The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

The mountain range - now like a fortress, now like a cathedral (it was yet another protectively maternal strip of the Sierra Madre) -stayed with us the whole day. But we never climbed it. We moved south along the hot lowland, and the more southerly we penetrated the more primitive and tiny became the Indian villages, the more emblematic the people: naked child, woman with basket, man on horseback, posed in the shattering sunlight before a poor mud hut. As the morning wore on the people withdrew and by eleven o'clock we were watched from the windows of huts which had grown much smaller. Shade was scarce: skinny village dogs slept under the bellies of cows which were themselves transfixed by hanks of coarse grass.

There was water to the south-west - a blue-green haze, a shimmering emptiness, the flat land receding to a sparkle and brown bizarrely suspended boats. This was the Dead Sea, a lozenge of lake on the shore of the Pacific. Nearer the train, horses were tied to the verandah posts of village bars, and men sat at tables near the windows; women and girls hawked prawns and pink-scaled fish which they carried in pails. My eyes were moist from the heat, and through this blur I saw dark pigs and coconut groves and banana trees and, behind them, bouldery mountains.

We crossed into the state of Chiapas. In Chiapas the mountains looked higher, the surrounding land hotter, and these two contrasting landscapes were so inhospitable and unmarked by any human effort, the people seemed like pioneers, hardy new arrivals who had yet to make any dent in the place. That was between stations, but the stations seemed like outposts, too. At the town of Arriaga I asked the conductor when we could expect to arrive in Tapachula. He counted on his fingers, then he laughed because we were more than ten hours late.

'Maybe tonight,' he said. 'Don't worry.'

'I'm not worried.'

Not worried, but rather sick of this hot crowded train. A slow train, which this was, could be a joy, if the seats were not broken and the toilet worked and the dust was mopped off the floor. The passengers, prostrate in the heat, lay collapsed on the seats, their mouths open, as if they had all been gunned down or gassed.

'I'll come back,' said the conductor. 'I'll tell you when we are near Tapachula. Right?'

'Thank you.'

But to arrive in Tapachula was to accomplish very little. Tapachula was nowhere. It was, simply, where this train stopped for good.

I had finished most of my food by the time we reached Pijijiapan; and what remained - some discoloured slices of ham, some sweating cheese that had softened to putty in the heat - I threw out of the window. I had also finished Pudd'nhead Wilson. Pijijiapan was a market town, a mob scene which the arrival of the train only maddened further - the train stayed in the middle of town for half an hour and none of the shoppers or hawkers or battered cars could cross the road. Nor would the conductor allow anyone to pass through the train. So they stood in the hot sun with their baskets, and the fish they carried grew more rancid-smelling as they waited. They carried chickens and turkeys, too, and corn and beans. They were Indians, short, square-featured people who glowered at this intrusion.

If one wonders who precisely they are, one needs only to listen to Jacques Soustelle on the Aztecs. Before treating the artistic and cultural achievements of the nobles, he directs our attention in a kind of whispered prologue, to another group. 'On the fringe of the rich and brilliant cities,' he writes, 'the peasant - Náhuatl, Otomí, Zapotec, etc. - continued to lead his patient and laborious life in obscurity. We know almost nothing about him . . . He was of no interest to the native or the Spanish chronicler, with his hut, his maize field, his turkeys, his little monogamous family and his narrow horizon, and they mention him only in passing . . . But it is important to speak of him at this point, if only to make his silent presence felt, in the shadows beyond the brilliance of the urban civilization; and the more so, because after the disaster of 1521 [the Spanish conquest] and the collapse of all authority, all concepts, the whole frame of society and all religion, he alone survived, and he alone still lives.'

He - or rather she - sold me some fritters and rice at Pijijiapan; I drank the last of my soda water (I had used the other half of the bottle for brushing my teeth) and we set off again. It was frustrating to be so tired in such a beautiful landscape, like dozing at a concert. The train picked up speed and shot along this savannah, skirting the majestic mountains, but the heat and the dirt and my fatigue, and now the noise of the speeding train, prevented me from being able to concentrate or steady my gaze on the bright rocks or the trees whipping past. It was punishing to feel so battered and incapable, but also a further punishment to know how the best of Chiapas was eluding me. Struggling to stay awake to see it, the effort exhausted me; the bright air and yellow land overwhelmed me, and I slept.

I woke perspiring whenever the train stopped, at little towns, like Mapastepec and Margaritas, where the foreground swam with colour: Jacaranda, bougainvillea, hibiscus - electric contending hues in what was otherwise a desert of frail trees and barren soil, broken by fields of corn and tobacco. We were in the deep hinterland now, and later I was to recognize the remote place, the combination of Indian villages and bad roads and the one railway line producing - but it was not so unusual: they had come with the railway and they had stayed - the Chinese, who advertised themselves on shop signs: Casa Wong or Chen Hermanos. I had thought it had been hot in the morning; the afternoon was almost unbearable and at Soconocusco I felt nauseated by the heat.

Walking the length of the train to find some bottled water to have with my fruit salts I came upon a man I at first took to be an American. I had not met an English speaker since leaving Veracruz, so I greeted him - glad to have someone who might understand my feeling of discomfort. He winced at me. He wore a jacket; the lenses of his glasses were coated with dust; he had a small map; he sat alone in Second Class. He was of course German.

And he spoke neither English nor Spanish. Where, I asked him in faulty German, had he boarded the train? In Veracruz, he said. But I had not seen him in Veracruz, or Papaloapan, or anywhere else. Well, he said, he had not left his seat. What had he eaten?

'A sandwich. Cheese.'

In two days?

'Yes,' he said. 'I do not like the toilets. I don't eat, so I don't use the toilets. I had a Pepsi-Cola. But I will eat in Guatemala.'

'We may not be in Guatemala until tomorrow.'

'Then I will eat tomorrow. It is good to be hungry for a few days. People eat too much - especially these people. You see them? Using the toilet?'

'Where are you going in Guatemala?'

'Maybe to the ruins. I don't know -1 have to go back to work next week.'

'Back to-?'

'Germany.'

'Ah.' He was riding in Second Class. Second Class had torn black plastic seats. First Class had torn red plastic seats. Some of First's had arm-rests. But Second was slightly more crowded. How did he like it?

He gave me a smile - it was the first time he had smiled, and it was one of triumph and real pleasure. He said, 'Three dollars.'

Neither an explorer nor a hitch-hiker; no rucksack, no compass. Just a tidy little suitcase and small gold-rimmed glasses covered with dust, an empty Pepsi bottle and a sandwich wrapper, sitting with Teutonic uprightness through the tumbling hinterland of Chiapas. His map was small, he had no other book, he did not drink beer. In a word, a skinflint.

Another train, with seat numbers and compartments, might have thrown us together, and I would have suffered his leaden company for two days. If there was a virtue in the disorder of this carelessly-run Mexican train it was that it allowed a passenger the freedom of its shabby cars. There were no rules; or, if there were, no one followed them. So it was easy for me to reject the companionship of this fellow - not that he offered any: tightfisted people are as mean with friendship as they are with cash; suspicious, unbelieving and incurious. In a way, I admired his aloofness, though his aloofness was inspired by nothing more admirable than his egoism and his craving for the cheap. And yet, by refusing to take any risk he was taking the greatest risk of all: being solitary in a place so hot and anarchic one really needed friends.

'Have a good trip,' I said.

He nodded, he did not smile. And that was all. A chance meeting - nothing more. We merely brushed past each other at that far side of the world.

Another Chinese store, more tobacco fields, and the afternoon grew cloudy but no less hot. I lay on the seat and went to sleep again and did not wake until I heard one of the Guatemalan Children yelling - as he had done since Veracruz - 'Let 's go! ' But this time he was yelling at me. I woke in darkness; the train had stopped, and now the Guatemalan mother was bending over me.

'If you are going to the frontier - you said you were - we could share a taxi and save some money. I have only three suitcases and these four children. We can fit in the back seat and you can sit in front with the driver. What do you say?'

It had been an awful trip and listening to her I saw my chance of leaving Mexico and this train and this town - just stepping across the border. Later, I decided that I would have been better off in a hotel in Tapachula, but at the time I was very eager to leave it. So I said yes and half an hour later, in darkness, I was walking across the bridge over the Suchiate River. Behind me were the rolling hills and banana groves of Mexico; ahead, a black brow of rock and on its cliffs and outcrops dim blue jungle and white lianas and vines, picked out in moonlight; and when the river ceased to thunder I could hear the screech of bats.

6

THE 7:30 TO GUATEMALA CITY

Guatemala had begun suddenly: a river-frontier and on the far bank jungly cliffs and hanging vines. Storm clouds were passing in front of the moon, which gave them druids' hooded shapes and grey rags. The border town of Tecún Umán was so small it made Tapachula seem a metropolis, and a Tapachula billboard I had seen advertising a hotel (GoodFood, Comfortable Rooms, Low Prices), stayed in my memory as I ate a vile meal of beans in an ill-lit room of a much meaner hotel in Tecún Umán. This was called the Pearl. A hundred years ago, a British traveller in Guatemala wrote, 'A stranger, arriving without introductions, can only go to a very low public house . . . intended for the accommodation of mule drivers, cattle herds and petty retail dealers.' But I was alone - not a mule driver in sight; I would have welcomed his company. There was a dog by the door, chewing at the fleas on his hindquarters. I gave him a lump of gristle from my plate and, watching his wild eyes as he champed it, I thought how lucky I was that there was a train out of this place in the morning. 'Very early,' the hotel-keeper had said. I had replied, 'The earlier the better.'

Tecún Umán was a tiny railhead - no more. But once, from here to Panama - then a neglected province of Colombia - it was all regarded as the Kingdom of Guatemala. It was an unstable and quarrelsome kingdom and, when a series of revolts resulted in a constitutional regime and a kind of futile independence, it became even more unstable. It was also menaced by Mexico - by the absurd Iturbide who had had himself crowned in a self-flattering ceremony: 'emperor by the grace of God and of bayonets,' was Bolivar's jeer. Guatemalan independence had meant the setting up of town councils, and in 1822 these councils voted to annex Guatemala to Mexico, reasoning that it was better to join the Mexicans than be humiliated in battle by them. But Mexican instability was apparent from the first, Iturbide was recognized as a tyrant, and a year later Guatemala withdrew and her National Assembly declared the independence of the five provinces: Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

This was nominally a confederation, the United Provinces of Cental America, though for the next eighty years the foreign traveller continued to call them 'Guatemala' and to treat his adventuring in the jungles of Costa Rica and Nicaragua and his canoe trips across El Salvador's Lake Ilopango as travel in Guatemala. If Guatemala was merely a misnomer for this jumble of countries, 'United Provinces' was the kind of fatuous violation of language that in our day terms the grotesque dictatorship a 'People's Republic'. Civil war was almost immediate in the five countries: it was woodsman against townie, conservative against liberal, Indian against Spaniard, tenant farmer against landlord; the provinces battled, and unity disintegrated in sabre charges and cannon fire. Within fifteen years the area was political and social bedlam - or, as one historian has written, 'quintuple confusion'. American and British travellers grumbled heartily about the difficulties of cutting their way from village to village, and remarked on how little was known of this attenuated tissue of geography on which South America swung from North America.

It is hard to keep the names straight. Guatemala is the anvil-shaped one next to Mexico; El Salvador is the tiny one being squashed by the blob of Honduras to the shape of a rectangular raft and proving unsea-worthy on its launch into the Pacific; Nicaragua is a wedge, Costa Rica the cuff on Panama's extended sleeve. There are no railways in Belize. Considering their history - not only the riots, civil wars and revolutions, but also the uproarious earthquakes and incessant vulcanism -it is a wonder they exist at all and have not furiously vanished beneath the sea. These countries lie on one of our planet's worst fault-lines, a volcanic fissure which, each year, threatens to shift in the tremendous way it has been promising, and swallow them and their wranglings. Oddly, the proudest boast of these countries is their volcanoes: they are on every national emblem, on most of the money, and figure prominently in their superstitions.

All this lay ahead of me, but I intended to stick to my route and deal with one country at a time. I had got some puzzled looks from the hotel-keeper when I told him I was going to catch the train.

The bus is quicker,' he said.

'I'm not in a hurry,' I said.

'The train is very old.'

'The Mexican train to Tapachula was old.'

'But this one is dirty as well.'

'I'll have a bath when I get to Guatemala City.'

'All the other tourists take buses. Or taxis.'

'I'm not a tourist.'

'Yes,' he said, seeing that my mind was made up, 'the train is very interesting. But for some reason no one ever takes it.'

He was mistaken about that, for one thing. There was a crowd of people at the station early the following morning. They were undersized - farmers in slouch hats and straw sombreros, Indian women with papooses and pigtails, barefoot children. Each person had a large bundle, a basket tied with vines or a home-made suitcase. I concluded that this was the reason they had chosen to take the train - their belongings would have been unwelcome on a bus. The train also took a different route from any of the buses, and the train-fare from Tecún Umán to Guatemala City was less than two dollars. Until ten minutes before the train was to leave, a policeman kept us away from the platform barrier, and we stood clutching our tickets - strips of paper with all the intermediate stations listed: one's ticket was guillotined at the station where one was to disembark.

The difference between Mexican trains and Guatemalan trains was obvious as soon as we were permitted to board. The cars - four of them - were very small wooden contraptions with large windows. There was no glass in the windows, no paint on the wood. It was narrow gauge and had the look of a train you might see in a decayed amusement park, too tiny and decrepit to take seriously. The seats were also tiny and they were filled within five minutes of our departure. I sat knee to knee with an Indian woman who, as soon as we left, put her chin against the red blanket on her shoulder and went to sleep. Her thin restless child, a small girl in a torn dress, stared at me. No one in the train spoke except to haggle with the hawkers boosting fruit on us, at the stations along the way.

Although I had the satisfaction of knowing that the train was a continuation of the one I had taken that frosty morning two weeks before in Boston, this passenger train to Guatemala City held no promise of comfort or companionship, and on this day obscured with smoke and mist I had no real expectation of anything but a fairly rough ride through damp and shrouded jungle. The jungle, where it was not an overhang of dark trees, gave the impression of dumped litter - wrappings, string, broken boxes, bits of rag; these I saw were not junk, but dead leaves and vines and flowers. The jungle itself was grey this cloudy morning, and the train rocking on the track and showing its scars (the scorched ceiling, the splintered seats), and stopping and starting with great uncertainty, seemed to me highly unreliable, if not downright dangerous. On the map it seemed a simple transit: Veracruz-Tapachula-Tecún Umán-Guatemala City - two days at most. But the map was misleading, and this train - which emitted groans on curves and slight ascents - did not really seem capable to me of completing the trip. The passengers' faces were set in frowns, as if they shared my conviction. The track had been cleared, but ten feet away the jungle dripped and was so dense no light showed through it.

A Bostonian had come this way in 1886, and charmed by the wildness of the place had regarded the arrival of the railway with a kind of horror. His was in a sense a typical curmudgeonly snobbery about travel, a bragging about the glory of travelling through trackless woods with a pack of Indians and mule-skinners (Evelyn Waugh fills the Introduction to When The Going Was Good - the curmudgeon's catch-phrase - with the same grumpy boasts). 'Old travellers know how soon the individuality of a country is lost when once the tide of foreign travel is turned through its towns or its by-ways,' writes William T. Brigham in his Guatemala. (I think he is the same William Brigham who nearly electrocuted himself in Hawaii when he touched a wooden stick which a native magician had loaded with some high voltage mumbo-jumbo.) Brigham soon makes his fears particular: 'When the Northern Railroad extends through Guatemala, when the Transcontinental Railway traverses the plains of Honduras, and the Nicaraguan Canal unites the Atlantic and the Pacific, the charm will be broken, the mulepath and the mozo de cargo (carrier of bundles) will be supplanted, and a journey across Central America become almost as dull as a journey from Chicago to Cheyenne.'

How wrong he was.

Chiapas had been arid - a stony exposed landscape that looked as if it had yet to be possessed by man. This part of Guatemala was heavily forested at the border- the national frontier was abruptly apparent in the rising land and the vine-covered trees - and as we descended to Coatepeque and Retalhuleu the scenery became tropical in its disorder -the jungle sprawled, the huts were poor and small and badly-made-and the only symmetries were the stretches of cane fields. In Mexico I had seen the cut cane in railway freight cars; here it was loaded on wagons and old tottering trucks, and sheaves of it dragged on the road and dropped, so that most of the roads were strewn and looked as if a fierce storm had just blown through and knocked these bare branches down.

The cane cutting had given Guatemala a sickly sweet odour. The sugary smell was released by the men with machetes, but as the day grew hotter the smell weighted the air. It was a noxious sweetness, like syrup made into smoke, with a whiff of vegetables and an abrasive chemical aftertaste. And there was in it, too, a sharper stink, the nauseating gust you would get by burning sugar over a fire and reducing it to black junk. This was the height of the cane harvest and the smells and the stacked trucks and the worker gangs made Guatemala seem a place of considerable enterprise, but of an old-fashioned plantation sort.

We travelled parallel to a road, and crossed it occasionally, but for most of the time we were not near to places that were very densely inhabited. The towns were small and tumbledown and in this bus-riding country most of the people lived on the main roads. After a few stops I could see that this was regarded as a local train - no one was going any great distance. Passengers who had got on at Tecún Umán were going to the market at Coatepeque, which was on a road, or to Retalhuleu to get to the coast, about twenty-five miles away. By noon we were at La Democracia. At the time I had concluded that this was an ironical name, but perhaps it was a fitting name for a place with a sweet-sour smell, and huts made out of sticks and cardboard and hammered-out tins, and howling radios and clamouring people - some boarding buses, some selling fruit, but the majority merely standing wrapped in blankets and looking darkly at the train. And tired children were hunkered down in the mud. Here was a fancy car among the jalopies, and there a pretty house among the huts. Democracy is a messy system of government, and there was a helter-skelter appropriateness in the name of this disordered town. But how much democracy was there here?

There were election posters pasted on the pillars of the shop verandahs. There would be an election in a few months. On the way to Guatemala City I tried to engage passengers in political talk, but I quickly discovered that Guatemalans had none of the candour I had found in Mexicans. 'Echeverría was a bandit and a hypocrite,' one man told me; 'Lopez Portillo is just the same - give him time.' Guatemalans were more circumspect: they shrugged, they spat, they rolled their eyes; they did not utter their political preferences. But who could blame them? For twelve years the country had been governed by a party of fanatical anti-communists - a party greatly fancied by America's Central Intelligence Agency, which has yet to perceive that fanatical anti-communists are almost invariably fanatical anti-democrats. In the late 1960's and early 1970's there was a wave of guerrilla activity - kidnappings, murders and bombings; but the army proved ineffectual against the guerrillas and in Guatemala due process of law had always been notoriously slow. The answer was simple. Using the advice of the United States Embassy's military attaché (later found murdered), a number of vigilante groups were set up. A vigilante assassination-squad is answerable to no one, and the 'White Hand', Guatemala's version of a volunteer Gestapo unit, has been responsible for thousands of murders and torturings. It seems strange that such a small country could produce such an appalling haemorrhage, that a system of terror and counter-terror could be responsible for so many deaths. And you might ask: What is the point? Seventy-five percent of Guatemalans are peasants of a classical sort: subsistence tanners and part-time cane-cutters, coffee-pluckers and cotton-pickers. The government, while insisting that it is democratic and does not imprison people, rigs elections and allows the 'White Hand' and a score of other vigilante groups to terrorize a justifiably sullen population. (There are plenty of freelance gunmen in Guatemala; in 1975, the vice-president claimed that he had enough armed men in his party alone to invade Belize, if the army proved gutless or unwilling.) Given the circumstances, it did not seem to me unusual that La Democracia was a mess or that my fellow passengers on the train were gloomy.

