The Brandon news. (Brandon, Miss.) 1892-1961, 1905-12-14
HE adventure mich

! 19C1 am rather glad that 1t
| didn't. 1t happened to friend Of
/ mine, a civil engineer, who was one
of the pioheers in the work of open
ing up the Perene district, which con-
! sists of triangle of land inclosed by
three rivers, all flowing into the Mar
anon, which good many hundred
| miles to the northeaStward becomes
| the Madeira and then the Amazon.
The Chanchamaya is torrent which
begins in the glaciers of the eastern
chain Of the Cordilleras, about ninety
miles from Oroya, which is the ter
minus Of the most wonderful railway
in the world. This railway, I may
say in parenthesis, starts from Callao,
the port of Lima, eight feet above sea
level, and after piercing Monte Meiggs
at an elevation Of ,67S feet descends
to Oroya, which is $4,000 feet above
| sea level.
| It Is out Of the question to give the
untraveled reader anything like a
definite idea of the appallingly diff
cult country that one has to travel
through from the rail end at Oroya
down to the glorious garden. lands Of
the Montana, yet it is in this stretch
| of country that you can die what is
| perhaps the most terrible death that
even the Imagination of Edgar Allan
Poe could have conceived. Crawling
| over the high mountain passes 1900
| and $4,000 feet above the sea level, l
| have often passed skeletons of ami
| mails and men whose death stories
must have been tragedies of unspeak-
| able horror. Up there if your animal
| gives out the best thing you can do
| for yourself is put your revolver muz-
zle under your ear and pull the trig-
| ger. 1t is impossible to walk any dis
lance in the deadly cold, in that rare
| fed atmosphere, where the barometer
stands at under twenty inches and
| your heart is trying to knock its way
out through your ribs. To sleep one
night without shelter is almost certain
death, and the chance of any one COM
| ing along to help you is a matter of
F.! days.
For sixty miles or so the gorge of
the Chanchamaya is possible for a
man and beast only by narrow path
! way cut OUT of the mountain side on
the right hand as you go down toward
| the Amazonas region. 1t rises and
falls with the mountains, dipping
sometimes to the river level by a
series of staircases, in which all the
steps are loose, and then rising again;
! but on the average the road runs about
a thousand feet above the bottom of
the gorge to the left hand, and above
that again to the right hand is the
mountain wall, which towers up to an
other one or two or three thousand
| feet, according to the height of the
hills that you are passing.
! 1t was on a comparatively broad
part of this path that I was riding a
somewhat FESTIVE horse when a couple
of donkeys, loaded with thornbush for
fuel and driven by Indians who were
| possibly stupid with the combination
of cocoa leaf and chacta (sugarcane
brandy, came round a corner and
| planted their burdens under my horses
breast. He was over and on top of
me in a moment, and when I came
round l found myself within a few
feet Of 500 precipice; but happily l
had a friend with me who was ac-
customed to that kind of travelling.
He got the horse on to his feet again,
and as no bones were broken he got
on to my horse and Lon to his mule.
It was a somewhat painful business
| getting to the next township, and the
next day I had to lay up with my
bruised leg covered with congresses
made of cocoa leaves soaked in chacta,
and from the rapidity of the cure |
came to the conclusion that this is a
combination which is much better to
take externally than internally.
About three weeks later was riding
back over the same road with an &C
quaintance whom I had got to know
down in the Perene and as we round
ed one particularly ugly corner I told
him about my little adventure, and
| said:
'It was a lucky thing for me that
it was not half a mile further on in
place like this, for I should have
gone over to a certainty
eyes," he said, with that sudden Sc
robustness which you so often find in
men who have pretty close acquaint
| ance with death. 81 suppose you know
that if you had gone over and broken
a limb you would have died in about
1 the most disgusting way that a man
can die. I very nearly did it myself
once about couple Of hundred yards
or so from here"
I remembered the clean picked skel
etons that I had seen up in the passes
and said:
Eyes. I think know what you mean
but how did this business of yours
happen?"
"Just as your accident did," was the
reply. 'sonly mine was in the narrow
part Of the track. My horse go
stumbling around among loose stones
and went down. I'll show you thu
place soon. He fell outward and
was mined by the leg just on TIT