these rapacious seas.
v
Talara in sight! The co-pilot is already pumping down the wheels for our first landing on ground. Talara, Peru! How impressive it has looked to us in the time-table! But our ideas are due for a rough rearrangement, for now we catch sight of a group of oil rigs, white-painted tanks, a few forsaken houses, and everywhere blistering, lifeless desert. We cross a brown ridge and bump down to a landing. A minute later and the hot sand bakes against our shoe soles. We shuffle through it, moving instinctively toward the shack that marks the ‘airport.‘
The glare is terrific, the isolated shadows are as black as paint. Our mouths feel dry and gritty.
The airport manager observes us. His eyes twinkle as he points to the sign painted on the roof.
‘I had to put the name up,’ he explains. ‘Passengers used to think it was a forced landing.‘
The plane refuels. We wander over to another amphibian that stands waiting, and chat with her pilot. A rescue party of one, he spent yesterday fighting storms in the high mountains around Chimborazo, flying blind through impossible weather, over impossible country, ambulancing a sick bishop from his remote see in Quito to the modern hospital in Guayaquil. We have heard the story from the airport manager. The pilot makes light of it. Storms? Oh, sure, a little thick. Danger? No, just a bit tricky here and there. All in the day’s work. He pounces gratefully upon our day-old newspaper from Panama.
We move toward the shack again. Our ears have caught a sound that staggers, a plaint in girlish voices unmistakably American: —
‘I cut out candy weeks ago.‘
‘Me too. And butter. But all I do is breathe and put on pounds!‘
‘This climate . . .’
A reducing bee, a petticoat explosion over pounds and kilograms arising in this bleak Sahara? Incredible! But there it is. Two pretty girls are standing by a well-used bathroom scale, their high-heeled shoes driving like little stakes into the sloppy sand. Powdered, perfumed, dainty to the last feminine degree, they seem to be arrayed for Easter Sunday on Fifth Avenue. This is the most incongruous sight we have st ruck so far.
‘Bridal party,’confides the manager. ‘At least, it will be if they can find a minister!‘ There is none here in the oil fields, he explains. Possibly at the next stop, sixty miles along — well, who can tell?
Sure enough, we now espy the bridegroom lurking in the shack. Dressed in his best, too, he is not merely blushing, but perspiring freely as the pilot gravely indicates the load sheet. It is a question of weight, and we begin to understand the bath-scale crisis. There is room for the bride, and the groom can sit on the floor. The maid of honor is the problem. What to do? For to do nothing is unthinkable — even in the Peruvian desert no one could have the heart to leave a wedding party in the lurch. Our pilot rises nobly to the need. The maid of honor is rushed back to the scales. Her precise weight in gasoline is withdrawn from the plane. A passenger presents his seat; he volunteers for floor space with the bridegroom. Smiles of delight all round. The emergency has been met. . . .
In thirty minutes we drop down again on to the desert. Here there is not even a shack; the town of Paita is out of sight. There is but one solitary object, rising like some forsaken statue from a ledge of sand. We taxi to it. It is, we now detect, a motor vehicle, but of such obsolete design and aspect that to identify it as a bus would be inaccurate. Rather, it is a horseless buggy, a museum piece, but not without a certain seedy dignity. A tattered canopy of velvet tassels hangs over it, and from its hog’s-back chassis rise rows of wooden benches that slope toward the back like gallery seats. There is a driver.
Conversation follows through an opened window. Is there a minister in Paita? The driver makes a long, impassioned speech in Spanish. The wedding party descends. The bride and her man stand there for a moment, regarding dubiously this chariot that is to be their bridal coach. Suddenly she bursts out laughing. She turns and waves the waiting plane a gay goodbye. A rousing cheer goes back to her across the sand. The engines roar and we are off again. The last we see of them is three dark specks, paging a parson in the middle of the grim Sechura Desert.
VI
We advance on Lima in the late afternoon sunshine. As at a play we sit expectant in our seats, awaiting with impatient eyes our introduction to this venerable Spanish capital. Lima — the pride of the Conquistadores, the City of Kings!
We rise swiftly from the flat trim of desert. We have exchanged our small amphibian for this luxurious ship. The three great engines lift her like a kite over the blockading mountains that are camel-hued, like the remainder of the landscape. Three thousand feet. All at once we are clear, and the streets of Lima are below us, a gridiron on the earth. It is like flying over a titanic hippodrome, which has for walls the sullen Andean ramparts. In the arena lies the city, with the River Rimac searching diagonally across it for the sea. We pick up the twin spires of Pizarro’s cathedral, stray patches of green that indicate the country club and polo fields, innumerable traffic lines moving in orderly procession along the crisscross streets. Eastward, in the shadow of a ridge, we see the crumbling outlines of the city of Cajamarquilla, which was old when grass grew undisputed over London. It was old even before the Incas came and for a little while, for a few centuries, made it green and fertile.