I had a political reverie on that train. It was this: the government held elections, encouraged people to vote and appeared to be democratic. The army appeared to be impartial, the newspapers disinterested. And it remained a peasant society, basically underfed and unfree. It must perplex any peasant to be told he is living in a free country, when the facts of his life contradict this. It might be that this does not perplex him; he has every reason to believe, in accordance with the evidence, that democracy is feudal, a bureaucracy run by crooks and trigger-happy vigilantes. When one sees a government of the Guatemalan sort professing such high-mindedness in its social aims and producing such mediocre results, one cannot be surprised if the peasant concludes that communism might be an improvement. It was a Latin American sickness: inferior government gave democracy an evil name and left people no option but to seek an alternative. The cynic might say - I met many who did - that these people are better off with an authoritarian government. I happen to think this is nonsense. From Guatemala to Argentina, the majority of the countries are run by self-serving tyrannies which are only making the merciless vengeance of anarchy inevitable. The shabby deceits were as apparent from this train as a row of Burma-Shave signs.

The stinging sweetness of the sugar cane, the putrefaction in every dismal village, the sorry children, the very frail huts and the sombre faces of the passengers in the train - it all made my mood reflective. And, having taken the train, I had the illusion that I was not terribly far from Boston -1 had left the American border just a week ago. The train had given me a sense of continuity which, unlike the dislocation and disconnection one experiences after a plane journey, had made Guatemala seem incongruous and puzzling. On this branch-line from Boston I had found barefoot Indians and starving children and rather ominous-looking peasants with two-foot knives resting on their knees.

The atmosphere in the train was grim. This was the bottom of the social scale, mainly people going to the next village, a ten-cent ride to sell a dollar's worth of bananas. The children chattered; no one else did. The adults seemed incurious, even surly, and those whose eyes I caught watching me appeared guiltily suspicious and turned away. In conversation they were off-hand. They asked no questions at all; their replies were brief.

At Coatepeque I said to a man on the platform, 'It's cold here. Is it always this cold?'

'Sometimes,' he said. He walked away.

At Santa Lucia I asked a man how far he had come. He said Mazatenango.

'Do you live at Mazatenango?'

'No.' He said nothing more. When the train moved on he changed his seat.

At La Democracia I told a man I was headed for Zacapa. He said nothing. I said I was taking the train to Zacapa. He said nothing. I wondered if he was deaf. I said, 'Is it hard to get to Zacapa?'

'Yes,' he said, and lapsed into silence once again.

He was smoking a cigarette. Most of the passengers had cigarettes in their mouths. It seemed to be a country of chain-smokers. A British traveller remarked, 'There are fashions in Guatemala which it would require more than common charity to speak of with respect; and among these stands foremost the immoderate use of tobacco, by both sexes.' That was in 1828. The traveller - his name was Henry Dunn - estimated that men smoked twenty cigars a day and women fifty cigarettes. No one on my train smoked a cigar, but as I have said the passengers represented the poorest class in the country.

It helps to take the train if one wishes to understand. Understanding was like a guarantee of depression, but it was an approach to the truth. For most tourists, Guatemala is a four-day affair with quaintness and ruins: veneration at the capital's churches, a day sniffing nosegays at Antigua, another at the colourful Indian market at Chichicastenango, a picnic at the Mayan temples of Tikal. I think I would have found this itinerary more depressing, and less rewarding, than my own meandering from the Mexican border through the coastal departments. The train creaked and whimpered but, incredibly, it kept to its schedule: at 3:20 we were at Santa Maria - as promised in Cook's International Timetable - and, eating my fifth banana of the day, I studied our progress on our climb to Escuintla and the greater heights of Guatemala City.

Now there were volcanoes all around us, or volcanic hills with footstool shapes that the Mexicans call 'little ovens'. It was cooler, and as the sun grew pinker and a ridge of hills rose to meet it where it hovered drawn to the shape of a chalice near the Pacific, the gathering darkness threw half-tones across the hills; those fragments of white were the hats and shirts of cane-cutters marching home. But it was not an ordinary jungle twilight, the mould of shadow under wide gleaming leaves, flickering hut fires and the jostlings of mottled pigs and goats. The sky ^as in flames far-off, and when we came closer the fire was revealed as enormous: bonfires of waste cane burned in sloping fields and sent up cloud tides that were purple and orange and crimson; they floated and lost their colour, becoming white until the night absorbed them. Then this smoke fogged the tracks and it was as if we were travelling on some antique steam locomotive in a mountain pass in Asia, through fog that smelled of stale candy. In the words of Hart Crane, we 'roared by and left / three men, still hungry on the tracks, ploddingly / watching the tail lights wizen and converge, slip- / ping gimleted and neatly out of sight.

The last landscape 1 had seen in daylight had been a row of volcanoes, shaped like a child's drawing of mountain peaks, with stiff steep sides and narrow summits. As we drew near to Guatemala City there was no landscape to speak of. There were the cane fires, and I could see the headlamps of cars on roads, but the rest was black with a scattering of lanterns, and now and then an illuminated church steeple at a mountain village. It was chilly as we passed through the highlands to enter the city on the plateau: huts, houses, streetlights, buildings. We crossed a bridge over the main street. The passengers who had come from the coast looked down at the glare and the crowds with what seemed like alarm.

Guatemala City, an extremely horizontal place, is like a city on its back. Its ugliness, which is a threatened look (the low morose houses have earthquake cracks in their façades; the buildings wince at you with fright lines), is ugliest on those streets where, just past the last toppling house, a blue volcano's cone bulges. I could see the volcanoes from the window of my hotel room. I was on the third floor, which was also the top floor. They were tall volcanoes and looked capable of spewing lava. Their beauty was undeniable; but it was the beauty of witches. The rumbles from their fires had heaved this city down.

The first capital had been destroyed by torrents of water. So the capital was moved three miles away to Antigua in the middle of the sixteenth century. In 1773, Antigua was flattened by an earthquake, and a more stable site - at least it was farther from the slopes of the great volcanoes - was found here, in the Valley of the Hermitage, formerly an Indian village. Churches were built - a dozen, of Spanish loveliness, with slender steeples and finely finished porches and domes. The earth shook - not much, but enough to split them. Tremors left cracks between windows, and separated, in the stained-glass of those windows, the shepherd from his brittle flock, the saint from his gold staff, the martyr from his persecutors. Christs were parted from their crosses and the anatomy of chapel Virgins violated, as their enamelling, the porcelain white of faces and fingers, shattered, sometimes with a report that startled the faithful in their prayers. The windows, the statues, the masonry were mended; and gold leaf was applied thickly to the splintered altars. It seemed the churches had been made whole again. But the motion of earthquakes had never really ceased. In Guatemala they were inescapable. And in 1917 the whole city was thrown into its streets - every church and house and brothel. Thousands died; that unprecedented earthquake was seen as a judgement; and more fled to the Caribbean coast, where there were only savages to contend with.

The Guatemalans, sullen at the best of times, display a scolded resignation - bordering at times on guiltiness - when the subject of earthquakes is raised. Charles. Darwin is wonderful in describing the sense of dislocation and spiritual panic that earthquakes produce in people. He himself experienced an earthquake, when the Beagle was anchored off the Chilean coast. 'A bad earthquake,' he writes, 'at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid; - one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced.'

And, speaking of his own frequent earthquakes, the Guatemalan seems to imply in his undemonstrative way that the punishment is deserved. It is a judgement, and it was foretold in Revelation ('what must soon take place'), in Chapter Six, the opening of the sixth seal: 'I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale; the sky vanished like a scroll that is rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. Then the kings of the earth and the great men and the generals and the rich and the strong, and every one, slave and free, hid in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains . . .'

Guatemalan earthquakes are no worse than this doomsday spectacle.

The city has been rebuilt. There is no other place to shift it. Succeeding earthquakes have left their marks on Guatemala City, but these wrinkles - part of the look of Guatemala - are less of a disfigurement than the styles of building that supplanted the Spanish architecture. Terraces of huts, the spattered stucco of mock-colonial houses, two-storey blocks and now the taller American-style hotels (how long, one wonders, will these monstrosities last?) constitute the city today. Some of the churches have been put back together, their refinements blunted in the rebuilding.

I found the churches gloomy, but after a few days church-going was toy single recreation. 'The inhabitants of Guatemala appear to have little of the desire for public amusements seen in most cities,' wrote Robert Dunlop in 1847. It was hard to knock holes in any of these old assessments. 'Almost the only recreation of the natives being the religious processions, at which the figures of saints are paraded ... of these, there are two or three every month.' For historical, religious and seismic reasons I chose the church of La Merced. It was the feast day of Our Lady of Mercy, to whom the church is consecrated. The church showed earthquake damage, though not so much as the Cathedral which, with its cracked arches and pillars and part of its ceiling missing, ought to be condemned as unsafe. La Merced also was damaged, but it had been recommended by the Chevalier Arthur Morelet (described by his translator as 'a French gentleman of leisure and extensive scientific acquirements'), who in his Travels in Central America (1871) called it, 'a pretty church with a fine site. From an artistic point of view, its massive towers are open to criticism, notwithstanding that they give to the edifice a great part of its originality.'

There were several hundred people in front of La Merced, waiting to go in - so many, that I had to enter by a side door. Inside, there were three activities in progress: a very large crowd in the centre aisle were pushing to get near a robed priest who held a tall candle in a silver candlestick - the object was about the size of a shotgun; another group was more scattered - these were families having their pictures taken by men with Polaroid cameras; the last large group had congregated around a table set up near a brutal crucifixion and they were signing a clipboard of papers and handing coins to a man - this, I discovered, was a lottery. And at the small chapels and minor altars people were praying, lighting candles, carrying tapers or chatting amiably. At a side chapel was the Virgin of Chiquiniquira, a black madonna with an ebony face. Black Guatemalans (there are many; a settlement of blacks at Livingstone on the Caribbean coast is English-speaking) had prostrated themselves before the nigrescent virgin who 'loaded down with sumptuous toys,' remarks Morelet, 'receives exclusively the homage of the faithful of the African race.'

Travellers less sympathetic than Morelet - one supposes them to be unyielding Protestants - have seen Guatemalan Catholicism as barbarous. Dunlop regarded saints' days in Guatemala as no more than occasions for the combustion of 'great quantities of fireworks' and disgusted by the statues Dunn wrote, 'most of the images of the saints . . . are very common pieces of sculpture, and disfigured by absurd and vulgar dresses.' Aldous Huxley, who affected a kind of comic, stuporous Buddhism (his senile transcendentalism he gave fictional form in his silly novel Island) jeered at Guatemalan penitents until his package tour called him to Antigua, where his jeers were resumed.

Anyone who finds a frenzied secularity at a church service in Guatemala - and thinks it should be stamped out - ought to go to the North End of Boston on the feast day of Saint Anthony and consider the probability of redemption in the scuffles of ten thousand Italians frantically pinning dollar bills to the cassock of their patron saint, who is borne on a litter past pizza parlours and mafia hangouts in a procession headed by a wailing priest and six smirking acolytes. Compared to that, the goings-on at La Merced were solemn. The priest with the silver candle appeared to be fighting his way through the crowd of women - there were only women in that part of the church. Actually, what he was doing was allowing the women to get a grip on the candle. A woman waited, lunged, gripped the candle in both hands and yelled an ejaculation; the priest yanked the candle from her hands and another woman made a dive for it. The priest continued to move in a circle; his perspiration had turned his white surplice grey.

The Polaroid cameramen were slightly better organized. They had touts who were rushing up to family groups and, for two dollars, posing them near especially punished-looking saints in order to have their pictures taken. There was heavy competition. I counted fourteen photographers and as many touts. They had deployed themselves from the sacristy door to the baptismal font, and in every niche and near every altar - there were two photographers near St Sebastian: that martyring was particularly prized - flashbulbs popped and credulous Indians gasped as they saw their startled faces sharpening in full colour on snapshot squares. It was in a way the miracle they had hoped for, though the price was high - two dollars was a week's pay.

The lottery was much cheaper. At that table near the crucifixion the crowd was so large I had to stand for fifteen minutes before I could get a glimpse at the clipboard or the fee or, for that matter, the prize. This was not a literate country - that much was clear. Only a handful of the people were able to sign their names; the rest told their names to a lady in a black shawl. She slowly copied the name down, with the person's address; the person handed over ten cents and received a slip of paper with a number on it. Most of the people were Indian women, carrying babies on slings on their backs like slumping rucksacks or papooses. I waited until a man signed the paper and followed him as he walked away smiling at his coupon.

'Excuse me,' I said. 'But what are you hoping to win?'

'You did not see the statue?'

'No.'

'It is on the table - come.' He took me around the back of the crowd and pointed. The lady in the black shawl, seeing that I was a foreigner who craved a look at the statue, lifted it up for me to admire.

'It is beautiful, no?'

'Very beautiful,' I said.

'I think it is very expensive.'

'Of course.'

Some Indian women heard. They nodded; they grinned - they had no teeth; they said it was very lovely, and they went on speaking their names, or signing, and paying their money.

The prize in the lottery - it was more than a statue - was extraordinary. It was an image of Jesus, about two feet high, with his back turned. He wore a crown of gold and a bright red cape with gold fringes, and with his right hand he was knocking on the door of a cottage. It was almost certainly a copy of an English country cottage - a plastic cottage wall of stone, and plastic beams at the eaves; a mullioned window with plastic panes; and an oaken plastic door surrounded by rambling plastic roses, some blue and some yellow. They were not morning glories - they had plastic thorns. A Catholic education had introduced me to Jesus on the cross, in a boat, being flogged, working in a carpentry shop, praying, denouncing the moneychangers and standing in a river to be baptized. I had never seen Jesus knocking at the door of an English country cottage, though I had a dim memory of a painting depicting something similar (five months later, walking through St Paul's Cathedral in London I saw Holman Hunt's 'The Light of the World' and was able to link it to that Guatemalan set-piece).

'What is Jesus doing?' I asked the Guatemalan man.

'As you see,' he said. 'Knocking on the door.' Knocking is a violent word in Spanish - more like hammering or throttling. Jesus was not doing that.

'Why is he doing that?'

The man laughed. 'He wants to go in. I think he wants to go in.'

The lady in the black shawl put it down. She said, 'It is heavy.'

'That house,' I said, gesturing. 'Is it in Guatemala?'

'Yes,' said the man. He stood on tiptoe and looked again. 'I cannot say.'

'Does the house represent anything?'

'The little house? It represents a house.'

We were getting nowhere. The man excused himself. He said he wanted to have his picture taken.

There was a priest nearby.

'I have a question, Father.'

He nodded benignly.

'I have been admiring the statue of Jesus in the lottery.'

'A beautiful statue,' he said.

'Yes, but what does it represent?'

'It represents Jesus, who is visiting a house. The house is represented. You are an American, no? Many Americans come here.'

'I have never seen anything like it before.'

'This is a very special lottery. Our feast day.' He bowed. He wanted to get away from me.

'Is that in the Bible? Jesus at the little house?'

'Oh, yes. Jesus goes to the little house. He visits the people, he preaches and so forth.'

He sounded as if he was making this up. I said, 'Where exactly in the Bible-'

'You will excuse me?' he said. He gathered his skirts. 'Welcome to Guatemala.'

Perhaps he thought I was mocking - I wasn't; I was only seeking information. If my hotel had been something other than a flophouse, run by a bad-tempered hag, I might have found a Gideon Bible in a table in my room. But there was no table, no Bible. 'I have a room with a bath,' the hag had said; the bath was a rusty shower pipe suspended from the ceiling on a loop of wire. Two days in this hotel and I was ready to board any train - even a Guatemalan one.

Some time later, I found the Biblical text from which that lottery prize had been derived. It was in Revelation, not far from the earthquake reference ('behold there was an earthquake, and the sun became black . . .'). In Chapter Three, Christ says, 'Those whom I love, I reprove and chasten; so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.'

I used my time in Guatemala City to recuperate from the strenuous train-ride I had had from Veracruz. I needed long walks and a couple of good nights' sleep; I made a phone call to London (my wife missed me, I told her I loved her; my children said they had made a snowman; this telephone call cost me $114), and then a tour of the bars where, hoping to meet Guatemalans with lively stories, I was surrounded by disappointed tourists. I walked from one end of the city to the other, from zone to zone, through the curio market (embroidered shirts, baskets, pottery - the clumsy work of defeated-looking Indians) and the food market (skinned pigs' heads, black sausages and the medieval sight of small children binding up bouquets of flowers with bleeding fingers and being shouted at by cruel old men). It was a large city, but not a hospitable one. It had a reputation for thievery; and yet it did not strike me as dangerous, only commonplace and sombre. I suggested to the hag at the hotel that the city seemed to me sadly lacking in entertainment.

'You should go to the market at Chichicastenango,' she said. That's what everyone does.'

And that's why I don't want to do it, I thought. I said, 'I am planning to go to Zacapa.'

She laughed. I had not seen her laugh before. It was quite horrible.

'You came here to go to Zacapa!'

That's right.'

'Do you know how hot it is in Zacapa?'

'I have never been there.'

'Listen,' she said. 'There is nothing in Zacapa. Nothing, nothing.'

'There is a train to Zacapa,' I said. 'And a train out of it, to San Salvador.'

She hooted again. 'Have you seen that train !'

This was starting to annoy me. I wanted to tell her what I thought of her hotel.

She said, 'When I was a small girl my father had a farm in Mazatenango. I used to ride the train all the time. It took a full day ! I liked it, because I was a small girl. But I am not a small girl anymore' - this was incontestable - 'and I have not taken the train since. You should take the bus. Forget Zacapa - go to Tikal, see Antigua, buy some things at the market - but don't go to Zacapa.'

I went to the railway station. There was a sign over the two ticket windows. It said, It Is Much Cheaper To Go By Train! Over one window was lettered, To The Pacific, over the other, To The Atlantic. I paid a dollar and bought a ticket to Zacapa, which was halfway down the Atlantic line.

The train was not leaving until seven the next morning, so I went for my last long walk. This took me to Zone Four and a church I had not really expected to find in Guatemala, or this hemisphere. To say the Capilla de Yurrita is mock-Russian orthodox in style is to say nothing, though it has onion domes and ikons. It is a crazy castle. Pink rectangles are painted on its concrete walls to resemble brickwork, and on its main steeple are four gigantic ice-cream cones; beneath the steeple are fourteen pillars, decorated like barber-poles. It has balconies and porches, and rows of cement buds on its castellated roofs, four clocks showing the wrong time, gargoyles and a twice-life-sized dog clinging to one of the cones. On the façade are the four Evangelists, and peeping out of windows the twelve Apostles, and three Christs and a two-headed eagle. It is red and black, rusty metal and tiles. The oak door panels are carved, the left shows Guatemalan ruins, the right Guatemalan tombs, and over the door, in Spanish, a scroll reads 'The Chapel of Our Lady of Anguish' with a dedication to Don Pedro de Alvarado y Mesia. On Don Pedro's shield a conquistador is shown driving an army into retreat and beneath it are three volcanoes, one in eruption.

Inside, there were three old ladies in the front pew singing a hymn to Mary. Mah-ree-ah; they sang with passion but off-key; Mah-ree-ah. At the back of the church was a lady with a little dog, and five Indians. These pious people were overwhelmed - as who would not be? - by the moorish-style choir loft, the ornate Spanish altar-piece, the vast supine Christ covered with a lace-curtain and attended by a dark-robed Mary with seven silver daggers in her breast. All the statues were clothed and many of the bouquets in the heavy gilt vases were real. The walls were covered with murky gloating frescoes and stone carvings - trees, candles, sunbeams, flames; near the pulpit was a bas-relief of the Sermon on the Mount. Even the small dog was silent. Somehow this maniacally opulent church had survived a hundred years of earthquakes.

