The People Are Very Religious, Yet With It All Are Terribly Depraved!

The truth is seldom spoken, and my guide was, unfortunately, no exception to the rule.

As we left the haunts of men, and difficulties thickened, he would often entreat the help of Holy Mary, but in the same breath would lie and curse!

Sighting a miserable hut, we called to inquire for meat. The master of the house, I discovered, was a leper, and I further learned, on asking if I might water my horses, that the nearest water was three miles away. The man and wife and their large family certainly looked as though water was a luxury too costly to use on the skin. The leper was most hospitable, however; he killed a sheep for us, and we sat down to a feast of mutton. After this we pushed on to water the horses. By sunset we arrived at a cattle ranch near the river Ipane, and there we stayed for the night. At supper all dipped in the same stew-pan, and afterwards rinsed out the mouth with large draughts of water, which they squirted back on the brick floor of the dining- room. The men then smoked cigarettes of tobacco rolled in corn leaves, and the women smoked their six-inch-long cigars. Finding that two of the men understood Spanish, I read some simple parts of scripture to them by the light of a dripping grease lamp. They listened in silence, and wondered at the strange new story. The mosquitoes were so troublesome that a large platform, twenty feet high, had been erected, and after reading all the inmates of the house, with us, ascended the ladder leading to the top. There the mosquitoes did not disturb us, so we slept peacefully on our aerial roost between the fire-flies of the earth and the stars of heaven.

Next day we came to a solitary house, where I noticed strings of meat hung in the sun to dry. This is left, like so many stockings and handkerchiefs, hanging there until it is hard as wood; it will then keep for an indefinite time. There we got a good dinner of fresh beef, and about ten pounds of the dried meat (charqui) to take away with us. At this place I bought two more horses, and we each got a large bullock's horn in which to carry water, swinging from the saddle-tree. I was not sorry to leave this house, for, tearing up the offal around the building, I counted as many as sixty black vultures. Their king, a dirty white bird with crimson neck covered with gore and filth, had already gorged himself with all the blood he could get. "All his sooty subjects stand apart at a respectful distance, whetting their appetites and regaling their nostrils, but never dreaming of an approach to the carcass till their master has sunk into a state of repletion. When the kingly bird, by falling on his side, closing his eyes, and stretching on the ground his unclenched talons, gives notice to his surrounding and expectant subjects that their lord and master has gone to rest, up they hop to the carcass, which in a few minutes is stripped of everything eatable." Here we left the high-road, which is cut through to Punta Pona on the Brazilian frontier, and struck off to the west.

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