We go out there next day and walk through miles of tumbling, lifeless streets. We step over the rifled graves, crunch with our feet odd scraps of finely executed pottery, — the burial huacos, — handle fragments of cloth whose loveliness of texture and design is still perceptible through centuries of rot. The sand is strewn with skulls. We pick up one, chalk-bleached by the fierce sun. Two rows of teeth are still embedded in their sockets. The coarse black hair stirs in the hot wind with a ghostly life. What part was his, we wonder, in the erection of these ruined aqueducts, the cracking waterways through which the modern Lima still obtains some irrigation? In Tehuantinsuyu, the historic Empire of the Four Winds, was he serf or dictator, cog or inspiration of that extraordinary socialist machine? Uneasily we put the skull back where we found it. There is no answer in this sinister silence, only the shuffle of our shoes over the graves, the buzzards awaiting avidly our scraps of lunch. . . .
We drive out of the dead history into the pulsating life of the Pan AmericanGrace airport. It is an experience like a cold shower after a fatiguing day, a singular exhilaration. Here is the brain centre of the West Coast airway, of this wand-waving system that gives us with the same cool efficiency crocodiles and blowpipes, jungles and deserts, oceans and Cordilleras. We begin to clear up points that have mystified us during the concert-pitch performance of our trip from Panama. More and more, flying over some of that impassable country, it has begun to dawn upon us that it is one thing to run an airway in the United States, with extensive government provision of landing fields, beacons, weather stations, radio towers, with every hand raised in cooperation, and quite another to create, single-handed, a full-fledged airway over twenty thousand miles of foreign continent — a continent where vast distances and savage geography have been perpetually hostile to international transport.
Walking through the plant, where the entire range of work is handled on the spot, we begin to understand why engines do not falter in that wall of water that is a tropic storm, why wings do not bend under Andean winter gales, and why this air express has a record of 99.8 per cent maintenance of schedule, winter and summer. We feel an immense respect for these young North Americans. They have achieved, in four brief years, a revolution in the intercourse of a hundred million people, and made their enterprise an integral part of North and South American business.
VII
All too soon we are on our way again. Lima has been banished in another dawn and we have come hundreds of miles to the southeast, over villainous country. We bump along at thirteen thousand feet. The big machine slams up and down, ten stories at a crack. The landscape is a vast relief map, inhospitable, barren. There are no roads, no railways, no towns, no trees, no living things — only the mountain ridges, one behind the other, sticking up like rusty sword blades. We keep a lookout for llama caravans, for we are told this Andean sheep is the only beast of burden that can survive the altitude. We see none, so we supply them out of our imagination, crawling like ants over a corrugated roof, picking their way, heaven knows how, over the everlasting sameness of each ridge.
We are glad of the two thousand feet of space between us and the mountain tops, gladder still to bump over the final rim into the green cup of Arequipa, which lies beneath El Misti. Thin air and a fast landing, for Arequipa, at eight thousand feet, is the highest airport in the system.
We are in luck. We come dowm just in time to see a ship that we have heard so much about along the Line. It is the gold plane. She stands there, engines warming, the twin of ours, only she has no seats; the whole interior is cargo space. We hasten over, panting a little with the exertion, and inspect the flying gold van that caused Andean Indians to fall down and worship, that lands and takes off like some legendary bird at fifteen thousand feet!
Behind it lies a fantastic story, the story of a man who could not use a gold mine. The gold was there, so was the money to exploit it. The problem was how to take in the machinery to work it. Llamas, with light loads strapped to their woolly backs, took forty days to make the trip from the railhead to the mine. Teams of Indians, eighty strong, succeeded in dragging one 300-pound piece of machinery over mountains four miles high — but some of them died like beasts of burden on the way. Heavier pieces, the essential parts of the plant, were hopeless. . . .
Watching the pilot test his oxygen supply and lift the gold plane off, we realize that the mine owner, to say nothing of the Indians, has reason to bless the coming of the Airway. The pilot will refuel at the railhead (Cuzco) and haul machinery weighing two tons over mountain summits twenty thousand feet in height — a world record. The six-week llama trip will take him twenty minutes, and, bringing the gold out as it is mined, he will make four round trips a day. The pioneer work for this extraordinary enterprise, the establishment of a landing field at fifteen thousand feet, the daring of crack pilots, hunting through unmapped mountains for the mine, make a story for another day.