But the Polytechnic School further down the Avenida Reforma also was unscathed. It seemed only the most bizarre buildings had withstood the tremors. The Polytechnic was a fake fortress two city blocks wide, with fake watchtowers and sentry posts and what looked like slits for gun emplacements. It was painted grey and on the central tower was the motto 'Virtue - Science - Strength'. The wide shady avenue on which the Polytechnic stood was lined with statuary: a great bronze bull (its penis daubed with red paint), a panther, a stag, another bull - this one charging, a lion killing a crocodile, two large wild boars fighting-one biting the other's belly; at the junction of this avenue and a main street there was a statue - lions, wreaths, maidens and a succession of plinths surmounted by a patriot. Nearby was an open manhole, as deep as a well and twice as wide.

The street was empty; there were no other strollers. I walked and it seemed to me that the way the joke church, the fake palace and the savage statues had endured the worst earthquakes in the world had the makings of a maxim; they had remained intact, as fools survive scorn. I kept walking and, just after nightfall, found a vegetarian restaurant in a darkened suburb. The dining room held only three people, one of whom - in a turban and long beard and the silver bracelet required by the Sikh religion - was a young Californian. He told me that he was on the point of rejecting Sikhism, but had not got around to shaving, and the turban gave him confidence. These three were architects, designing houses for the people who had been made homeless in the earthquake of 1976, two years before.

'Are you just designing the houses?' I asked. 'Or are you building them, too?'

'Designing, making concrete blocks, planning villages, building the houses - the whole bit,' said the man in the turban.

I put it to him that this sort of idealism could be carried too far. Surely it was the government's job to see that people were housed. If they needed money they could sell some of those bronze statues as scrap metal.

'We're working under the government,' said one of the others.

Wouldn't it be better, I said, to teach people how to make houses and let them get on with the job?

'What we do,' said the man in the turban, 'is put up three walls. If someone wants the house he has to finish it - put up the fourth wall and thereof.'

I approved of this effort. It seemed to strike the right balance, the trust in idealism tempered by a measure of caution. I said that, so far, I had found the Guatemalans a pretty gloomy bunch. Was this their experience?

'You answer,' said one to the man in the turban. 'You've been here for a year.'

'They're heavy,' said the man in the turban, stroking his beard sagely. 'But they've got a lot to be heavy about.'

7

THE 7:00 TO ZACAPA

It was a brutal city, but at six in the morning a froth of fog endowed it with secrecy and gave it the simplicity of a mountain-top. Before the sun rose to burn it away, the fog dissolved the dull straight lines of its streets, and whitened its low houses and made its somber people ghostly as they appeared for moments before being lifted away, like revengers glimpsed in their hauntings. Then Guatemala City, such a grim thing, became a tracing, a sketch without substance, and the poor Indians and peasants - who had no power - looked blue and bold and watchful. They possessed it at this hour. There was no wind; the fog hung in fine grey clouds, a foot from the ground. Even the railway station, no more than a brick shed, took on the character of a great terminus: there was no way of verifying that it did not rise up for five stories in a clock tower crowned by pigeons and iron-work, so well hidden was its small tin roof by the fog the volcanoes had trapped. There were about twenty people standing near the ticket window of the station - in rags; but their rags seemed just another deception of the fog.

They carried baskets, cardboard boxes, bananas and machetes. They were Indians and weatherbeaten farmers, standing in silence in the dampness. One distinguished-looking man in a spotless sombrero and white moustache and frock coat smoked a cheroot. From the waist up he could have been the mayor, but his trousers were ragged and he wore no shoes - as the shoe-shine-boys lingering nearby were quick to point out. They too were barefoot.

A bell was rung. The gate was opened. We went through to the platform. The cars - in much worse shape than the ones that had taken me from Tecún Umán - had the further disadvantage of having been soaked by the fog. The padded seats were torn - springs and stuffing Protruded; the wooden seats were shaky; all the seats were wet. The car itself, a relic from the 1920's, was neither quaint nor comfortable, but merely a small uncared-for box, with bare wires hanging from the ceiling, and stinking of dirt. It was shaped, as all Central American rail-Ways cars were shaped, like a trolley car - wooden, with a curved roof and a verandah platform at either end. Zacapa was not on the tourist route; if it was, there would have been a well-sprung bus serving the Zacapa Department. The Guatemala Tourist Board was attentive to the needs of the visitors. But only barefoot peasants lived in Zacapa and their train matched them in looking woebegone.

We sat in the wet car listening to the jabber on a girl's green radio. The girl held it in the crook of her arm; in her other arm was an infant.

A man with a monkey-wrench walked through the car.

The man sitting next to me said, 'This car is broken.'

'That is true,' I said.

There was a shout, followed by a general stampede, as the passengers from this car ran into the next one. I watched Indians dragging baskets, and women pushing children, and men with machetes. Most people merely put their heads down and butted their way into the next car. I was alone in the car a few minutes later. 'Get out,' said the man with the monkey-wrench, so I followed the others - two cars' passengers jammed into one- and considered myself lucky to find a seat.

'Good morning,' I said to the Indians, trying to ingratiate myself with people who would share this all-day journey to the eastern province.'How areyou?'

A sniggering man to my left, dandling a large skinny boy on his leg, said, 'They do not speak Spanish. They know a few words -that is all.'

'That is all I know,' I said.

'No - you are doing extremely well.'

'On the other hand, my English is a little better.'

The man laughed - much too loud. I could see he was drunk, though how he had managed this so early in the morning I could not tell.

Our train was shunted back and forth, and the broken car - no more broken-looking than the one we were in-was removed. I had expected a delay; I had the morning paper and a novel to read, but on the dot of seven the train's harsh horn blew, and we began racing through the fog at the edge of a muddy road.

At the first level crossing, there was great confusion outside the train, and inside a woman stood up and began to laugh and shout. The train had slowed down for the crossing, and now 1 could see a boy running alongside with a bundle. The woman yelled to the boy, telling him to hurry, but at that moment a soldier by the door (there were two soldiers in each of the train's three cars) put down his automatic rifle and leaned out and caught the bundle. The soldier handed it to the woman.

'It is my food,' said the woman.

The passengers continued to stare at her.

'I forgot it this morning,' she said. 'That was my son.'

'He is a fast runner!' said the drunken man next to me. 'That soldier is pretty quick, too. Hyah!'

The soldier had tucked his rifle under his arm. He took up his position by the door and glowered at the man. You might have thought, from the way the soldiers scanned the huts by the track side and kept their rifles ready, that they expected to come under heavy fire. But nothing more lethal than a banana peel was aimed at the train.

These huts, and some in a horrific slum outside San Salvador, were the worst I saw in Latin America. Rural poverty is bad, but there is hope in a pumpkin field, or the sight of chickens, or a field of cattle which, even if they are not owned by the people in the huts, offer opportunities to the hungry cattle rustler. But this slum outside Guatemala City, a derangement of feeble huts made out of paper and tin, was as hopeless as any I had ever seen in my life. The people who lived here, I found out, were those who had been made homeless in the last earthquake-refugees who had been here for two years and would probably stay until they died, or until the government dispersed them, and set fire to the shacks, so that tourists would not be upset by this dismal sight. The huts were made out of waste lumber and tree branches, cardboard and bits of plastic, rags, car doors and palm fronds, metal signboards that had been abstracted from poles, and grass woven into chicken-wire. And the slum, which remained in view for twenty minutes - miles of it - smouldered; near each house was a small cooking fire, with a blackened tin can simmering on it. Children rise early in the tropics; this seemed to be an entire slum of children, very dirty ones, with their noses running, waving at the train from curtains of yellow fog.

The train passengers on their way to Zacapa did not take much interest in this slum, but one could hardly blame them. They were as ragged as the people in the huts.

And then there was nothing. No shacks, no trees, no people, no smoke, no barking dogs. The ground gave way and there was emptiness; the sound of birds and insects was eclipsed, and in that silence was a thin echo of crows. It was a startling experience of space. We were on a bridge and crossing a deep gorge. 1 looked out of the window; the sight took my breath away - my legs went numb and a buzz began in my ears. Hundreds of feet down, at the rusty struts of a bridge, a gash of rock lay beneath us. We were leaving Guatemala City's plateau and making our way across this rickety bridge - but a long one: I could not see the far side - to the mountains on the northeast of the city. It seemed a particularly dangerous traverse for this train, not only because it was so old and trembled on the bridge, but also because all the windows were open.

Steeling myself for the shock, I leaned out and took another look at the gorge. There was no water in it. There were pinnacles of rock which had snagged scraps of fog, as country hedges and thorns snag bunches of fleece; and through this streaming whiteness a pair of crows flew and steadied themselves. I looked down upon the crows' backs, and this sight, with the white behind it, was like a glimpse of sky - the birds' silhouette in the clouds - as if the train had turned upside down. There was nothing but fog above the train, but below it were broken clouds, and birds, and a glint of sun. This topsy-turvy sight made my head swim. I shut the window.

'Open the window!' A boy of about eight or nine hit me on the knee.

'No,'I said.

'I want to look out!'

'It is dangerous,' I said.

'I want to see!' he yelled, and tried to get past me.

'Sit down,' I said. People were staring at me. 'It is very dangerous.'

The boy spoke to his father - the drunken man. 'I want to look out of the window. He will not let me!'

I smiled at the old man. 'He will fall into the valley.'

'You,' said the old man, pushing the child aside, 'you will fall into the valley!' The boy sulked. The old man said to me, 'He is always causing trouble. One day, something terrible will happen to him.'

I could see that the old drunken man was angry. Trying to calm him I said, 'Your son is a good boy, but this train is very dangerous - so - '

'This train is not very dangerous,' said the man. 'It is an old useless train. It is worth nothing.'

'Right,' I said. The Indians nodded. It gladdened me to know that these people recognized that the train was a piece of junk. I had thought, from their silence, that they had not noticed.

There were more bridges, more gorges filled with cloud and fog, but none was so frightening as that first one. And yet this part of the trip reminded me of the route through the Khyber Pass taken by the battered train to Peshawar. It was more than the view from a similarly beat-up car of rocky mountainsides; it was the sight of a dozen sections of track - ahead, across the valley, and one beneath that, and one over there, and another lying parallel, and more above and below all the way to the valley floor. Not a dozen railways, but pieces of the one we were on, sections that would lead this wheezing engine around four mountains to a descent, another bridge, another climb to the winding sections that ringed those far-off cliffs. Round and round we went; sometimes the engine was silenced by its distance from us on the far side of a ridge, while at other times the curves were so tight it roared past us on a hairpin and seemed like a different train altogether, going in the opposite direction.

The valley floors were stony; the fog had lifted here. The sun revealed the landscape as dead and brown, and the plants which appeared as pale green woods from on high were thorn bushes and bunches of cactus, so thin they cast no shadows. I had thought Guatemala was green - the whole of it like the jungly part around Tecún Umán - but passing from west to east and then pushing north-east to Zacapa, the country had become barer and poorer and stonier. Now in the Motagua Valley - shown on the map as hilly, with a river running through it - we were in a waterless desert: no sign of the river in this parched wasteland. The mountains were stone, the riverbeds rocky; no people. And it looked even worse up ahead as the empty land stretched dustily into the sun.

Every ten or fifteen minutes, the train halted. The soldiers jumped out and positioned themselves in a crouch on the ground, a firing posture. Then a few people would hop to the ground and, without looking back at the train, begin walking into the desert - gone, lost behind the boulders, before the train started again. Most of these stations were not listed on the ticket; they were signboards, a clump of cactus, nothing more than that. Aguas Calientes was one of these: a sign, some cactus, a heap of rocks at the foot of a dry mountain. We started, and I saw a dry riverbed that mimicked a road, but near the riverbed an odd sight - great spurts of white steam from the hot springs that gave this place its name, bubbling from beneath that mountain which was a volcano. There were hot pools around the shooting steam, and women were doing their washing in them. Not even cactus could live among these geysers - the boiling water foamed in the bare rock and drained through the cracks; and the only live things visible in that dead corner of desert were the bent-over women scrubbing their laundry.

The first large station was not a station at all, but a row of shops, a school, and some tall dead trees. People watched from the porches of the shops and children ran into the schoolyard to look at the train (there were only two trains a week). Here, a number of people got off the train, but no one got on. And the train was so infrequent and unde-pendable that not even food-sellers bothered to show up at this station. A boy with a case of tonic hollered to ask whether anyone wanted a drink-that was all. But one Indian in the opposite seat from mine had got off, so now I could stretch out my legs.

The heat had put most of the passengers to sleep. They were small people, they fit these seats and could be recumbent in them. I hunched forward and forced myself to take notes on the blank pages of the book I was too tired to read, Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. From time to time I smoked my pipe. I did not talk to anyone. No one talked to anyone. There was no conversation on this train.

It struck me that since leaving Veracruz the trains I had taken had not been noticeably congenial. I was continually reminded that I was travelling alone. I had not expected the people to be so dour or the trains to be in such a state of decay. I had assumed there would be the usual free-for-all - planters and tenant-farmers, Indians, hippies, ranch-hands, coastal blacks, Americans with rucksacks and road-maps, a few tourists. But the train held only the very poor - everyone else had taken the bus. And these were not just poor people, but defeated people, who wore hats but no shoes, and regarded not only strangers but each other with suspicion. They were hardly the stuff of boon companions, and though I liked the rattle of the train and congratulated myself on having found a little-known route through Central America, this made for rather lonely travel.

The penalty for this sense of discovery - who would have guessed Guatemala to be such desert? - this sustaining experience of making my way among marvels of erupted landscape, was that I was a stranger travelling with strangers. They were either oblivious to, or mystified by my presence. They stole glances at my pipe, but when addressed by me in their own language displayed (in shrugs and grunts) a marked reluctance to chat.

Across the aisle an old woman was hawking and spitting. She would clear her throat and then spit - pah! - on the floor at her feet. This annoyed me (and the passengers walking through the mess nauseated me), but there was worse to follow. A woman selling coffee out of a large clay jar entered the train at a tiny station. I had had no breakfast, and more, thought that a hot coffee would be just the thing to bring on a sweat that would cool me. In the hottest areas of Burma, the wise Burmese drink cups of steaming tea and stay cool that way. The coffee-seller dipped a tin cup into her jar and decanted this into a cup she pulled out of her pocket, and handed this to a buyer. When the person finished the coffee, the woman took the cup back and repeated the process. So everyone used the same cup. If I had not known, or if I had been able to persuade myself that I was in no danger, I might have bought a coffee. But, before it was my turn, the spitting woman called the coffee-seller over.

'How much?' she said.

The coffee-seller told her the price: two cents.

The woman spat, drank, wiped her mouth and handed the cup back.

It was my turn next.

I said, 'Do you have another cup?'

'Sorry,' she said and moved away.

Further on, a small girl boarded with some watermelon. Most of it had been sliced. I said, 'Those pieces are too big for me,' and took out my switchblade. As I cut my own piece ('This is about the right size, eh?') - my cutting was a guarantee against cholera -1 noticed that what I had taken for seeds on the cut pieces were glossy black flies.

The mountains receded into the distance. We had circled around their slopes and descended to a blighted area, a straight line of track.

For the next few hours I looked for the Motagua River, but it was nowhere in view. This was Death Valley. The earth here was finer and duller than sand; it was powder, light brown, that was stirred by the movement of the little train. There was a dusting of it on all the cactuses, which gave them the look of stumps. There is no more hopeless object than a dead cactus; it does not collapse, but rather turns grey and hard and seems to petrify. The rest was scrub or single stones, and once, not far from the track, the ribs and skull of a cow, much whiter than the one I had seen in Texas. The only odour was the dust of this pulverized plain. The chief characteristic of a desert, apart from the absence of water, was this absence of smell.

I kept thinking of what the lady in the hotel had said to me: Don't go toZacapal

But if I had not come here I would not have known the extent of this desolation. The heat was intense, but it was still tolerable, and hadn't I complained of the cold just a short time ago in Chicago? I had asked for this. And this was the route the muleteers had taken into El Salvador; it was also - though hardly used these days - the principal way of travelling to Puerto Barrios and the so-called Atlantic coast. It was bad, but if it got no worse than this - it was hard to imagine anything worse - it would be bearable.

I did have one fear: that the train would stop, just like that, no warning, no station; that the engine would seize up in the heat and that we would be stuck here. It had happened on what was regarded as a fine railway a hundred miles out of Veracruz, and the Mexicans had no explanation. This railway was clearly much older, the engine more of a gasper. And suppose it does, I thought, suppose it just stops here and can't start? It was ten in the morning, the open cars were full of people, the train carried no water, there was no road for miles, nor was there any shade. How long did it take to die? I guessed it would not take long in this boundless desert.

It was no reassurance, half an hour later, to arrive at the town of Progreso. Aldous Huxley had come this way in 1933: 'As we steamed out of the station, I noticed that the place was called Progreso. The fact annoyed me; I can detect an irony without having it underlined for me.' Progreso was huts of unbaked mud-bricks, with palm-frond roofs (odd: there were no palms nearby, no trees of any sort). And Rancho, some miles further on, was no better: no progress in Progreso, no ranches in Rancho. This was the hottest, dustiest, most derelict place I had seen outside the boondocks of northern Uganda.

But there was one great difference. The graveyard near Rancho was large and easily identifiable as a graveyard. The tombs were nearly as big as Rancho's mud huts; they were solid and looked newly whitewashed, cottage-shaped with pillars and slanting roofs. They were much stronger than the huts. But I could see the logic in this. A man spent a life-time in a mud-hut, but these tombs had to house his remains for all eternity. The mud huts were not built to withstand earthquakes - the tombs were.

In this scorching heat, I was very thirsty. My mouth was so dry I felt as if I had eaten a handful of moths. An hour later I bought a bottle of soda water and drank it warm. But the heat did not let up, nor did the landscape change. From halt to halt, the cactus and the pulverized soil were all there was to see. People scrambled onto the train, people scrambled off; people slept; the old woman spat. Every so often I thought: What if the engine dies on us - what then! And saw a skinny man, like the Angel of Death, watching us from the rag of a cactus's shade.

I had passed the point of expecting to see anything different, when a long trough of black water appeared beside the train - an irrigation ditch. It became a narrow canal and poured from spouts into fields -corn at Malena, tobacco at Jicaro. The green was dazzling and I had got so used to the desert tones, this colour seemed miraculous. But it was, after all, no more than a small patch in an immense desert.

Jicaro appeared to be in earthquake country. There were not many huts here, but those I saw all had a crack or a collapsed roof or wall. They were still lived in, however; the people had accommodated themselves to missing walls or gaps. There were houses being built here, too - without a doubt the houses planned by those American architects I had met in Guatemala City. But I could not say that the government-assisted project was a success. There were many three-walled houses, without roofs, which demonstrated the lack of inclination of anyone to finish them off and take up residence. The town of Jicaro was wrecked: the catastrophe showed, and very little of it had been rebuilt.

We came to Cabanas. Here were coconut trees. A woman with a pile of coconuts sliced them open with a machete and passed them into the train - five cents. The passengers drank the coconut water and threw the rest away. Pigs tried to stick their snouts into the coconuts and eat the flesh. But the woman had swiped deftly at the coconuts - three cuts and it became a drinking vessel: the pigs could not get their snouts inside. They whined and chomped the husks.

We were a long time at Cabanas. It was a wooden station, and I supposed that the village was somewhere on the other side of the sand-dune. In Central America, the train station always seemed to be at the edge of town, not in the centre. The temperature in the train rose, and it seemed like an oven now. The rubbish-pile of coconuts had brought out the flies; people snored. I saw some workmen fussing beside the engine and tried to get out.

'Is this your station?' It was a soldier, one of our armed guards.

'No,'I said.

'Get back then.' He pushed his rifle at me.

I hurried to my seat.

It might be here, I thought. Perhaps this is the end of the line.

An old man began to shout. He was mocking the place. I think the heat had got to him.

'Cabanas! That is a laugh! Know what cabanas are? They are little huts - you find them near hotels and refreshment stands. Sometimes near the beach.'

The passengers were silent, but the man needed no encouragement.

'Cabanas are pretty and pleasant. You sit there and have nice cool drinks. That is what they call them - cabanas. And they call this filthy place Cabanas!'

Hearing this shout, the Indian woman in the next seat opened one eye, but seeing no more than a red-faced man wiping sweat out of his sombrero with a hanky she shut her eye.

