At Pampa Grande we had a very good illustration of two extreme types of Bolivian character. When we entered the town, our travelling companion met an acquaintance who owned practically the only house of any size. The Bolivian greeted him in the friendliest and most polite manner possible, and insisted that all of us spend the night at his home; he directed us to the house and then excused himself, saying that he would return presently. We found the place without difficulty, but the wife refused to admit us and told us we might wait--in the street--until the return of her husband. The school-teacher, seeing our predicament, ventured to offer us the use of the classroom; he apologized because it was so small and the roof leaked; and the next day he refused to accept a single _centavo_ for the accommodation. The first man had not returned home when we were leaving the following morning; from my experience with the same type of person, I am certain that had he returned and admitted us to his home, he would have made an exorbitant charge that courtesy demanded our paying. There now remained but one day’s ride to Samaipata, where the trail divides--one branch leading toward Sucre, and the other to Santa Cruz de la Sierra. The farther eastward one goes the greener the country becomes. Between the five-thousand-foot elevation of Pampa Grande and Samaipata, which is six thousand feet above sea-level, there are two peaks to be crossed, one seven thousand three hundred and twenty-five feet, and the other six thousand seven hundred feet high. The top of the former is known as the Alto de Mairana; it is a cold, dreary little plateau where half a dozen wretched Indians live. The town of Mairana is on the lower plain between the two peaks. Patches of low brush replace the cacti and thorny, arid-region type of vegetation; there is a sufficient water-supply; and the whole country seems to present a transition zone of reviving life between the alternately hot and frigid upland deserts and the green slopes stretching toward Santa Cruz. CHAPTER XXI A MULE-BACK JOURNEY ON THE SANTA CRUZ TRAIL TO SUCRE Samaipata is in no particular different from the towns through which we had passed during the previous two weeks. Perhaps provisions were somewhat more abundant, and a small number of mules and sheep grazed in the nearby pastures; but the general distress and dejection were very much the same, and never failed to give one the impression that the settlements were tottering on the brink of obliteration. Everywhere we heard tales of woe about the prevalence of malarial fever during a part of the year, and that this disease was the cause of the desolation and extermination of the people; but as none of the places was lower than five thousand feet above sea-level, and the country is of a semiarid type, I am unable to understand how malaria could work such havoc, and am inclined to attribute the dreadful inroads to some other little-known underlying cause.