It is the beginning. The exploitation of other remote mines is already under way, with such effect that in one case three cargo planes and six men are about to undertake the work of fortyfive thousand llamas and hundreds of drovers. New horizons, new sources of untapped riches, are crowding up.
VIII
We fly all day over an El Dorado, laden with secret wealth, — silver, copper, iron, gold, — one of the few frontiers left to big business. We are high over the clouds. On our left, the endless Andes rise higher and still higher, a craggy coast line in this formless sea. The air of the late afternoon is smoothly cushioned, and we are grateful after our lively exercising of the morning. We roll on gently toward Antofagasta, where we are due to land in forty minutes.
Suddenly the gold-topped cloud floor appears to rise obliquely. With throttled engines we sink into it. Bumps — seconds of mist that dull our silver wings — and then the landscape comes catapulting into view. We catch our breath. We have intruded on the sombre scene at a moment of stupendous beauty.
We are flying down a desert valley, the tawny sides of which are drawn up out of sight. The cloud floor has now become our ceiling, and through great jagged holes filters a fire-colored sunset, investing the wild terrain with its brief moment of splendor. The harsh outlines of the hills are smoothed; great pools of crimson rest upon the valley floor. The engines pick up and we fly through an unearthly glow, even our metal wings suffused with color.
We drop down over a thread of railroad and follow it for miles over nitrate fields scratched in giant grooves on the earth, until the airport marker beckons for the night.
Volcanic dust flies up in dense clouds as we taxi to the hangar. We exchange our familiar chairs for antiquated jitneys, race madly down the plain, past nitrate furrows long abandoned, plunge into the cloud-roofed defile of the Salar del Carmen, jolt into the harsh, unlovely streets of Antofagasta. We relax gladly in the queer little hotel. It is a relief to surrender to the unvarying Panagra schedule — our names are known, the rooms are ready, dinner will be at seven, we are to be called at five-thirty, breakfast will be at six, the jitneys will come at six-thirty. We subside, drop neatly into our prepared niches until the system punches the keys and we pop into view again like figures on a cash register.
Morning, and we assemble again before the ‘U. S. Mail’ sign painted on the sides of the plane; the heavy sacks tell of expanding business, even in the face of the depression. The last is stowed away and we pull straight up to twelve thousand feet in one long climb. Jagged mountain ridges reach higher and higher until our margin narrows to two thousand feet. Our early-morning disposition, as usual, is blunted to the finer aspects of the scenery and we gaze without emotion at a dreary pattern of Andean foothills, cut every twenty miles or so by a thin river, meandering down a steep-walled valley. We reflect smugly that each hour of flight is the equivalent of at least one day by any other means. At noon, we make a brief plunge into the hot airport of Ovalle, and are off again in a few minutes.
IX
This is the last lap. The savage hills remain the same, but we are swinging in closer and closer to the colossal barrier itself. All at once the hills drop away. Within a minute, the everlasting thirsty brown is banished; vivid green revives, and far below us, like some fabled garden of the gods, spreads the valley of one of the loveliest cities in the world — Santiago de Chile.
We see it cupped in a protecting ring of foothills, its myriad fields watered by clear mountain streams, its roads shaded by stately trees. Before it lies Valparaiso, and the ships; behind it, shielding it from the winter snows of the pampa, is the whole might of the Andes.
It is a scene to catch one’s breath, for in these grateful moments we see at last the full glory of the Cordillera.
We have three miles of space beneath us, but Aconcagua, over on the left, towers ten thousand feet above our wing. We stare straight up at the overwhelming summit, the highest in the Western Hemisphere. A mile-long snow plume blows out from the peak, swept off the mountain by some fierce gale of that blue altitude. Our eyes range down from the gleaming snows, past a wafer-edged stratum of clouds hanging halfway on the escarpment, to the foothills ending in a checkerboard of plough and pasture land.
As the air screws idle and we hear the thin whistle of wind over the wings, we realize that we have reached our southerly limit. Our next flight must be in a plane with superchargers, oxygen, and heating coils for high altitudes. For thousands of miles we have watched the mountains rise from the trivial foothills of Panama to this supreme effect, a panorama which spreads in the crystal air to the farthest range of vision. From the first dawn to the last dusk of each day, it has seemed that we have looked down on all possible varieties of scene.
Now, while our silver wings sink quietly into the white blaze of summer, we know that something more has been reserved. We gaze in expectation over white-domed peaks at that shimmering giant guarding the great Pass, the gateway to the Argentine, and to Brazil.