'This is not Cabanas- it should have another name.'

The alarm had passed. He was out of breath and gasping.

'I have seen the real cabanas. They are not like this at all.'

No one cared, really. But I thought it was interesting that even these toothless farmers and slumbering Indians found this place laughable. The desolation was obvious to them, and they knew the train was junk. After this, I did not indulge in any charitable self-censorship of my thoughts. Another thing, and more curious, was the fact that people who were not disposed to conversation had no inhibitions about standing up and shouting mad speeches. The man was quiet when the train started again.

The hamlet of Anton Bram was so small its name was not shown on the ticket.

'Anton Bram!' It was the man behind me - hooting.

'What a silly name!' It was his wife.

The passengers smiled. But why hadn't they laughed at Progreso?

We entered another dead valley, and like the first, all the colour had been burned away by the sun. It was flatter than the previous one, and seemed to me much hotter. The vegetation was weird. Here, cactuses grew as tall as elms and were the same shape. The smaller real trees had died and with their bark missing had the paleness of human skin. There were spurges, plants of the genus euphorbia, which were used by some people for medicinal purposes; and other cactuses, with cylindrical limbs, the size of apple trees. The cactus is tenacious. After the shrubs with less complicated root-systems and more munchable leaves have died or been grazed into extinction, the cactus remains, its spines keeping animals away, its fine white hairs shading its tough hide and preventing evaporation. And, under the sky of clearest blue, even more fantastic plants - dog tails sprouting in clusters - hairy brown tubes, prickly pear cactuses, and sprawling nets of weed.

The train was going ten miles an hour, so it was possible to botanize here on the back pages of my Poe novel, and make some sense of the creeping confusion on the cracked nests of mudwasps. This business absorbed me until, two hours later, I saw a tractor, a shed, some wrecked houses and then a four-story structure of grey planks, with a porch on each floor: Railway Hotel.

We were in Zacapa.

It was a dusty station at the end of a dusty road and now, in the middle of the afternoon, suffocatingly hot. A group of people at the station barrier yelled at the train. I passed through and, approaching the hotel - it was a ghostly, comfortless place - heard the racket of a generator and saw some men digging near the hotel. The ground was hardened clay: they needed a pneumatic drill to penetrate it. There would be no rest in that hotel. What I could see of the town did not persuade me to linger: cracked huts, a yellow church steeple, more cactuses. So this was Zacapa. The woman in Guatemala City had not exaggerated. It seemed a terrible place, as hot as any of the miserable villages on the railway line, if a bit larger.

I found the Station Manager's office. He had a fan, a calendar, a wooden filing cabinet, a spike of papers. The noise of the generator was loud even here, so I had to raise my voice.

'Excuse me,' I said. 'What time does the train leave for the border?'

'Which border are you crossing?'

It was not an idle question: we were nearer Honduras than El Salvador.

'I'm trying to get to Metapan, in El Salvador.'

'Yes, there is a train to Metapan in two days - on Wednesday. At six-thirty in the morning. Do you want a ticket?'

Two days here! I said, 'No, thank you.'

The train had pulled out of Zacapa and was now on its way north to Puerto Barrios. The station platform was empty, the dust still settling. I studied my Cook's Timetable and saw that if I crossed the border to Metapan or Santa Ana I could get a connection to San Salvador the next day. I decided to do this - the border was not very far, perhaps thirty miles.

A man was watching me. I went over to him and asked him whether there was a bus station in Zacapa.

'Where are you going?'

'El Salvador.'

Too bad. All the buses to El Salvador leave in the early morning.'

But he was smiling.

I said, 'I would like to go to Santa Ana.'

'I have a car,' he said. 'But petrol is very expensive.'

'1 will give you five dollars.'

'For ten I will take you to Anguiatu. That is the border.'

'Is it far?'

'Not very.'

As soon as we left Zacapa we were out of the desert. I could see green hills, rounder ones, with a river running through them. I talked to the man. His name was Sebastiano; he had no job - no one had a job in Guatemala, he said. He was from Zacapa. He hated Zacapa, but he had been to Guatemala City and he thought that was a lot worse.

''There is one thing I think I should tell you,' he said some time later, slowing down at a bend in the road. He drew over to the side and stopped, and smiled sheepishly. 'I have no driving license, and this car - it is not registered. No insurance either - if you do not have a registration what is the point of insurance?'

'Interesting,' I said. 'But why did you stop the car?'

'I cannot take you any farther. If I do, the policemen at the border will ask to see my licence and so forth. As I do not have one, they will arrest me and probably treat me badly. I cannot give them a bribe - I do not have any money.'

'You have ten dollars,' I said.

He laughed. 'That will pay for the petrol!'

'So what am I supposed to do?'

He reached across and opened the door. 'Walk,' he said.

'Is it far?'

'Not very.'

He drove away. I stood for a moment on this road at the edge of Guatemala, and then started walking. Not very far, he had said. It was a mile. There was no traffic. There were green trees here and singing birds. My suitcase was not heavy, so I found the hike rather pleasant.

The border was a shed. A boy in a sports shirt stamped my passport and demanded money. He asked me if I was carrying any drugs. I said no. What do I do now? I asked him. You go up the road, he said. There you will find another house. That is El Salvador.

It was a shady road, circling around a hill, past a meadow and a glugging stream. What a transformation in landscapes! Earlier in the day I had thought I was going to wither and die in the wastes of the Motagua Valley, and here I was ambling through green humpy hills to the sound of birdsong. It was sunny late-afternoon as I walked from Guatemala into El Salvador, as fresh and breezy as a summer day in Massachusetts. That border-crossing was as happy a hike as I have ever made and reminded me pleasantly of strolling down the Amherst road into Shutesbury.

A car was parked near a hut, the frontier post. A soldier got out and examined my suitcase. 'What is this?'

'A book. In English, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.'

'Over there,' he said, 'Show your passport.'

'Where are you going?' asked the Immigration Officer.

'Santa Ana.'

A car had arrived at the shed, and a man had got out and was now behind me. He said, 'I am going through Santa Ana. Want a ride?'

'How much?'

'Free!'

So I went to Santa Ana, which was not far away. We passed Lake Guija and more volcanoes and fields of coffee and tobacco.

'Why don't you come with me to San Salvador?' said the man, when we arrived at Santa Ana. 'I am leaving tonight.'

'I think I will stay here.'

'I would advise you not to. This place is full of thieves, pick-pockets and murderers. I am not joking.'

But it was nightfall. I decided to stay in Santa Ana.

8

THE RAILCAR TO SAN SALVADOR

The town only looked Godforsaken; in fact, it was comfortable. It was a nice combination of attributes. In every respect, Santa Ana, the most Central American of Central American towns, was a perfect place -perfect in its pious attitudes and pretty girls, perfect in its slumber, its coffee-scented heat, its jungly plaza, and in the dusty elegance of its old buildings whose whitewash at nightfall gave them a vivid phosphorescence. Even its volcano was in working order. My hotel, the Florida, was a labyrinthine one-story affair, with potted palms and wicker chairs and good food - fresh fish, from nearby Lake Guija, was followed by the crushed velvet of Santa Ana coffee, and Santa Ana dessert, a delicate cake of mashed beans and banana served in cream. This pleasing hotel cost four dollars a night. It was a block from the plaza. All Santa Ana's buildings of distinction - there were three - were in the plaza: the Cathedral was neo-gothic, the town hall had the colonnaded opulence of a ducal palace, and the Santa Ana theatre had once been an opera house.

In another climate, I don't think the theatre would have seemed so special, but in this sleepy tropical town in the western highlands of El Salvador - and there was nothing here for the luxury-minded or ruin-hunting tourist - the theatre was magnificent and strange. Its style was banana republic Graeco-Roman; it was newly whitewashed, and classical in an agreeably vulgar way, with cherubs on its façade, and trumpeting angels, and masks of comedy and tragedy, a partial sorority of Muses - a pudgy Melpomene, a pouncing Thalia, Calliope with a lyre in her lap, and - her muscles showing through her tunic as fully developed as a gym teacher's - Terpsichore. There were columns, too, and a Romanesque portico, and on a shield a fuming volcano as nicely proportioned as Izalco, the one just outside town, which was probably the model for this emblem. It was a beautiful turn of the century theatre and not entirely neglected; once, it had provided Santa Ana with concerts and operas, but culturally Santa Ana had contracted and catering to this shrunken condition the theatre had been reduced to showing movies. That week, the offering was New York, New York.

I liked Santa Ana immediately; its climate was mild, its people alert and responsive, and it was small enough so that a short walk took me to its outskirts, where the hills were deep green and glossy with coffee bushes. The hard-pressed Guatemalans I had found a divided people -and the Indians in the hinterland seemed hopelessly lost; but El Salvador, on the evidence in Santa Ana, was a country of half-breeds, energetic and full of talk, practising a kind of Catholicism based on tactile liturgy. In the Cathedral, pious Salvadoreans pinched the feet of saints and rubbed at relics, and women with infants - always remembering to insert a coin in the slot and light a candle first - seized the loose end of Christ's cincture and mopped the child's head with its tassel.

But no citizen of this town had any clear idea of where the railway station was. I had arrived from the frontier by car, and after two nights in Santa Ana thought I should be moving on to the capital. There was a train twice a day, so my time-table said, and various people, without hesitation, had directed me to the railway station. But I had searched the town, and the railway station was not where they had said it was. In this way, I became familiar with the narrow streets of Santa Ana; the station continued to elude me. And when I found it on the morning of my third day, a mile from the hotel in a part of the town that had begun to tumble into ploughed fields and cash crops, behind a high fence and deserted apart from one man at an empty desk - the station master -1 understood why no one knew where it was. No one used the train. There was a major road from Santa Ana to San Salvador. We take the bus: it seemed to be a Central American motto in reply to all the railway advertising which said, Take the Train - It is Cheaper! It was a matter of speed: the bus took two hours, the train took all afternoon.

The station was like none I had ever seen before. In design it looked like the sort of tobacco-curing shed you see in the Connecticut Valley, a green wooden building with slatted sides and a breeze humming through its splinters. All the rolling stock was in front - four wooden cars and a diesel. The cars were labelled alternately First and Second, but they were equally filthy. On a siding was a battered steam locomotive with a conical smoke stack, its boiler-plate bearing the inscription Baldwin Locomotive Works, Philadelphia, Pa -110 - it could have been a hundred years old, but the station master assured me that it ran perfectly. Nearer the station was a silver-painted wooden railcar, the shape of a cable car. This contraption had its own engine, and it was this, the station master said, that made the run from here to San Salvador.

'Where have you come from?' asked the Stationmaster.

'Boston.'

'Plane?'

'Train.'

He shook my hand and said, 'Now that is something I would like to do!' He had been to Zacapa, he said, but he hadn't liked it much - the Guatemalans were a confused people. The Hondurans were worse. But what about my route from Boston? He questioned me closely: how many hours from Chicago to Fort Worth? What sort of trains? And the Mexican railways - were they as good as people said they were? Which trains had dining cars and pullmans? And had I seen anything like his steam locomotive? 'People tell me it is now worth a lot of money - I think they are right.' Where was I going from here? When I told him Argentina, he said, 'Wonderful ! But be careful in Nicaragua - there is a rebellion there at the moment. That cruel man, Somoza.'

We were standing near the railcar. The station master shook his head at it. 'It is rather old,'he said, 'but it goes.'

It was leaving for San Salvador after lunch. I checked out of the Florida and, at the station, bought my ticket - a bargain at thirty-five cents for thirty-five miles. I had planned to sit near the front of the railcar, but the engine was noisy and as soon as we were on our way I had found two Salvadoreans in the back to talk to. They were both salesmen, in their mid-twenties. Alfredo was stocky and dark and looked athletic in a squat muscular way; he sold plastic basins and household fixtures. Mario was thin and had a mirthless chattering laugh. He sold toothpaste, oil, soap and butter. They had been sent by their companies to Santa Ana and their territory was in and around Santa Ana, nearly the whole of western El Salvador. It seemed a big area, I said. They reminded me that it was a very small country: they had to visit twenty or thirty shops a day to make a profit.

We were speaking in Spanish. Did they speak English?

'Enough,' said Mario, in Spanish, and chattered out his laugh.

'I know enough,' said Alfredo, in Spanish. 'I was in Arrisboorg for two months- studying English.'

'Pennsylvania?'

'Meeseepee.'

'Say something in English.'

Alfredo leered at me. 'Titty,' he said. Then he uttered several obscenities which, in his terrible pronunciation, did not sound at all offensive.

'Spanish is better than English,' said Mario.

'I think that is true,' said Alfredo.

'Nonsense,' I said. 'How can one language be better than another? It depends on what you are trying to say.'

'For all things,' said Mario. 'Spanish is a more amplified language. English is short and practical.'

'Shakespeare is short and practical?'

'We have Shakespeare in Spanish,' said Alfredo.

Mario stuck to his point. He said, 'We have more words in Spanish.'

'More words than English?'

'Lots more,'he said.

The railcar had halted to take on passengers. Now we started and not far from the track was a hairy mottled pig ploughing grass with its snout. Mario gestured at the pig.

He said, 'For example, take "pig" - we have five words for pig. How many do you have?'

Hog, sow, piglet, swine. I said, 'Four.'

'Listen,' he said, and counted on his fingers. 'Cuche, tunco, maraño, cochino, serdo. What do you think of that?'

'And two words for "dog",' said Alfredo. 'Chucho and can.'

'We have about seven words for children, or child,' said Mario. 'In Honduras they have eight!'

Alfredo said, 'How many have you got for dog?'

Puppy, mutt, mongrel, cur. 'Four,' I said. 'That is more than you have.'

'Well, we have four for bull,' said Mario.

My God, I thought, what a ridiculous conversation.

Mario listed the words for bull: novillo, buey, tórrete, guiriche.

'You win,' I said. The railcar stopped again, and while Alfredo and Mario went out to buy Cokes I dug my Spanish dictionary out of my suitcase and checked some of the words. When the railcar resumed its jangling progress I said, 'Buey does not mean bull. It means "ox".'

'It is the same animal,' said Mario.

We argued about this until Alfredo conceded, 'Yes, in the United States the ox is different from ours. I have seen them in Arrisboorg.'

We were passing through lovely mountains, very steep and volcanic. On many of the lower slopes were coffee bushes. We were not very far from Guatemala even now, and it struck me as amazing that landscape could change so quickly from country to country. This was not only greener and steeper than what I had seen just over the border in the Motagua Valley, but had a cared-for look, a rustic neatness and a charm that made it quite attractive. I did not know then that El Salvador imported most of its vegetables from Guatemala, and yet El Salvador was clearly the busier-looking of the two, the better integrated. Its real burden was its size: what claim could such a small place make? I had heard that it was run by fourteen families, a melancholy statistic suggesting ludicrous snobberies and social jostling as well as an infuriated opposition to them, Marxist students sweating with indignation. Mario and Alfredo confirmed that this was true.

'I do not like to talk about politics,' said Alfredo. 'But in this country the police are cruel and the government is military. What do you think, Mario?'

Mario shook his head. It was obvious that he preferred to talk about something else.

At about three-thirty we came to the town of Quetzaltepeque. Seeing a church, Mario and Alfredo made the sign of the cross. The women in the railcar did the same. Some men removed their hats as well.

'You are not a Catholic?' said Alfredo.

I rapidly made the sign of the cross, so as not to disappoint him.

Alfredo said, 'In English, what is the meaning of huacha?'

What was this, some Nahautl word? Alfredo giggled - no, he said, there were no Indian languages spoken in El Salvador. Huacha was English, he insisted, but what did it mean? I said I was not familiar with it - could he use it in a sentence? He cleared his throat and hunched and said in English, 'Huacha gonna do when da well rons dry?'

'English,' said Mario, with a derisory snort.

Although they were both travelling salesmen, they hoped to rise in their firms and, one of these days, be promoted to a desk job in San Salvador. Mario worked on a straight commission, Alfredo's profit was based on a credit system which I could not understand - he had a salesman's knack for long opaque explanations, exhausting the listener into submission without allowing comprehension to occur. I said that they both seemed very ambitious. Oh, yes, said Alfredo, Salvadoreans were much cleverer than other Central Americans.

'We are like Israelis,' said Alfredo.

'Are you going to invade anyone?'

'We could have taken Honduras a few years ago.'

'I have an ambition,' said Mario. He said the salesman in his company who sold the most boxes of Rinso that year was going to win a free trip to San Andres Island. He thought he had a good chance of winning - he had sold thousands of boxes.

The valleys were deepening, the mountains growing shadowy in the setting sun. The railcar was small, but at no time was it full, and I guessed that it would not be long before it was removed and the railway service suspended except for shipments of coffee. Towards late afternoon we passed through dense forest. Alfredo said there was a swimming pool nearby, fed by a waterfall; it was a wonderful place for picking up girls. He would be glad to take me there. I said I had to be moving along, to Cutuco and Nicaragua. He said he would not go to Nicaragua for anything in the world. Neither Alfredo nor Mario had ever been to Honduras or Nicaragua, which were next-door.

San Salvador remained hidden. It lies in a bowl, surrounded by mountains which trap the air and keep it smoggy. To our right was a highway-the Pan-American Highway. Alfredo said it was a fast road, but had its dangers. Chief among these was the fact that, ten miles out of San Salvador, the Pan-American Highway is sometimes used as an emergency landing strip for planes. I said that I would rather be in this railcar pottering gently through the coffee plantations than in a bus careening towards a taxiing plane.

What were these two going to do in the capital? Business, they said, see the manager, file orders. Then Mario said a bit hesitantly that he was also going to see his girl-friend - he did not yet have a girl-friend in Santa Ana and was being driven to distraction by the provincial morality of the place. Alfredo had two or three girl-friends. His main reason for this trip to San Salvador ('please do not tell my manager!') was to see the football game that night. It promised to be one of the best games of the year - El Salvador was playing Mexico at the National Stadium and, as Mexico was scheduled to play in the World Cup in Argentina, it was El Salvador's chance to prove itself.

I had read about Latin American soccer - the chaos, the riots, the passionately partisan crowds, the way political frustrations were ventilated at the stadiums. I knew for a fact that if one wished to understand the British it helped to see a soccer game; then, the British did not seem so tight-lipped and proper. Indeed, a British soccer game was an occasion for a form of gang-warfare for the younger spectators. The muscular ritual of sport was always a clear demonstration of the wilder impulses in national character. The Olympic Games are interesting largely because they are a kind of world war in pantomime.

'Would you mind if I went to the game with you?'

Alfredo looked worried. 'It will be very crowded,' he said. 'There may be trouble. It is better to go to the swimming pool tomorrow - for the girls.'

'Do you think I came to El Salvador to pick up girls at a public swimming pool?'

'Did you come to El Salvador to see the football game?'

'Yes,'I said.

The San Salvador railway station was at the end of a torn-up section of road in a grim precinct of the city. My ticket was collected by a man in a pork-pie hat and sports shirt, who wore an old-fashioned revolver on his hip. The station was no more than a series of cargo sheds, where very poor people were camped, waiting for the morning train to Cutuco: the elderly and the very young - it seemed to be the pattern of victims in Central American poverty. Alfredo had given me the name of a hotel and said he would meet me there an hour before kick-off, which was nine o'clock. The games were played late, he said, because by then it wasn't so hot. But it was now after dark and the humid heat was choking me. I began to wish that I had not left Santa Ana. San Salvador, prone to earthquakes, was not a pretty place; it sprawled, it was noisy, its buildings were charmless, and in the glare of headlights were buoyant particles of dust. Why would anyone come here? 'Don't knock it,' an American in San Salvador told me. 'You haven't seen Nicaragua yet!'

Alfredo was late. He blamed the traffic: There will be a million people at the stadium.' He had brought along some friends, two boys who, he boasted, were studying English.

'How are you doing?' I asked them in English.

'Please?' said one. The other laughed. The first one said in Spanish, 'We are only on the second lesson.'

Because of the traffic, and the risk of car-thieves at the stadium, Alfredo parked half a mile away, at a friend's house. This house was worth some study; it was a number of cubicles nailed to trees, with the leafy branches descending into the rooms. Cloth was hung from sticks to provide walls, and a strong fence surrounded it. I asked the friend how long he had lived there. He said his family had lived in the house for many years. I did not ask what happened when it rained.

But poverty in a poor country had subtle gradations. We walked down a long hill towards the stadium, and crossing a bridge I looked into a gorge expecting to see a river and saw lean-tos and cooking fires and lanterns. Who lived there? I asked Alfredo.

'Poor people,' he said.

Others were walking to the stadium, too. We joined a large procession of quick-marching fans, and as we drew closer to the stadium they began yelling and shoving in anticipation. The procession swarmed over the foothills below the stadium, crashing through people's gardens and thumping the fenders of stalled cars. Here the dust was deep and the trampling feet of the fans made it rise until it became a brown fog, like a sepia print of a mob scene, with the cones of headlights bobbing, in it. The mob was running now, and Alfredo and his friends were obscured by the dust cloud. Every ten feet, boys rushed forward and shook tickets at me, screaming, 'Suns! Suns! Suns!'

These were the touts. They bought the cheapest tickets and sold them at a profit to people who had neither the time nor the courage to stand in a long rowdy line at a ticket window. The seat-designations were those usual at a bullfight: Suns were the cheapest, bleacher seats; Shades were more expensive ones under the canopy.

I fought my way through the touts and, having lost Alfredo, made my way uphill to the kettle-shaped stadium. It was an unearthly sight, the crowd of people emerging from darkness into luminous brown fog, the yells, the dust rising, the mountainside smouldering under a sky which, because of the dust, was starless. At that point, I considered turning back; but the mob was propelling me forward towards the stadium where the roar of the spectators inside made a sound like flames howling in a chimney.

The mob took up this cry and surged past me, stirring up the dust. I'here were women frying bananas and meat-cakes over fires on the walkway that ran around the outside perimeter of the stadium. The smoke from these fires and the dust made each searchlight seem to burn with a smoky flame. The touts reappeared nearer the stadium. They were hysterical now. The game was about to start; they had not sold their tickets. They grabbed my arms, they pushed tickets in my face, they shouted.

One look at the lines of people near the ticket windows told me that I would have no chance at all of buying a ticket legally. I was pondering this question when, through the smoke and dust, Alfredo appeared.

Take your watch off,' he said. 'And your ring. Put them in your pocket. Be very careful. Most of these people are thieves. They will rob you.'

I did as I was told. 'What about the tickets? Shall we buy some Suns from these boys?'

'No, I will buy Shades.'

'Are they expensive?'

'Of course, but this will be a great game. I could never see such a game in Santa Ana. Anyway, the Shades will be quieter.' Alfredo looked around. 'Hide over there by the wall. I will get the tickets.'

Alfredo vanished into the conga line at a ticket window. He appeared again at the middle of the line, jumped the queue, elbowed forward and in a very short time had fought his way to the window. Even his friends marvelled at his speed. He came towards us smiling, waving the tickets in triumph.

We were frisked at the entrance; we passed through a tunnel and emerged at the end of the stadium. From the outside it had looked like a kettle; inside, its shape was more of a salver, a tureen filled with brown screeching faces. In the centre was a pristine rectangle of green grass.

It was, those 45,000 people, a model of Salvadorean society. Not only the half of the stadium where the Suns sat (and it was jammed: not an empty seat was visible); or the better-dressed and almost as crowded half of the Shades (at night, in the dry season, there was no difference in the quality of the seats: we sat on concrete steps, but ours, being more expensive than the Suns, were less crowded); there was a section that Alfredo had not mentioned: the Balconies. Above us, in five tiers of a gallery that ran around our half of the stadium, were the Balcony people. Balcony people had season tickets. Balcony people had small rooms, cupboard-sized, about as large as the average Salvadorean's hut; I could see the wine bottles, the glasses, the plates of food. Balcony people had folding chairs and a good view of the field. There were not many Balcony people - two or three hundred - but at $2,000 for a season ticket in a country where the per capita income was $373 one could understand why. The Balcony people faced the screaming Suns and, beyond the stadium, a plateau. What I took to be lumpish multi-coloured vegetation covering the plateau was, I realized, a heap of Salvadoreans standing on top or clinging to the sides. There were thousands of them in this mass, and it was a sight more terrifying than the Suns. They were lighted by the stadium glare; there was a just-perceptible crawling movement among the bodies; it was an ant-hill.

National anthems were played, amplified songs from scratched records, and then the game began. It was apparent from the outset who would win. Mexico was bigger, faster, and seemed to follow a definite strategy; El Salvador had two ball-hoggers, and the team was tiny and erratic. The crowd hissed the Mexicans and cheered El Salvador. One of the Salvadorean ball-hoggers went jinking down the field, shot and missed. The ball went to the Mexicans, who tormented the Salvadoreans by passing it from man to man and then, fifteen minutes into the game, the Mexicans scored. The stadium was silent as the Mexican players kissed one another.

Some minutes later the ball was kicked into the Shades section. It was thrown back into the field and the game was resumed. Then it was kicked into the Suns section. The Suns fought for it; one man gained possession, but he was pounced upon and the ball shot up and ten Suns went tumbling after it. A Sun tried to run down the steps with it. He was caught and the ball wrestled from him. A fight began, and now there were scores of Suns punching their way to the ball. The Suns higher up in the section threw bottles and cans and wadded paper on the Suns who were fighting, and the shower of objects - meat pies, bananas, hankies - continued to fall. The Shades, the Balconies, the Anthill watched this struggle.

And the players watched, too. The game had stopped. The Mexican players kicked the turf, the Salvadorean team shouted at the Suns.

Please return the ball. It was the announcer. He was hoarse. If the ball is not returned, the game will not continue.

This brought a greater shower of objects from the upper seats -cups, cushions, more bottles. The bottles broke with a splashing sound on the concrete seats. The Suns lower down began throwing things back at their persecutors, and it was impossible to say where the ball had gone.

The ball was not returned. The announcer repeated his threat.

The players sat down on the field and did limbering-up exercises until, ten minutes after the ball had disappeared from the field, a new ball was thrown in. The spectators cheered but, just as quickly, fell silent. Mexico had scored another goal.

Soon, a bad kick landed the ball into the Shades. This ball was fought for and not thrown back, and one could see the ball progressing through the section. The ball was seldom visible, but one could tell from the free-for-alls - now here, now there - where it was. The Balconies poured water on the Shades, but the ball was not surrendered. And now it was the Suns' turn to see the slightly better-off Salvadoreans in the Shades section behaving like a swine. The announcer made his threat: the game would not resume until the ball was thrown back. The threat was ignored, and after a long time the ref walked onto the field with a new ball.

In all, five balls were lost this way. The fourth landed not far from where I sat, and I could see that real punches were being thrown, real blood spurting from Salvadorean noses, and the broken bottles and the struggle for the ball made it a contest all its own, more savage than the one on the field, played out with the kind of mindless ferocity you read about in books on gory medieval sports. The announcer's warning was merely ritual threat; the police did not intervene - they stayed on the field and let the spectators settle their own scores. The players grew bored: they ran in place, they did push-ups. When play resumed and Mexico gained possession of the ball it deftly moved down the field and invariably made a goal. But this play, these goals - they were no more than interludes in a much bloodier sport which, towards midnight (and the game was still not over!), was varied by Suns throwing firecrackers at each other and onto the field.

The last time play was abandoned and fights broke out among the Suns - the ball bobbing from one ragged Sun to another - balloons were released from the upper seats. But they were not balloons. They were white, blimpy and had a nipple on the end; first one, then dozens. This caused great laughter, and they were batted from section to section. They were of course contraceptives, and they caused Alfredo no end of embarrassment. 'That is very bad,' he said, gasping in shame. He had apologized for the interruptions; for the fights; the delayed play. Now this - dozens of airborne rubbers. The game was a shambles; it ended in confusion, fights, litter. But it shed light on the recreations of Salvadoreans, and as for the other thing - the inflated contraceptives - I later discovered that the Agency for International Development's largest Central American family planning programme is in El Salvador. I doubt whether the birth-rate has been affected, but children's birthday parties in rural El Salvador must be a great deal of fun, what with the free balloons.

Mexico won the game, six to one. Alfredo said that El Salvador's goal was the best one of the game, a header from thirty yards. So he managed to rescue a shred of pride. But people had been leaving all through the second half, and the rest hardly seemed to notice or to care that the game had ended. Just before we left the stadium I looked up at the ant-hill. It was a hill once again; there were no people on it, and depopulated, it seemed very small.

Outside, on the stadium slopes, the scene was like one of those lurid murals of Hell you see in Latin American churches. The colour was infernal, yellow dust sifted and whirled among crater-like pits, small cars with demonic headlights moved slowly from hole to hole like mechanical devils. And where, on the mural, you see the sins printed and dramatized, the gold lettering saying Lust, Anger, Avarice, Drunkenness, Gluttony, Theft, Pride, Jealousy, Usury, Gambling, and so on, here after midnight were groups of boys lewdly snatching at girls, and knots of people fighting, counting the money they had won, staggering and swigging from bottles, shrieking obscenities against Mexico, thumping the hoods of cars or duelling with the branches they had yanked from trees and the radio aerials they had twisted from cars. They trampled the dust and howled. The car horns were like harsh moos of pain - and one car was being overturned by a gang of shirtless, sweating youths. Many people were running to get free of the mob, holding handkerchiefs over their faces. But there were tens of thousands of people here, and animals, too, maimed dogs snarling and cowering as in a classic vision of Hell. And it was hot: dark grimy air that was hard to breathe, and freighted with the stinks of sweat; it was so thick it muted the light. It tasted of stale fire and ashes. The mob did not disperse; it was too angry to go home, too insulted by defeat to ignore its hurt. It was loud and it moved as if thwarted and pushed; it danced madly in what seemed a deep hole.

Alfredo knew a short cut to the road. He led the way through the parking lot and a ravaged grove of trees behind some huts. I saw people lying on the ground, but whether they were wounded or sleeping or dead I could not tell.

I asked him about the mob.

'What did I tell you?' he said. 'You are sorry you came, right?'

'No,' I said, and I meant it. Now I was satisfied. Travel is pointless without certain risks. I had spent the whole evening scrutinizing what I saw, trying to memorize details, and I knew I would never go to another soccer game in Latin America.

That soccer game was not the only event in San Salvador that evening. At the Cathedral, as the fans were rioting in the National Stadium, the Archbishop of El Salvador was receiving an honorary doctorate from the President of Georgetown University. The Archbishop had deliberately made it into a public ceremony, to challenge the government and give a Jesuitical oration. There were 10,000 people at the Cathedral and I was told that this crowd was equally frightening in its discontent.

And ten years before, there had been 'The Football War' - also known as 'The 100 Hour War'. This was between El Salvador ano Honduras - first the soccer teams and the rioting spectators, then the national armies. It had grown out of El Salvador's chronic shortage of land. Salvadoreans slipped over the border into Honduras to farm, to squat, to work on the banana plantations. They worked hard, but when the Hondurans got wind of it they tried to restrict entry on the Salvadorean border; they persecuted squatters, then repatriated them. And, as in all such squabbles, there were atrocity stories: rapes, murders, torturings. But there were no large-scale hostilities until the crucial soccer matches were played in preparation for the 1970 World Cup. In June 1969, there was violence after the El Salvador-Honduras match in Tegucigalpa, and this was repeated a week later in San Salvador. Within days, the El Salvador army began its armed attack on Honduras - its cue had come from the soccer match: the fans' belligerence was to be taken seriously. Although the war lasted only a little more than four days, at the end of it 2,000 soldiers and civilians - mainly Hondurans - lay dead.

A year ago, an election was held in El Salvador. The election was rigged. There was violence, and there were mob scenes of the sort I had seen at the soccer game, but this time enacted on the streets of the capital. Students were shot and people imprisoned. And so El Salvador found itself with yet another military dictatorship. This was a particularly brutal one. Politics is a hideous subject, but I will say this: people tell you that dictatorships are sometimes necessary to good order, and that this sort of highly-centralized government is stable and dependable. But this is seldom so. It is nearly always bureaucratic and crooked, unstable, fickle, and barbarous; and it excites those same qualities in those it governs.

Back at my hotel, which was not a good hotel, I wrote about the soccer game. The writing made me wakeful, and there were noises in the room - occasional scratchings from the ceiling. I opened Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and began to read. It was, from the first chapter, a terrifying story: Pym is a stowaway; he becomes trapped between decks and, without food or water, he suffers the pitching of the ship. His dog is with him. The dog becomes maddened and goes for him. Pym nearly dies, and is released from this prison only to find that there has been a mutiny on board, and there is another storm. All this time, in my own narrow room, I had been hearing the sinister scratchings. I switched out the light, went to sleep and had a nightmare: a storm, darkness, wind and rats scrabbling in a cupboard. The nightmare woke me. I groped for the light-switch. And in this lamp's glare I could see that there was a hole in the ceiling, directly overhead, the size of a quarter. It had not been there before. I watched it for some minutes, and then a pair of yellow teeth appeared at its chewed edge.

I did not sleep that night.

9

THE LOCAL TO CUTUCO

Even Salvadoreans, with their little-country loyalty and their violent nationalism, regard Cutuco as a hole. And you know, as you see Nicaragua just across the border, that the end of the line cannot be far away. This is an observable fact. The train from Boston comes to a complete stop in Cutuco. After that, there is a ferry ride of anywhere from eight to eleven hours (it depends on the tide) across the Gulf of Fonseca to Nicaragua. If there is no Indian uprising, or peasant revolt, or civil war, it ought to be possible to make your way by road through Nicaragua, if only to judge how much reckless exaggeration there is in the commonly held view that Nicaragua is the worst eyesore in the world: the hottest, the poorest, the most savagely governed, with a murderous landscape and medieval laws and disgusting food. I had hoped to verify this. The inhospitable country, like the horrible train ride, has a way of bringing a heroic note to the traveller's tale. And though I had had a few set-backs on the trip from South Station to San Salvador Central it had, for the most part, been fairly clear sailing. But Nicaragua was something of a problem.

I had been thinking hard about Nicaragua ever since I had read, months before leaving Boston, that the guerrilla war (which was in part an Indian uprising) had spread from Managua to smaller villages. And why was it, I wondered, that all these villages seemed to be on my proposed route through the country? My method for making an itinerary usually did not include newspapers. I got the best maps I could and, with guidebooks and what railway timetables I could lay my hands on, tried to determine how I might join one railway with another. I never gave any thought to hotels; if a town was important enough to be lettered on a map I assumed it was worth visiting (some surprises were inevitable: Zacapa was on most maps, Santa Ana was not; but that kind of discovery sustains and emboldens the traveller). I had heard that Nicaragua was Central America's answer to Afghanistan, but apart from this cloudy image and the historical fact that from 1855 to 1857 Nicaragua had been governed by a five-foot Tennessean named William Walker (he changed the national language to English, instituted slavery and had plans for annexing Nicaragua to the American South; this midget was shot in 1860), I knew little about the country. It had been ruled barbarously by the Somoza family for nearly forty years - that was common knowledge. But this guerrilla war? Th° newspaper reports, which I now depended on, differed in assessing its seriousness.

Through Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador I bought the local papers and tried to discover what was happening in Nicaragua. The news was always bad and it appeared to grow worse. GUERRILLAS ATTACK POLICE STATION one day was followed the next day by SOMOZA IMPOSES CURFEW. Then it was GUERRILLAS ROB BANK - I made careful translations of the headlines - and SOMOZA LAYS A FIRM HAND. In Santa Ana I read GUERRILLAS KILL TEN, in San Salvador the headline was SOMOZA ARRESTS 200 and INDIANS TAKE UP ARMS. Latterly I had read UNEASY CALM PREVAILS IN NICARAGUA, but just before leaving San Salvador there was a news item in La Prensa headlined GUERRILLAS BUY $5 MILLION OF ARMS FROM UNITED STATES. President Carter had remained prudently neutral on the Nicaragua issue; it was apparently hoped in the United States that Somoza would be overthrown. This was a pious hope, and it was no help to me. By the end of February the revolution had yet to occur; there was still sporadic fighting and reports of massacres and Somoza was in power. It looked as if he would remain in office for another forty years, or at the very most pass the machinery of government - in Nicaragua's case these are instruments of torture- on to his son. I began to worry about crossing Nicaragua. I decided to go to the frontier. I would talk to the people there. If the news was still bad I would take a detour around it. I went by train to Cutuco, to examine Nicaragua. It was like going to the dentist and hoping that the office was shut, the dentist laid up with a bad case of lumbago. This had never happened to me at the dentist's, but on the frontier of Nicaragua my reprieve came in just that way.

'You cannot go into Nicaragua,' said the Salvadorean at his border post by the ferry landing. Was there a muddier sight in all the world, a gloomier prospect, than the Gulf of Fonseca? 'The border is closed. The soldiers will send you back. '

This was better than a stay of execution. I was absolved of any responsibility to travel through Nicaragua. I returned to San Salvador. I «ad changed my hotel room to one in which I was sure there were no rats. But I had nothing more to do in San Salvador. I had given a lec-ure on the topic that had occurred to me on the train to Tapachula: little known Books by Famous American Authors - Pudd'nhead Wilson, The Devil's Dictionary, The Wild Palms. I had looked at the Diversity (and no one could-explain why there was a mural, in the uni-of this right-wing dictatorship, of Marx, Engels and Lenin). I had a day in hand, so I decided to take the Cutuco train again, but this time to stop along the way.

I knew from my previous trip that long before San Miguel, which was three-quarters of the way to Cutuco, the journey ceased to be interesting. As before, there were two passenger cars and not more than twenty-five people travelling. While we were waiting for the train to be shunted to the platform I asked some of them where they were going. They said San Vicente. It was market day in San Vicente. Was San Vicente pretty? Oh, very, they said. So I decided to get off the train at San Vicente.

No two trains are alike. Salvadorean trains are just as broken down as Guatemalan ones, but there are differences. They might have been given life by the same fruit company, but they have evolved differently. This is true of the world's railways - I have never seen two even remotely similar. 'El Jarocho' is as distinct from The Golden Blowpipe' as its name. It is more than national differences; trains take on the character of their routes. On the Local to Cutuco the uniqueness is obvious as soon as you board. Here, at the gate, was the same sad dark little man who had greeted me from the Railcar. He wore his sports shirt and carried his old revolver in a holster and some bullets in an ammo belt. I hoped he would not be provoked to fire it, because I was sure it would explode in his face if he did and I would be killed, not by the bullet, but by shrapnel. He punched my ticket, the train creaked to the platform, and I boarded. All the seats were torn. They were stuffed with horse-hair: it was agony to lean back.

'These seats are really in bad condition.' The Salvadorean man across the aisle was apologizing. He kicked the seat in front and went on, 'But they are strong - look, the seats themselves are fine. But they are ripped and dirty. They should fix them.'

I said, 'Why don't they fix them?'

'Because everyone takes the bus.'

'If they fixed them, everyone would take the train.'

'True,' he said. 'But then the train would be crowded with all the world.'

I agreed with him, not because I believed what he said but because I was sick of lecturing people on disorder. Central America was haywire; it was as if New England had gone completely to ruin and places like Rhode Island and Connecticut were run by maniacal generals and thuggish policemen; as if they had evolved into motiveless tyrannies and become forcing-houses of nationalism. It was no wonder that, seeing them as degenerate states, tycoons like Vanderbilt and imperial-minded companies like the United Fruit Company took them over and tried to run them. It should have been easy enough. But tycoons and big companies did not have the morality or the compassion or the sense of legality to make these places work; they acted out of contempt and self-interest; they were less than colonial - they were racketeers, and they spawned racketeers. Lawless, the countries became bizarre with inequality, and hideously violent. El Salvador deserves to be serene, but it is not. Football, the simplest sport in the world, in this place had become a free-for-all of punchy frustration in which the spectators made themselves the center of attention. Why shouldn't we have some fun, they might reply: we live like dogs. Football wasn't football, the Church was not the Church, and this train was unlike any I had ever ridden on. By the time it had got to this condition, any sensible railway company would have collected the insurance money for the damage and started all over again, the way they do in India. But this was El Salvador, not India - indeed, this heap of junk would have been laughed out of West Bengal, which is saying something.

But, truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes. The crack express trains - the bullet trains in Japan, The Blue Train' from Paris to Cannes, 'The Flying Scotsman' - these are joyrides, nothing more; the rapidity diminishes the pleasure of the journey. But the Local to Cutuco is a plod through the spectacular. If one is not put to flight by the pistol-toting ticket-puncher, or the filthy cars or painful seats, one is rewarded by the grandest scenery south of Massachusetts. And the train is so geriatrically slow, one gets the impression that El Salvador is as big as Texas. It is the effect of the feeble engine and all the stops: three and a half hours to go the forty miles to San Vicente.

The spectacle takes a while to begin.

El Salvador had seemed to me to be tidy, fertile and prosperous. And it is, in the west. But east of the capital, on the other side of the tracks - here, desolation lies. It starts where the station precincts end, at a quarry on the edge of town. For a full hour as the train moves there is nothing but the stone-age horror of little huts: mud and bamboo, cardboard and sticks, tin and mud, and on the roofs every sort of refuse to hold the things down, since one can't drive nails into mud or cardboard. The roofs are amazing collections of broken things. Look at this one: an old rusted sewing machine, an iron stove in pieces, six tyres, bricks, tins, boulders; and on that one splintered lumber and a tree branch and some stones. The huts lean against each Other and are propped against the steep sides of the quarry, pressed against the track, with no decoration but a picture of Jesus or a saint, and no colour but the rags hanging out to dry on a tripod of timbers. »t is a coffee-growing country. The price of coffee is very high. But these people really do live like dogs, and the dogs themselves seem to nave evolved downward into cowering creatures which never bark, but only limp and skulk and forage in dusty bushes with their snouts. i he dogs have been turned into a species of scavenging burrower, like a particularly mangy sort of aardvark. Now the train was moving so slowly, and was so empty and neglected, that children from the slum climbed shrieking into it and ran down the aisles, jumping from seat to seat. They hopped off at the continuation of the slum, on the next curve.

If the slum children had lingered another ten minutes on the train they would have seen open country, trees and wild flowers and singing birds. But the children do not stray into the countryside. Perhaps it is forbidden, or perhaps they are obeying the slum-dweller's instinct, which is to seek the protection of the slum and not to go beyond its boundaries. They are vulnerable in the outer world to policemen, landowners, tax inspectors; and in their rags they are easy to identify and humiliate. So, in the daylight hours, the slum is full and active and in Central America it nearly always has as its frontier a creek or stream or a railway track. And just past that natural frontier the slum ends and jungle or pasture land begins. Here, the slum gave on to coffee plantations, and it was reasonable to assume that those destitute people I had seen earlier were coffee-pickers. From what I found out later, their wages bore no relation to the price of coffee.

We climbed some low hills and then passed along the ridge of a higher one. I looked across the valley and saw a lake - Lake Ilopango -and a volcano - Chinchontepec. From these heights to San Vicente, where the vistas are shortened by the train's sinking into the eastern lowlands, the lake and the volcano grow huger and alter in colour as the sun shifts behind them. The first glimpse is impressive, but the lake swells and the volcano rises and for miles and miles they grow to almost unbelievable loveliness. The lake waters are blue, then grey, then black as the train mounts its own volcanic range and travels along the spine, passing the north side of this lake. There is an island in the lake. It appeared in 1880, when the water level suddenly fell, and is still there, like a dismasted flagship in this darkly chromatic sea. Between the lake and the train are low hills of green vegetation and a long sweep of treetops which, closer to the train, are banana and orange groves and tall clusters of yellow swaying bamboos. The foliage nearby is faded and dusty, but at a distance it is emerald green and looks dense and lush.

Now the lake is silver, with an enamelling of blue discs; now black, with furrows of frothy whiteness; now it is suffused with pinkness and at its shores takes the colour from the greenest trees. It was, to the lakeside Indians, much more than a body of water in which they washed and fished and quenched their thirst. The guidebooks merely repeat falsifications of its importance for credulous tourists. One guidebook says that before the Spanish conquest the Indians 'used to propitiate the harvest gods by drowning four virgins here every year'. Well, this might have been true, and it provides a cue for the joke that the ritual was abandoned for lack of suitable victims. But human sacrifice continued well into the last century at this lake, and it had nothing to do with the harvest gods. It was a complicated procedure, and purposeful.

There was a witness. His name was Don Camillo Galvar. He was Visitador-General in San Salvador in the 1860's. In 1880 he described ,what he had found out about the supposedly blood-thirsty practices of the Indians who lived near Lake Ilopango. 'The people of the pueblos around the lake,' he wrote, 'Cojutepeque, Texacuangos, and Tepezontes, say that when the earthquakes came from the lake, which they knew by the disappearance of the fish, it was a sign that the monster lord of these regions who dwelt in the depths of the lake was eating the fish.'

Not a harvest god, but a monster; and the Indians' fear was that unless this monster was 'provided with a more delicate and juicy diet worthy of his power and voracity' he would eat all the fish and there would be none for the fishermen to catch. The Indians said that the monster only ate fish 'as men eat fruit, to refresh and allay hunger.' The lake and the volcano rumbled and the fish began to disappear; the Indians 'deeply afflicted by the fish famine . . . collected at the command of their chiefs.' Sorcerers came forth in their ceremonial robes and headdresses and outlined what the Indians were to do: they were to throw flowers and fruits into the lake. Sometimes, this worked: the tremors ceased. But if they continued, the Indians assembled again and were told to throw in animals, preferably gophers, racoons and armadilloes and ones they called taltusas. The animals had to be caught alive and thrown into the water still kicking. Any Indian found throwing a dead animal into the water faced the severe penalty of being hanged with a zinak vine, because the monster lord would be enraged by having to feed on dead flesh.

Days were given to the study of the water level, the numbers offish, the evidence of tremors. If the signs were still bad the 'wizards' acted. They took a girl of from six to nine years old, decked her with flowers and 'at midnight the wizards took her to the middle of the lake and cast her in, bound hand and foot, with a stone fast to her neck. The next day, if the child appeared upon the surface and the tremors continued, another victim was cast into the lake with the same ceremonies.

'In the years 1861 and 1862,' Don Camillo goes on, 'when I visited these towns they told me that they kept to this barbarous custom to Prevent the failure of the fish.' So there was a reason; and the Indians did not gloat about it. Indeed, Don Camillo adds that they spoke to him 'with much reserve'.

The lake had assumed a more ominous blueness, chased by ghostly mists, and still the train was rising. Below was not one valley, but fifty of them, and a landscape of green peaks. It was hard to believe that the hills so far down could be high, but the train was crossing the ridge at such a great altitude, and it was a lesson in scale to compare the hills with the volcano Chinchontepec. We were nowhere near it, and it continued to increase in size; now it seemed mammoth and black and unclimbable.

But it remained in the distance, in that other lush climate. The train crossed a hotter mountain range. The dust flew into the cars. I got up and walked from car to car to stretch my legs, and when I went back I recognized my seat by its colour: it had a thinner layer of dust than the others, which were covered by the brown powder. There were no doors on the cars, no glass in the windows - they were completely open, and whirling with such a dust storm the porters and conductors, and all the train staff, rode on the roofs of the cars where the dust could not reach them. They sat, gripping the pipes and wheels on the roof, or else stood straddling the centre of the car. The train to Zacapa had been dusty, but there was no wind in the Motagua Valley. Here, we were high and the movement of the train and the stiff mountain winds combined to create gusts of considerable velocity which drew a brown veil over the train and made it impossible for long periods to see anything. The passengers crouched and put their heads down, holding their shirts against their faces. The train's noise was a loud hammering and clattering; it was hard to draw a breath and, more than anything, it was as if we were roaring through a small dirt tunnel fleeing a cave-in.

Outside the village of Michapa, the train coursed through a trough of steep sandbanks. A young girl, perhaps eight years old, had pressed herself against the bank, and the dust churned around her. She held a tiny goat in her arms to prevent him from scampering in fright onto the tracks, and she looked persecuted by the dust and noise, her face fixed in a pained suffocated expression.

When the dust storm passed and the sky turned blue and large, the train's racket was swallowed by the empty air, and we seemed to be in a low-flying plane, gliding at tree-top height towards the valleys below. It was a trick of the landscape, the way the train balanced on its narrow ridge and gave a view of everything but its tracks. And though the train had been slow before, on this downhill run it had gathered speed: but the clatter was not so obvious. This old engine and its cars had taken to the air like a railway lifted and travelling down the sky. It is not often that one gets a view like this in a train and it was so beautiful that I could forget the heat and dust, the broken seats, and was uplifted by the sight of the hills way down and the nearer hills of coffee and bamboo. For the next half-hour of this descent, it was an aerial railway diving across hills of purest green.

The landscape changed; the villages remained the same. You think: I've been here before. The village is small and has a saint's name. The station is a shed, open on three sides and near it are piles of orange peels and blown-open coconut husks with fibrous hair, and waste paper and bottles. That grey trickle of waste water gathering in a green-yellow pool; that woman with a basket on her head, and bananas in the basket, and flies on the bananas; that heap of black railway ties and the stack of oily barrels, the Coca-Cola sign faded to pink, the ten filthy children and the small girl with the naked infant on her back, the boy with a twanging radio the size of a shoe-box, the banana trees, the four huts, the limping dog, the whining pig, the dozing man with his head resting on his left shoulder and his hat-brim crushed. You were here, you saw the trampled path and the smoke, the sun at just that scorching angle above the trees, the wrecked car resting on its rims, the chickens pecking pebbles out of the shade, the face behind the rag of curtain in the hut window, the station-master in his shirt sleeves and dark trousers standing at attention in the sun holding his log-book, the leaves of the village trees so thick with dust that they appear to be dead. It seems so familiar you begin to wonder if you have been travelling in a small circle, leaving in the morning and every day arriving in the heat of the afternoon at this same village with its pig and its people and its withered trees, the vision of decrepitude repeating like the dream that demands that you return again and again to the same scene; the sameness of it has a curiously mocking quality. Can it be true that after weeks of train travel you have gone no farther that this and only been returned once again to this squalid place? No; though you have seen hundreds like it since crossing the Rio Grande, you have never been here before.

And when the train whistle squawks and you pull out, because you have seen so many departures like this, the village leaves no impression. The dust from the accelerating train rises and the huts vanish beneath it. But somewhere in the memory these poor places accumulate, until you pray for something different, a little hope to give them hope. To see a country's poverty is not to see into its heart, but it is very hard to look beyond such pitiable things.

We ascended another range of hills and the gorge to the south distracted me. Tall crooked trees, looped with the entrails of slender yines, grew on the slopes and cliffs of the gorge, like the beginnings of jungle. The land was too precipitous for crops, too steep even for huts or paths. It was wild and uninhabited; birds flew along the sides of the gorge, but seemed too timid to risk flying across it. They whistled at the train. I looked for more, leaned out of the window and just then everything went black.

We had entered a tunnel. The passengers began to scream. Central Americans always scream in tunnels, but whether they screamed with enthusiasm or terror I could not tell. The train had no lights in its cars, and with the darkness was a rush of dust which thickened as the train blundered on. I could feel the dust blowing into my face and could feel it on my hair as if I was in a hole and the dust was being shovelled onto me. I did what I had seen the passengers do earlier: I buried my face in my shirt and breathed through the cloth. We were in the tunnel for five minutes, which is a long time to be blindly choking and hearing people scream. But not everyone had screamed. In front of me was an old lady who had told me she was going to San Vicente to sell her crate of oranges. She had gone to sleep an hour before. She was sleeping when we entered the tunnel; she was sleeping when we left it. Her head was thrown back and her mouth was open; she had not shifted her position.

The train plunged out of the tunnel and lost its racket in the sunlight and clear air. We teetered on a mountainside, and the subdued chug of the engine - muffled by the tide of air - was like a hushed reverence for the ten fertile miles of the Jiboa Valley, which began at the tunnel entrance and descended as evenly as a ski slope before rising at the foot of the volcano. The volcano was a darker green than the landscape it sprang out of, and it had leonine contours of light and shade, some like shoulders and forepaws, some muscled like flanks and hindquarters. But it had a carved considered look to it and seemed, as I sped towards it on the train, like a headless sphinx, green and monumental, as if its head had rolled away leaving its lion's body intact. It was easy to understand how the Indians hereabouts had come to believe that their lands were inhabited by monster lords. Not only did the mountains have a monstrous aspect, the animal shapes and clumsy claws of giants and demons, but they growled and rumbled and trembled and hollered, and shook down the flimsy huts of the Indians; they burned the Indians alive and buried them in ashes and made their fish disappear and ate their children. And these oddities of landscape were still a source of fear.

For the next forty minutes we rolled down the mountain valley towards the shadows of the volcano. And yet, so slowly were we moving, it seemed as if we were stuck fast at the rim of the valley and the volcano was rising and turning, revealing the lion's svelte back and lengthening, perhaps stretching to pounce in eruption, until finally, and just as I expected it to rise and roar, it disappeared - everything but those two ridges which were tensed like front legs. We were at San Vicente, its nearest town, and deep between its fore-paws.

Most of the passengers got out here and stumbled across the tracks. There was no one collecting tickets. The officials watched from the coolness of a grove of trees. The whistle blew; the train lurched towards Cutuco. Then the dust settled and with it the mournful stillness of the country town on a hot afternoon.

I asked the way to the market. A boy gave me simple directions: follow this road. He seemed surprised that anyone should need directions in this tiny place. But the railway station was not in the centre of town; it was half a mile, along the town's main street, from the station to the plaza. Most of San Vicente's houses are on that street; the street begins as dust, turns bouldery, then cobbled, and nearer the plaza is concrete. The market, which I had been told was interesting, was like an oriental bazaar - tent-shelters pitched along several small lanes. Each tent enclosure was piled with fruit or vegetables, or dead animals hung on makeshift gallows, or boxes of pencils or pocket combs. All the people in a particular section were selling the same thing: a section of fruit, one of vegetables, one of meat or household items; and further away was a section reeking of decayed fish. I bought a bottle of soda water and noticed that no one was hawking anything. The hawkers had gathered into groups - men here, women there- and were talking companionably.

At the end of the market precinct was the plaza, and fronting onto the plaza San Vicente's church. It is one of the oldest churches in Central America, and called El Pilar. Built by the Spanish in this remote town, it has not been restored: no restoration has been necessary. It was made to withstand the sieges of pagans and the ravages of earthquakes. It has survived them all; apart from a few broken windows it shows few signs of age or ruin. Its walls are three feet thick; its columns, twelve feet in circumference, are low plump pillars the thickness of a cathedral's. But El Pilar is little more than a chapel; it is the shape of the mausoleums I had seen in rural Guatemala, white and rounded, with the mosque-lik.; domes and squat arabesques that the Spanish gave their country churches. But its whitewash did not disguise its look of belligérance, nor did its stained-glass windows or crosses prevent it from looking like what it perhaps always has been - a fortress.

In the early nineteenth century there were a number of Indian wars in this part of Central America. By force of numbers and in their ferocity the Indians were able to overwhelm the Spanish in certain areas and create Indian strongholds, little kingdoms within the Spanish colony. From these places they made forays into Spanish towns and occasionally terrorized the inhabitants. Throughout the 1830's there were battles, and the largest number of Indians was led by a chief, Agostino Aquinas - he was a Christian - whose bravado brought him here to El Pilar in San Vicente. As a taunt to the Spanish, Aquinas rushed into El Pilar and snatched the crown from the statue of Saint Joseph. This he crammed onto his own head, declaring war on the Spanish. He then made for the mountains and, controlling a sizable district with his Indians, fought a guerrilla war.

The church could not have looked much different when Aquinas whooped in and desecrated it. The arches are heavy, the tiles immovable, the carved wooden altarpiece merely darker, and there is a narrow tomb-like quality to the interior. It may be the holiest building in town; it is certainly the strongest. It has, without any doubt, known service as a fortification.

Eleven old ladies were kneeling in the front pews and praying. The church was cool, so I took a pew at the rear and tried to spot the statue of Saint Joseph. From the eleven black-shawled heads came the steady murmur of prayer; it was a simmer of incantation, low voices like thick Salvadorean soup mumbling in a pot, the same bubbling rhythm of formula prayers. They were like spectres, the row of crones draped in black, uttering muffled prayers in the shadowy church; the sunbeams breaking through the holes in the stained-glass windows made logs of light that seemed to prop up the walls; there was a smell of burned wax, and the candle flames fluttered in a continuous tremble, like the voices of those old ladies. Inside El Pilar the year might have been 1831, and these the wives and mothers of Spanish soldiers praying for deliverance from the onslaught of frantic Indians.

A tinkling bell rang from the sacristy. I sat primly and piously, straightening my back, in an instinctive reflex. It was habitual: I could not enter a church without genuflecting and dipping my fingers in the holy water font. A priest scuffed to the altar rail, flanked by two acolytes. The priest raised his arms and, in that gesture - but perhaps it was his good looks, the well-combed curate rather stuck on his clerical smoothness- a stagey flourish of a nightclub master of ceremonies. He was praying, but his prayers were mannered, Spanish, not Latin, and then he extended one arm towards a corner of the church that was hidden from me. He performed a little wrist-play, a wave of his hand, and the music began.

It was not solemn music. It was two electric guitars, a clarinet, maracas and a full set of drums - as soon as it had started to blurt I shifted my seat for a look at the musicians. It was the harsh wail of tuneless pop music that I had been avoiding for weeks, the squawk and crash that I had first heard issuing from Mexico as I stood on the high riverbank at Laredo. I had, since then, only rarely been out of earshot of it. How to describe it? With the guitar whine was an irregular beat, and each beat like a set of crockery dropped on the floor; a girl and boy shook maracas and sang - this was a cat's yowl attempt at harmonizing, but off-key it did not even have the melodiousness of a set of madly scraping locusts.

They were of course singing a hymn. In a place where Jesus Christ was depicted as a muscular tough, a blue-eyed Latin with slicked-down hair, a deeply handsome young fellow, religion was a kind of love affair. In some Catholicism, and frequently in Spanish America, prayer has become a romancing with Jesus. He is not a terrible God, not a destroyer, not a cold and vindictive ascetic; he is princely and with it the ultimate macho figure. The hymn was a love song, but very much a Spanish American one, crowing with lugubrious passion, the word heart repeated in every verse. And it was extremely loud. This was worship, but there was no substantial difference between what was going on here in this old church and what one could hear in the jukebox down the street in El Bar Americano. The church had been brought to the people; it had not made the people more pious - they had merely used this as an opportunity to entertain themselves and take the boredom out of the service. A mass or these evening prayers was an occasion to concentrate the mind in prayer; this music turned it into a distraction.

Music of this special deafening kind seemed important in Spanish America, because it prevented any thought whatsoever. The goon with the transistor in the train, the village boys gathered around their yakketing box, the man in Santa Ana who brought his cassette machine to breakfast and stared at its groaning amplifier, all the knee-jerks and finger-snapping and tooth-sucking seemed to have one purpose - a self-induced stupor for people who lived in a place where alcohol was expensive and drugs illegal. It was deafness and amnesia; it celebrated nothing but lost beauty and broken hearts; it had no memorable melody; it was splinters of glass ceaselessly flushed down a toilet, the thud of drums and the grunts of singers. People I met on my trip were constantly telling me they loved music. Not pop music from the United States, but this music. I knew what they meant.

Meanwhile, the priest had sat down beside the altar, looking pleased with himself. Well he might: the music had its effect. As soon as it had started, people had begun to pour into the church: schoolchildren with satchels and wearing uniforms, young children - barefoot urchins, kids with twisted nitty hair who had been frolicking in the plaza; mumbling old men with machetes, and two farm-boys clutching straw hats to their chests, and a lady with a tin wash basin and a gang of boys, and a bewildered dog. The dog sat in the centre aisle and beat its stub of tail against the tiles. The music was loud enough to have reached the market up the street, for here were three ladies in full skirts carrying empty baskets and leather purses. Some sat, some waited at the back of the church. They watched the band, not the tabernacle, and they were smiling. Oh, yes, this is what religion is all about - rejoice, smile, be happy, the Lord is with you; snap your fingers, He has redeemed the world. There were two shattering clashes of cymbals.

The music stopped. The priest stood up. The prayers began.

And the people who had come into the church during the song pushed to the rear door. The eleven old ladies in the front pews did not move, and only they remained to say the Confiteor. The priest paced back and forth at the altar rail. He gave a short sermon: God loves you, he said; you must learn how to love Him. It was not easy in the modern world to find time for God; there were temptations, and the evidence of sin was everywhere. It was necessary to work hard and dedicate each labour to the glory of God. Amen.

Again, a wave of the hand, and the music started. This time it was much louder, and it attracted a greater number of people from the plaza to hear it. It was a similar song: yowl, thump, heart, heart, yowl, crash, dooby-doo, thump, crash, crash. There was no hesitation among the on-lookers when it ended. At the final crash, they fled. But not for long. Ten minutes later (two prayers, a minute of meditation, some business with an incense burner, another pep-talk) the band again began to play and the people returned. This routine continued for a full hour, and it was still going on when I took myself away -during a song, not a sermon or prayer; I had a train to catch.

The sky was purple and pink, the volcano black; lurid chutes of orange dust filled the valleys, and the lake was fiery, like a pool of molten lava.

10

THE ATLANTIC RAILWAY: THE 12:00 TO LIMON

I was a bit surprised to find a Chinese man in a bar in San José, Costa Rica. The Chinese are not, typically, bar-flies. Once a year, if the occasion is special and they are in the company of some other men, they might, on a dare, drink a whole bottle of brandy. Then they turn red, say silly or abusive things very loudly, throw up and have to be carried home. Drinking is their mad fling at gaiety; but it is perverse - they take no pleasure in it. So what was this Chinese man doing here? We talked circumspectly at first, as strangers do, reaching agreement on trivialities before risking anything personal. And then he told me. Well, he said, he happened to own this bar. He also owned a restaurant and a hotel. He was a Costa Rican citizen. It had been a deliberate choice. He disliked every other country he had seen.

'Which ones?' I asked. We spoke in Spanish. He said his English was shaky; I told him my Cantonese was far from perfect.

'All the countries,' he said. 'I left China in 1954. I was a young man and I liked to travel. I looked at Mexico - I went all over. But I didn't like it. I went to Guatemala and all around - Nicaragua - that was very bad. Panama - I didn't like it. Even Honduras and El Salvador - those countries.'

'What about the United States?'

'I went all around it. Maybe it is a good country, but I didn't think So. I could not live there. I was still travelling, and I thought to myself, "What is the best country?" It was Costa Rica - I liked it here very much. So I stayed here.'

I had so far only seen San José, but I took his point. It seemed an exceptional city. If San Salvador and Guatemala City were hosed down, all the shacks cleared and the people rehoused in tidy bungalows, the buildings painted, the stray dogs collared and fed, the children given shoes, the refuse picked up in the parks, the soldiers pensioned off- there is no army in Costa Rica - and all the political prisoners released, those cities would, I think, begin to look a little like San José. In El Salvador I had chewed the end of my pipestem to pieces in frustration. In San José I was able to have a new pipestem fitted (and I bought a spare for Panama) - it was that sort of place. The weather was fine, the service efficient, the city orderly. And they had just had an election. In the rest of Central America an election could be a harrowing piece of criminality; in Costa Rica the election had been fair and something of a fiesta. 'You should have been here for the election,' a woman told me in San José, as if I had missed a party. Costa Ricans were proud of their decent government, their high literacy rate, their courtly manners. The only characteristic Costa Rica shares with her Central American neighbours is a common antipathy. You don't hear a good word about Guatemala or El Salvador; and Nicaragua and Panama - the countries Costa Rica is wedged between - are frankly loathed. Costa Rica is as smug as any of them, but has more reason to be so. They hate gringos in those places,' a shopkeeper said to me. He was really saying two things: that gringos are not hated in Costa Rica, and that Costa Ricans are honorary gringos. It is with reluctance that foreigners tell you why they think Costa Rica works so well. 'It's a white country,' they say with hesitation. 'I mean, it's all white people, isn't it?'

This - you only have to take the train to Limón to find out - is a falsehood. But I was enjoying myself in San José, so I delayed my train-trip to Limón.

The Costa Ricans I discovered were courteous and helpful. The foreigners were otherwise. You go to a stinking place like Cutuco and you think how exactly it matches the fly-blown setting of a Bogart movie; it has the heat and the seedy cinematic romance, the end-of-tether squalor and rather vicious-looking bars that you associate with whiskery gringos on dangerous missions. But there are no gringos in Cutuco and the danger is all in the drinking water. It is not the malarial jerk-town that the foreigner seeks, but the hospitable tropical city where, for all its boredom, it is possible to have a good meal, frequent a safe brothel, start a business or make a killing. Costa Rica is enjoying a boom; the prosperity is obvious in San José. San José is hardly a romantic place but, next to Panama, it has the highest concentration of foreigners in Central America. Some are small-time crooks and hustlers, others are grand-scale con-rnen. Robert Vesco claims he lives in the suburbs of San José because he likes the climate; but he is also alleged to have embezzled almost half a billion dollars from an investment company. (Vesco's house, with its high fence and burglar-proof TV cameras in the shrubbery, is one of San Jose's sights; it is pointed out to tourists on their way to the Irazu volcano.) Not all San Jose's foreigners are crooks. There are timber merchants and booksellers, pharmacists and ice-cream tycoons. And there are retired people from all over the United States who have bought condominium apartments and plots of land and who sit in the shade and thank God they are not in Saint Pete. The difference is that, unlike Florida, there aren't so many geriatrics in Costa Rica to remind them that they have come down to die.

'I think they'd be better off in Florida,' said Captain Ruggles. 'For one thing, they'd have a better standard of medical care. God knows what kind of cattywampus you'd have to start here to get a doctor to look at you.'

Andy Ruggles - the 'captain' was honorific: he was an airline pilot -was from Florida himself; he kept asking out loud what in the name of God he was doing in San José. We were in the bar of the Royal Dutch Hotel and Andy was resolutely making himself drunk. He could not drink on duty, he said. He could not drink at all if he was scheduled to fly. A good vacation for him, he said, was a binge in the company of a really stunning prostitute. 'But we have beer like this in Florida, and the girls are much better looking. Paul,' he said, 'I think I made a real bad mistake coming here. But I got a discount on the air-fare.'

We talked about religion: Andy was a Baptist. We talked about politics: in Andy's view, Nixon had been framed. We talked about race. In this respect, Andy was enlightened. He said there were five races in the world. A more narrow-minded man would have said two. The Indians in Central America were of course Mongolians. 'They came down through the Bering Straits, when there was land there. Take our Indians - they're Mongolian to the core.'

Conversations about race make me uneasy; the general direction of such talk is towards Auschwitz. I was glad when he said, 'How do you pronounce the capital of Kentucky? Louieville or Lewisville?'

'Louieville,' I said.

'Wrong. It's Frankfort.' He guffawed. 'That's an old one!'

I asked him to give me the capital of Upper Volta. Andy did not know that Ouagadougou is the capital of Upper Volta. He countered with Nevada. I did not know that Carson City was its capital, and I missed Illinois too. Andy knew more capital cities than anyone I had ever met, and I prided myself on my knowledge of capitals. He missed New Hampshire (Concord) and Sri Lanka (Colombo), but that was all, apart from Upper Volta. He bought me three beers. I ended up buying six.

Andy was an even-tempered drunkard and he said that as he had in San José for three days he wanted to show me around. But a roan on his right had been listening to our conversation, and as Andy rose to leave, the man said in a strong Spanish accent, 'I think your airline is the worst one in the world. That's what I think. I'm on my way to Miami, but I'm not going to fly on your airline. It's the worst.'

Andy grinned at me. 'You always get one dissatisfied customer, don't you?'

The man said, 'It stinks. Really stinks.'

I thought Andy was going to hit him. But his smile returned to his reddened face and he said, 'Guess you had a bad flight. Little turbulence?' Andy fluttered his hand. 'Plane sort of going up and down, huh?'

'I have flown many times.'

'Correction,' said Andy. 'Two bad flights.'

'I would never fly with your airline again.'

'I'll mention that to the president next time I see him.'

'You can tell him something else for me- '

'Hold on a minute, sir,' said Andy very calmly. 'What I want to know is what's a Scotchman like you doing here?'

The Spaniard looked puzzled.

Andy turned his back on him and clawed his cuff from his wrist-watch. 'Time to eat.'

'I'm going to show you around town, boy. You're new in this here town. Gonna introduce you to the main features. If we meet any of my pals you just keep your mouth shut. I'm gonna say you're an Englishman, just in from London. Don't you say a word - they won't know the difference.'

We went to a bar called 'Our Club'. It was noisy and dark and in the shadows I could see furtive men canoodling with prostitutes.

'Set them up,' said Andy. 'This gentleman and I will have some beer. Any kind will do.' The girl behind the bar wore a low-cut dress. She wiped the bar with a rag. 'You look like an intelligent girl,' said Andy. 'Know who' - the girl walked away - 'aw, she ain't listening. Paul, know who's the greatest poet in the world? No, not Shakespeare. Can't guess? Rudyard Kipling.'

The girl brought us two bottles of beer.

Andy said, 'I've taken my fun where I've found it. Give the girl two dollars, Paul - you still owe me for Oregon. Salem, remember? And I've rogued and I've ranged in my time.'

He settled into his recitation of 'The Ladies'. He did not seem to see that four feet down the bar was a grossly fat man who, drinking alone and scooping peanuts from a bowl, had been watching us. The man rattled the peanuts in his hand, a crap-shooter's motion, before tossing them into his mouth; then his other hand went to his drink. He sipped and reached for more peanuts. He put his drink down, shook the peanuts and shot them into his mouth. His movements were ceaselessly gluttonous, but his eyes remained fixed on us.

Andy's voice was hoarse, almost gruff, but touched with melancholy.

Doll in a teacup she were-

But we lived on the square, like a true-married pair,

An' I learned about women from 'er.

'This used to be a great country,' said the fat man, munching peanuts.

I looked over at him. He was chuckling ruefully. His left hand found the peanut bowl. He had not looked down.

Andy was saying,

An' I took with a shiny she-devil,

The wife of a nigger at Mhow;

Taught me the gypsy folks' bolee

Kind of volcano she were ....

'Hookers everywhere,' said the fat man. I estimated that he weighed three hundred pounds. His hair was pushed back. He had huge lard-white arms. 'You could hardly move for the hookers.'

Andy said,

For she knifed me one night 'cause I wished she was white

And I learned about women from 'er.

'Americans come down. They buy little businesses - taxi-companies, soft drinks, gas stations. Then they sit on their asses and count their money. The government wanted them, so they cleaned the place up, sent the hookers to Panama. Because of these people who comedown. Practically all of them are from New York. Mostly sheenies.'

Andy had not stopped reciting, but he finished quickly, saying, 'The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under the skin. Did you say something, sir?'

'Sheenies,' said the fat man; his chewing was like a challenge.

'Hear that, Paul?' said Andy. He turned to the fat man. 'But you're here, ain't you?'

'I'm just passing through,' said the fat man. Drink, peanuts, drink, peanuts: he didn't stop.

'Sure,' said Andy, 'you bring your money down here. But someone else does it and you criticize.' So he had heard the fat man's complaint! He had been reciting 'The Ladies', but he had heard. Andy's tone was judicious. He said, 'Well, sir, you're entitled to your opinion. I am not going to dispute what you say. But I'm entitled to my opinion, too, and I say Robert W. Service is the second greatest.'

Andy began to recite The Cremation of Sam McGee'. He faltered, cursed, then recovered and recited in its entirety a Robert Service poem called 'My Madonna'.

I haled me a woman from the street,

Shameless, but, oh, so fair!

For several minutes, the fat man was silenced, but when Andy finished he piped up again.

'Not only sheenies,' he said. 'Anyone with a few bucks. They've ruined the place. I'll tell you one thing - Carazo just got elected, and he's going to kick them all out. They'll all be back in New York, where they belong. The trouble is, the hookers won't come back.' His hand went to the bowl and scrabbled. Now he looked down. The bowl was empty. He said again, 'The hookers won't come back.'

Andy said, 'Where are you from, sir?'

'Texas.'

'I knew it. Know how I knew it? Cause I could tell you were interested in poetry, Tex. Yes, I did. Now, listen, I know you're not a redneck - '

'That's the beer talking,' said the fat man. His hand, without peanuts, foraged on the bar, a large greedy lump of fingers looking for food.

' - but I wonder if you could do me a favour?'

'Yeah?'

'Just an application,' said Andy. He was perched on his bar-stool. His voice was matter-of-fact, but he sipped between phrases and broke up his sentences. 'I wonder if you could get me, um,' he sipped his beer, 'an application to, um,' he sipped again, 'join the, um,' now he sipped and smacked his lips, 'Ku Klux Klan.'

The fat man hoicked phlegm and spat on the floor.

Andy said, 'Could you do that little thing for me?'

'You can wash the sheets,' snarled the fat man.

'I knew he had a sense of humour,' said Andy. That Tex is a real fun guy, and I tell you, I'd like to sit here all night just swapping jokes with him. But, Paul, I think I've had enough beer.'

Andy climbed off his bar-stool and trying to stand started to topple. He balanced himself against the bar, blew out his cheeks and said, 'Yep, if you can't stand up you've had enough. Now tell me, what's the name of that hotel I'm in?'

After Andy had gone, the fat man said, 'He's lucky I'm in a good mood. I could snap his arms off.'

The fat man's name was Dibbs. He had been a policeman in Texas, but he had quit, and he hinted that his reason for quitting was that policemen were not allowed to be violent enough. Dibbs? Well, two or three times he had wanted to blow people's brains out; but you weren't supposed to do that sort of thing. He could have done it easily and called it resisting arrest. And he had been taunted by punks he was not allowed to shoot. He became a construction worker, operating a bulldozer, and then he had quit because everybody else was collecting social security money, so why not him? Now he was a personal bodyguard ('to a sheeny') and a courier.

'What exactly does a courier do?' I asked him.

'They carry things. Me, I carry money.'

In the past few weeks he had been to Mexico, Panama and Honduras. He had carried fifty thousand dollars' worth of pesos to Montreal, and eighty thousand Canadian dollars to Honduras and Panama. He worked for a certain man, he said. When I asked why these large amounts of currency were being shunted back and forth across national frontiers, he laughed. But he did say how the money was carried - in a suitcase.

'A big suitcase.'

He said, 'You'd be surprised how much money you can get into a little suitcase. It's easy. No country checks your baggage when you leave. And customs people in the States and Canada don't care if they open a suitcase and find it filled with pesos. Sometimes they don't even open it. But when they do, they shit. They've never seen so much money in their life.'

It was clear to me why Dibbs had been hired for this job. He was strong; he was as big as a house; he was fairly stupid and completely loyal. He would not go into detail about his employer or the reason for transporting the money, and he said at one point, 'Maybe my name's Dibbs and maybe it ain't.' He had a fantasy of self-importance; carrying these sums of money fed his fantasy. He was proud of the fact that no one had ever succeeded in mugging him. 'Guess why?'

I said I couldn't guess.

'Because I'm an alcoholic,' he said. He picked up his glass. 'See that? It's a Coke. If I drink anything stronger, I'm finished. So I don't drink. Can't drink. Drunks get mugged. You - you'll probably get mugged. You've been drinking beer all night. I could carry fifty grand through the worst part of Panama City and nothing would happen to me.'

'You'd be sober.'

'Guess why else?'

'Can't guess.'

'Because I know karate. I could snap your arms off.' Dibbs leaned forward. He looked as though he wanted to snap my arms off. He said, 'Also, I'm not stupid. People who get mugged ask for it. They're stupid. They go to the wrong places. They get drunk. They don't know karate.'

Also, I thought, they weigh less than three hundred pounds.

Dibbs struck me as being a very sinister character, and without Andy Ruggles around to distract Dibbs's attention I felt rather defenceless. Dibbs had one passion: hookers. He liked to take them two or three at a time. 'I just lie there- they do all the work.' He boasted that he never paid them. They liked him; he walked into a brothel and they were all over him, clamouring, fighting to go to bed with this mountain of meat. He didn't know why this was so. 'Maybe it's because I'm so handsome!'

He wanted to take me to what he said was the only good brothel in San José. It was too late, I said, nearly midnight. He said midnight was the best time - the hookers were just waking up. 'How about tomorrow?' I said, knowing that tomorrow I would be in Limón. 'You're a chicken,' he said, and I could hear him laughing as I descended the stairs to the street.

There are two railways in Costa Rica, each with its own terminal in San José. Their routes dramatize Costa Rica's indifference to her neighbours: they go to the coasts, not to any frontier. The Pacific Railway travels down to Puntarenas on the Gulf of Nicoya; The Atlantic up to Puerto Limón. The Atlantic station is the older of the two, and part of its line has been in operation for almost a hundred years. Outside that station there is a steam locomotive mounted on blocks for travellers to admire. In El Salvador such an engine would be puffing and blowing up the track to Santa Ana; in Guatemala it would have been melted down and made into anti-personnel bombs for the White Hand.

A Limón train leaves the Atlantic station every day at noon. It is not a great train, but by Central American standards it is the Brighton Belle. There are five passenger coaches, two classes, no freight cars. I had been eager to take this train, for the route has the reputation of being one of the most beautiful in the world, from the temperate capital in the mountains, through the deep valleys on the north-east, to the tropical coast which, because of its richly lush jungle, Columbus named Costa Rica when he touched there on his fourth voyage in 1502. He believed that he had arrived at the green splendour of Asia. (Columbus tacked up and down the coast and was ill for four months in Panama; cruelly, no one told him that there was another vast ocean on the other side of the mountains - the local Indians were deaf to his appeal for this information.)

The most scenic of Central American routes; but I had another good reason for wanting to take this train out of San José. Since arriving in Costa Rica I had spent much of my time in the company of hard-drinking American refugees - Andy Ruggles and the diabolical Dibbs were but two. I was glad of their company; El Salvador hadn't been much fun. But now I was ready to set off alone. Travel is at its best a solitary enterprise: to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be alone and unencumbered. Other people can mislead you; they crowd your meandering impressions with their own; if they are companionable they obstruct your view, and if they are boring they corrupt the silence with non-sequiturs, shattering your concentration with Oh, look, it's raining and You see a lot of trees here. Travelling on your own can be terribly lonely (and it is not understood by Japanese who, coming across you smiling wistfully at an acre of Mexican buttercups, tend to say things like Where is the rest of your team?). I think of evening in the hotel room in the strange eity; my diary has been brought up to date; I hanker for company: what to do? I don't know anyone here, so I go out and walk and discover the three streets of the town and rather envy the strolling couples and the people with children. The museums and churches are closed, and towards midnight the streets are empty. Don't carry anything valuable, I was warned; it'll just get stolen. If I am mugged I will have to apologize in my politest Spanish: I am sorry, sir, but I have nothing valuable on my person. Is there a surer way of enraging a thief and driving him to violence? Walking these dark streets is dangerous, but the bars are open. Ruggles and Dibbs await. They take the curse off my boredom, but I have a nagging suspicion that if I had stayed home and lingered in downtown Boston until midnight I would have met Ruggles and Dibbs in the Two O'Clock Lounge ('20 Completely Nude College Girls!!). I did not have to take the train to Costa Rica for that.

It is hard to see clearly or to think straight in the company of other people. Not only do I feel self-conscious, but the perceptions that are necessary to writing are difficult to manage when someone close by is thinking out loud. I am diverted, but it is discovery not diversion that I seek. What is required is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision which, however banal, seems in my private mood to be special and worthy of interest. There is something in feeling abject that quickens my mind and makes it intensely receptive to fugitive impressions. Later, these impressions might be refuted or deleted, but they might also be verified and refined; and in any case I had the satisfaction of finishing the business alone. Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of a rest. Have a nice time, people said to me at my send-off at South Station. It was not precisely what I had hoped for. I craved a little risk, some danger, an untoward event, a vivid discomfort, an experience of my own company, and in a modest way the romance of solitude. This I thought might be mine on that train to Limón.

I found a corner seat by a window and watched the houses get smaller as we approached the outskirts of San José. They got smaller but, unlike the houses in the rest of the suburbs in Central America, they did not get dingier and more tumbledown on the periphery of the city. The campaign flags were still flying, and election slogans and posters were stuck to the walls of some of them. They were ranch houses, bungalows, square tin-roofed houses; houses of clapboard and concrete. They were pink and green and lemon-yellow in the small settlements, and in the smart outer suburbs they were red-brick and white and had rolling lawns. And then, without passing a dump or a slum, or the dirty river with its grey froth of soapsuds that was the boundary of every other town I had seen so far, we sped into the countryside, past banana groves and fields of coffee. These were shady plantations, with wooded green hills surrounding them. It was sunny and cool on this day in late February, and there by the tracks was a Costa Rican beekeeper, like Sherlock Holmes in retirement, just as hawk-nosed and skinny; he looked up from his swarming hives and grinned at the train.

Even the poorest, the smallest house was neatly painted, the stairs swept, and starched curtains flapped through windows. In the yards were the piles of firewood, the vegetable garden, the borders of flowers. They were proud little houses, and the pride gave them dignity. There was a completeness to this, a certain formality, and it was reflected in the way the train passengers were dressed, the girls in sun-hats, the ladies in shawls, the men in fedoras.

More than half the passengers on the train were black. I found this odd: I could not remember having seen any blacks in San José. Their baskets and shopping bags marked them out as Costa Ricans, not tourists, and for the early part of the trip they chatted with the whites on the train. They spoke in Spanish, getting acquainted, laughing and joking. I hope I've got enough food, said a black lady in a sunbonnet. My children are always eating.

Then I heard, 'Take yo haid out de winda!'

It was the same woman, now yelling in English. One of her small sons, in a blue jersey, was hanging out of the window. But his head was so far out he could not hear her.

'Tree gonna lop it off!'

Now he heard. He turned his head to her, but did not withdraw it.

'You kyant do dat!' She punched his shoulder. The boy sat back in his seat and giggled at his sister.

'I have to watch them all the time,' said the black woman in Spanish. Her English was sing-song, her Spanish a stutter.

We passed through blobs of sunlight in a pretty, shady wood. It was unusual to travel in the shade, through woods which overhung the track. Normally there was heat on either side of the track and sun beating through the windows. But here the sunlight speckled the glass and flashed in the train, and the trees were so dense it was impossible to see beyond the pickets of slender trunks and the cracks of light. We were among mountains. A space between the trees opened like a gate and, far-off, pine groves grew darkly on the hills and below them in a ditch of shade there was a dairy and a saw-mill and a village of timber houses and a wood-lot. A river ran through it, sparkling just before it tumbled into the shady valley, and the place looked to me like a town in Vermont I had seen as a child, perhaps Bellows Falls or White River Junction. The illusion of Vermontness persisted even though in this village I saw a row of royal palms.

We came to Cartago. This was a market town. Here, in 1886, the railway line was begun by an American speculator, Minor Keith. The silver commemorative shovel, with an appropriate inscription, is on display in the National Museum in San José, along with pre-Columbian pottery and masks and gold jewellery and portraits of moustached Costa Rican patriots and presidents (their walking sticks, each one as individual as their moustaches, are also on display). In that museum is a painting of Cartago depicting the result of the great earthquake of 1910. It is an interesting picture, for right through the middle of town, in the foreground of the painting, are the railway tracks, a whole section of them covered by masonry which had fallen from a convent wall. That earthquake flattened Cartago, but the line was repaired; nothing else of old Cartago remains.

The seat next to me had been empty. Just as we left Cartago a young man took it and asked me how far I was going. He said he was going to Siquirres. Limón, he said, was interesting, but I might find it crowded. It would be hours before we'd reach Siquirres; he hoped I would teach him some English. He had tried to learn it, but found it very difficult. His name was Luis Alvarado, he said. I asked him if we could skip the English lesson.

'It is just that you look like a teacher. I think you could help me,' he said in Spanish. 'How do you like Costa Rica?'

I told him that I thought it was a beautiful country.

'Why do you think so?'

The mountains, I said.

'They are not so beautiful as those in Oregon. Or so high.'

The river, I said. That was a lovely river in the valley.

'The rivers in Oregon are much more beautiful.'

I told him I thought the people in Costa Rica were extremely pleasant.

'The people in Oregon always smile. They are more friendly than Costa Ricans.'

It was a green country, I said.

'Have you been to Oregon?'

'No,' I said. 'Have you?'

He had. It was his single visit outside Costa Rica, a summer in Oregon, trying to learn English. It was a wonderful visit, but the English lessons were a failure. He had not been to Nicaragua or Panama: they were loathsome places. He said that instead of my going on to Panama I should return to the States and visit Oregon.

The river was beneath us; the landscape had opened and become simple and terrifying, two parallel mountain ranges and between them, so deep it made me anxious, a gorge. There were fountains of mist in the gorge, the flung spray of the foaming river. This was the Rio Reventazón. It is a swift river and its strength has pulled down the sides of these mountains and made a canyon, filled with the rubble of its destruction, and this - the fallen walls of boulders, the river heaving over rocks, the turbulent suds of rapids - lay four hundred feet below the train. The low coffee bushes could not obscure the view. I saw how the gorge had been levelled by the rushing whiteness on the valley floor. The valley of the Reventazón is forty miles long. The mountains are in places so precipitous the train has to descend through tunnels (screams, exalted yells in the car, and the odour of damp walls) to a cliffside that brings it so near the river the spray hits the windows. Then up again, along a cut to switchbacks and bridges.

The bridges were always approached at an angle, so that they were seen whole, from the side; they appeared as a framework of slender girders, or sometimes wooden beams, tensed across two cliffs. It seemed as if this was the view of a bridge on another track, as if we were going to bypass it. But always the train turned sharply, and became noisy as it started onto it; and the torrent beneath it looked peculiarly menacing - a staircase of cataracts frothing into the greater torrent yonder. I wondered how it was that Costa Rica could be so cool and piney, and it was not just that it was so different from its near neighbours, but that it was cool and piney like Vermont, and freshly watered - here a sawmill and there a dairy, the cows cropping grass on the hillsides; and horses, oblivious to the train, tethered to fences. Later, I was to meet an American horse-dealer in Costa Rica. He said, 'My horses would bolt and hang themselves if I tied them that near the tracks.'

It is, for the first third of the trip, a mountain railway, the train travelling along a narrow shelf that has been notched into the mountainside. How narrow? Well, at one point a cow had strayed onto the line. To the left was the sheer mountain wall, to the right the drop into the river; the cow was baffled and for almost a mile she lolloped ahead of the engine, which had slowed so as not to kill her. At times she stopped, put her nose against the mountainside, sniffed at the precipice, then started away again, rocking back and forth, stifflegged, the way cows run. The track was too narrow to give her space to allow us to pass, so she ran ahead rocking, her tail swinging, for almost a mile on this high shelf.

Nearer the river the coffee bushes were thick, and there was cocoa, too, the wide leaves, the plump, bobbin-like pods. It was easier to make notes here, as the train moved slowly on the flat tracks by the riverbed. But my notes were not extensive. Boulders, I wrote, Valley -River - Spray - Frail bridge - Trapped cow- Cocoa.

'You Americans like to travel alone.' It was Luis.

I said, 'I hate to travel alone. It is depressing. I miss my wife and children. But if I am alone I see more clearly.'

'You never talk to each other, you Americans.'

'You mean in Oregon?'

'Here, when you travel.'

'We talk all the time! Who says Americans don't talk to each other?'

'There is an American,' said Luis. 'You see him? Why don't you talk to him?'

The man wore a blue cap, a Barney Oldfield cap with a peak; his shirt was bright green, his trousers cut like a sailor's. Although he was seated, the strap of his bag was over his shoulder and he clutched the bag tightly, as if it had something valuable in it. He was sunburned and I guessed he was in his sixties - the hair on his arms was white. He was seated near the blacks, who were talking in Spanish and English; but he did not speak to anyone.

I said, 'I did not know he was an American.'

Luis found this funny.

'You did not know he was an American?'

I suppose it was his cap, which Luis took to be foolishly youthful. Costa Ricans wore felt hats and fedoras. This man's cap was tilted at a rakish angle, and it did not quite go with his craggy face.

'Talk to him,' said Luis.

'No, thank you.'

Talk to this old man, just because Luis wanted to hear us speak English? I had met enough Americans in San José. It was the reason I had left the city, to seek out and assess the reputedly uninhabited Atlantic coast, perhaps wind up swapping stories with a grizzled black in a Limón bar, tales of mule-skinning and piracy on the Mosquito Coast.

'Go ahead.'

'You talk to him,' I said. 'He might teach you some English.'

It was, mainly, my other fear: the distortion of companionship. I did not want to see things with anyone else's eyes. I knew this experience. If they point out something you have seen already you realize that your own perception was rather obvious; if they indicate something you missed you feel cheated, and it is a greater cheat to offer it later as your own. In both cases, it is annoying. Oh, look, it's raining is as bad as Costa Ricans have their own unit of length - the vara.

I wanted to concentrate my whole attention on what was outside the window; I wanted to remember this valley, this river, these mountains, the breeze freshening the train, the fragrance of the wildflowers that grew next to the track. Pretty flowers, I wrote.

Smiling nervously, Luis got up. He went up the aisle and mumbled to the old man. The old man did not understand. Luis tried again. You bastard, I thought. Now the old man turned and smiled at me. He rose. Luis took the old man's seat. The old man came towards me and took Luis's seat. He said, 'Boy, am I glad to see you!'

He had missed his tour. It would have been all-inclusive, the train to Limón, a boat-trip up the coast, a chef travelling with the party, some wonderful meals. He would have seen monkeys and parrots. Back to Limón: some swimming, a four-star hotel, then a bus to the airport and a plane to San José. That was the tour. But (the river was dashing an old canoe to pieces, and those little boys - surely they were fishing?) the hotel manager had gotten the time wrong and the tour had left at six, not nine, so on the spur of the moment, and with nothing else to do in San José, the old man asked about the train and hopped on, just like that, and you never knew, maybe he'd catch up with the rest of them; after all, he had paid his three hundred dollars and here was his receipt and his booklet of coupons.

Six hours lay ahead of us, before we would reach Limón.

'Did you know the train was going to take so long?'

I said, 'I would not mind if this train took four days.'

That took care of him for a while, but as soon as the splendour of the valley returned he began chattering. His name was Thornberry, he lived in New Hampshire, and he was a painter - of pictures. He had not always been a painter. Until recently he had had to make his living as a commercial artist and designer. It had been a real grind, worrying about how he was going to buy groceries; but a few years ago he had come into some money - quite a lot of money - and he had set about seeing the world. He had been to Hawaii, Italy, France, the West Indies, Colombia, Alaska, California, Ireland, Mexico and Guatemala. His impressions of Guatemala were different from mine. He loved Guatemala. He liked the flowers. He had been two weeks in Antigua with a charming fellow who gave parties every night. On Mr Thornberry's report, the fellow was an alcoholic. Mr Thornberry had not gone to Zacapa.

'This scenery,' said Mr Thornberry, 'it blows my mind.' Mr Thornberry had a curious way of speaking, he squinted until his eyes were no more than slits; his face tightened into a grimace and his mouth went square, mimicking a grin, and then without moving his lips he spoke through his teeth. It was the way people talked when they were heaving ash barrels, sort of screwing their faces up and groaning their words.

Lots of things blew Mr Thornberry's mind: the way the river thundered, the grandeur of the valley, the little huts, the big boulders, and the climate blew his mind most of all - he had figured on something more tropical. It was an odd phrase from a man his age, but after all Mr Thornberry was a painter. I wondered why he had not brought his sketchbook. He repeated that he had left the hotel on the spur of the moment. He was, he said, travelling light. 'Where's your bag?'

I pointed to my suitcase on the luggage rack.

'It's pretty big.'

'That's everything I have. I might meet a beautiful woman in Limon and decide to spend the rest of my life there.'

'I did that once.'

'I was joking,' I said.

But Mr Thornberry was still grimacing. 'It was a disaster in my case.'

Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the river was seething, and men were standing in the shallows - I could not make out what they were doing - and pink and blue flowers grew beside the track.

'That fellow in Antigua had a beautiful house,' said Mr Thornberry. 'A wall all around it, with morning glories just like those.'

'So those are morning glories, eh?' I said. 'I was wondering.'

Mr Thornberry told me about his painting. You couldn't be a painter during the Depression; couldn't make a living at it. He had worked in Detroit and New York City. He had had a miserable time of it. Three children, but his wife had died when the third was still an infant - tuberculosis, and he had not been able to afford a good doctor. So she died and he had had to raise the kids himself. They had grown up and married and he had gone to New Hampshire to take up painting, what he had always wanted to do. It was a nice place, northern New Hampshire; in fact, he said, it looked a hell of a lot like this part of Costa Rica.

'I thought it looked like Vermont. Bellows Falls.'

'Not really.'

There were logs in the water, huge dark ones tumbling against each other and jamming on the rocks. Why logs? I did not want to ask Mr Thornberry why they were here. He had not been in Costa Rica longer than me. How could he know why this river, on which there were now no houses, carried logs in its current as long as telegraph poles and twice as thick? I would concentrate on what I saw: I would discover the answer. I concentrated. I discovered nothing.

'Sawmill,' said Mr Thornberry. 'See those dark things in the water?'

He squinted; his mouth went square. 'Logs.'

Damn, I thought, and saw the sawmill. So that's why the logs were there. They had been cut up-river. They must have-

'They must have floated those logs down to be cut into lumber,' said MrThornberry.

'They do that back home,' I said.

'They do that back home,' said Mr Thornberry.

He was silent for some minutes. He brought a camera out of his shoulder bag and snapped pictures out the window. It was not easy for him to shoot past me, but I was damned if I would yield my corner seat. We were in another cool valley, with rock columns all around us. I saw a pool of water.

'Pool of water,' said MrThornberry.

'Very nice,' I said. Was that what I was supposed to say?

Mr Thornberry said, 'What?'

'Very nice pool of water.'

Mr Thornberry hitched forward. He said, 'Cocoa.'

'I saw some back there.'

'But there's much more of it here. Mature trees.'

Did he think I was blind?

'Anyway,' I said, 'there's some coffee mixed in with it.'

'Berries,' said Mr Thornberry, squinting. He heaved himself across my lap and snapped a picture. No, I would not give him my seat.

I had not seen the coffee berries; how had he? I did not want to see them.

'The red ones are ripe. We'll probably see some people picking them soon. God, I hate this train.' He fixed that straining expression on his face. 'Blows my mind.'

Surely a serious artist would have brought a sketchpad and a few pencils and be doodling in a concentrated way, with his mouth shut. All Mr Thornberry did was fool with his camera and talk; he named the things he saw, no more than that. I wanted to believe that he had lied to me about being a painter. No painter would gab so aimlessly.

'Am I glad I met you!' said Mr Thornberry. 'I was going crazy in that seat over there.'

1 said nothing. I looked out the window.

'Kind of a pipeline,' said Mr Thornberry.

There was a rusty tube near the track, running parallel in the swamp that had displaced the river. I had not seen the river go. There were palm trees and that rusty tube: kind of a pipeline, as he had said. Some rocky cliffs rose behind the palms; we ascended the cliffs and beneath us were streams-

'Streams,' said MrThornberry.

- and now some huts, rather interesting ones, like sharecroppers' cottages, made of wood, but quite solidly built, upraised on poles above the soggy land. We stopped at the village of Swampmouth: more of those huts.

'Poverty,' said Mr Thornberry.

'Don't be silly,' I said. These were good timber houses, with wide corrugated tin roofs and healthy faces in the windows and well-dressed children standing on the big porches. They were not wealthy people, but neither were they poor. It seemed to me amazing that so far from San José - so far from Limón - in what was the borderland of thick viney jungle and dense savannah, people lived in dry well-made bungalows. Most of the people were black, and now most of the passengers on the train were black. I walked to the rear of the car to get away from Mr Thornberry, and talked to an old black man. The blacks he said had been brought over from Jamaica to build the railway. 'We didn't get the diseases,' he said in English. 'The British people got all the diseases.' His father had been a Costa Rican, his mother Jamaican; English had been his first language, which allowed me a glimpse of the sociology of the family - he had been raised by his mother. He was critical of the black boys hooting and laughing in the corridor of the train. 'Their grandparents were willing to work, but they ain't.'

The houses in style were perhaps West Indian, too. They were certainly the sort I had seen in the rural south, in the farming villages of Mississippi and Alabama; but they were trimmer and better-maintained. There was a banana grove in each mushy yard and in each village a general store, nearly always with a Chinese name on the store sign; and most of the stores were connected to another building, which served as a bar and a pool room. There was an air of friendliness about these villages, and though many of the households were pure black, there were mixed ones as well; Mr Thornberry pointed this out as soon as I returned to my seat.

'Black boy, white girl,' he said. They seem to get along fine. Pipeline again.'

Thereafter, each time the pipeline appeared - and it did about twenty times from here to the coast - Mr Thornberry obligingly indicated it for me.

We were deep in the tropics. The heat was heavy with the odour of moist vegetation and swamp water and the cloying scent of jungle flowers. The birds had long beaks and stick-like legs and they nosedived and spread their wings, becoming kite-shaped to break their fall. Some cows stood knee-deep in swamp, mooing. The palms were like fountains, or bunches of ragged feathers, thirty feet high - no trunks that I could see, but only these feathery leaves springing straight out of the swamp.

Mr Thornberry said, 'I was just looking at those palm trees.'

'They're like giant feathers,' I said.

'Funny green fountains,' he said. 'Look, more houses.'

Another village.

Mr Thornberry said, 'Flower gardens - look at those bougainvilleas. They blow my mind. Mama in the kitchen, kids on the porch. That one's just been painted. Look at all the vegetables!'

It was as he said. The village passed by and we were again in swampy jungle. It washumid and now overcast. My eyelids were heavy. Note-taking would have woken me up, but there wasn't room for me to write, with Mr Thornberry darting to the window to take a picture every five minutes. And he would have asked why I was writing. His talking made me want to be secretive. In the damp greenish light the woodsmoke of the cooking fires clouded the air further. Some of the people cooked under the houses, in that open space under the upraised floor.

'Like you say, they're industrious,' said Mr Thornberry. When had I said that? 'Every damn one of those houses back there was selling something.'

No, I thought, this couldn't be true. I hadn't seen anyone selling anything.

'Bananas,'said Mr Thornberry. 'It makes me mad when I think that they sell them for twenty-five cents a pound. They used to sell them by the hand.'

'In Costa Rica?'

'New Hampshire.'

He was silent a moment, then he said, 'Buffalo.'

He was reading a station sign. Not a station - a shed.

'But it doesn't remind me of New York.' Some miles earlier we had come to the village of Bataan. Mr Thornberry reminded me that there was a place in the Philippines called Bataan. The March of Bataan. Funny, the two places having the same name, especially a name like Bataan. We came to the village of Liverpool. I braced myself.