The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

'Liverpool,' said Mr Thornberry. 'Funny.'

It was stream-of-consciousness, Mr Thornberry a less allusive Leopold Bloom, a reluctant Stephen Dedalus. Mr Thornberry was seventy-one. He lived alone, he said; he did his own cooking. He painted. Perhaps this explained everything. Such a solitary existence encouraged the habit of talking to himself: he spoke his thoughts. And he had been alone for years. His wife had died at the age of twenty-five. But hadn't he mentioned a marital disaster? Surely it was not the tragic death of his wife.

I asked him about this, to take his attention from the passing villages which, he repeated, were blowing his mind. I said, 'So you never remarried?'

'I got sick,' he said. 'There was this nurse in the hospital, about fifty or so, a bit fat, but very nice. At least, I thought so. But you don't know people unless you live with them. She had never been married. There's our pipeline. I wanted to go to bed with her right away - I suppose it was me being sick and her being my nurse. It happens a lot. But she said, "Not till we're married."' He winced and continued. 'It was a quiet ceremony. Afterwards, we went to Hawaii. Not Honolulu, but one of the little islands. It was beautiful - jungle, beaches, flowers. She hated it. "It's too quiet," she said. Born and raised in a little town in New Hampshire, a one-horse town - you've seen them - and she goes to Hawaii and says it's too quiet. She wanted to go to night-clubs. There weren't any night-clubs. She had enormous breasts, but she wouldn't let me touch them. "You make them hurt." I was going crazy. And she had a thing about cleanliness. Every day of our honeymoon we went down to the launderette and I sat outside and read the paper while she did the wash. She washed the sheets every day. Maybe they do that in hospitals, but in everyday life that's not normal. I guess I was kind of disappointed.' His voices trailed off. He said, 'Telegraph poles. . . pig. . . pipeline again,' and then, 'It was a real disaster. When we got back from the honeymoon I said, "Looks like it's not going to work." She agreed with me and that day she moved out of the house. Well, she had never really moved in. Next thing I know she's suing me for divorce. She wants alimony, maintenance, the whole thing. She's going to take me to court.'

'Let me get this straight,' I said. 'All you did was go on a honeymoon, right?'

'Ten days,' said Mr Thornberry. 'It was supposed to be two weeks, but she couldn't take the silence. Too quiet for her.'

'And then she wanted alimony?'

'She knew my sister had left me a lot of money. So she went ahead and sued me.'

'What did you do?'

Mr Thornberry grinned. It was the first real smile I had seen on his face the whole afternoon. He said, 'What did I do? I counter-sued her. For fraud. See, she had a friend - a man. He had called her up when we were in Hawaii. She told me it was her brother. Sure.'

He was still looking out the window, but his thoughts were elsewhere. He was chuckling. 'I didn't have to do a thing after that. She gets on the witness-stand. The judge asks her, "Why did you marry this man?" She says, "He told me he had a lot of money." He told me he had a lot of money! Incriminated herself, see? She was laughed out of court. I gave her five grand and was glad to get rid of her.' Almost without pausing he said, 'Palm trees,' then, 'Pig,' 'Fence,' 'Lumber,' ' More morning glories - Capri's full of them,' 'Black as the ace of spades,' 'American car.'

The hours passed; Mr Thornberry spoke without let-up. 'Pool table,' 'Must be on welfare,' 'Bicycle,' 'Pretty girl,' 'Lanterns.'

I had wanted to push him off the train, but after what he had told me I pitied him. Maybe the nurse had sat beside him like this; maybe she had thought If he says that one more time I'll scream.

I said, 'When was this abortive honeymoon?'

'Last year.'

I saw a three-story house, with a verandah on each story. It was grey and wooden and toppling, and it reminded me of the Railway Hotel I had seen in Zacapa. But this one looked haunted. Every window was broken and an old steam locomotive was rusting in the weedy front yard. It might have been the house of a plantation owner - there were masses of banana trees nearby. The house was rotting and uninhabited, but from the remainder of the broken fence and the yard, the verandahs and the barn, which could have been a coach-house, it was possible to see that long ago it had been a great place, the sort of dwelling lived in by tyrannical banana tycoons in the novels of Asturias. In the darkening jungle and the heat, the decayed house looked fantastic, like an old ragged spider's web, with some of its symmetry still apparent.

Mr Thornberry said, 'That house. Costa Rican gothic.'

I thought: I saw it first.

'Brahma bull,' said Mr Thornberry. 'Ducks.' 'Creek.' 'Kids playing.' Finally, 'Breakers.'

We were at the shore and travelling alongside a palmy beach. This was the Mosquito Coast, which extends from Puerto Barrios in Guatemala to Colón in Panama. It is wild and looks the perfect setting for a story of castaways. What few villages and ports lie along it are derelict; they declined when shipping did, and returned to jungle. Massive waves were rolling towards us, the white foam vivid in the twilight; they broke just below the coconut palms near the track. At this time of day, nightfall, the sea is the last thing to darken: it seems to hold the light that is slipping from the sky; and the trees are black. So in the light of this luminous sea, and the pale still-blue eastern sky, and to the splashings of the breakers, the train racketed on towards Limón. Mr Thornberry was still talking. He said, 'I think I'm going to like this place,' then reported that he had spotted a house, an animal, a sudden fire, until at last we were travelling in darkness and his voice ceased. The surf was gone, the heat oppressive. I saw through the trees a combustion of awful flaring light, and Mr Thornberry croaked, 'Limón.'

Limon looked like a dreadful place. It had just rained, and the town stank. The station was on a muddy road near the harbour, and puddles reflected the decayed buildings and over-bright lights. The smell was dead barnacles and damp sand, flooded sewers, brine, oil, cockroaches and tropical vegetation which, when soaked, gives off the hot mouldy vapour you associate with compost heaps in summer, the stench of mulch and mildew. It was a noisy town, as well: clanging music, shouts, car horns. That last sight of the palmy coast and the breakers had been misleading. And even Mr Thornberry, who had been hopeful, was appalled. I could see his face; he was grimacing in disbelief. 'God,' he groaned. 'It's a piss-hole in the snow.' We walked through the puddles, the other passengers splashing us as they hurried past. Mr Thornberry said, 'It blows my mind.'

That does it, I thought. I said, 'I'd better go look for a hotel.'

'Why not stay at mine?'

Oh, look it 's raining. It blows my mind. Kind of a pipeline.

I said, 'I'll just sniff around town. I'm like a rat in a maze when I get to a new place.'

'We could have dinner. That might be fun. You never know - maybe the food's good here.' He squinted up the street. 'This place was recommended to me.'

'It wasn't recommended to me,' I said. 'It looks pretty strange.'

'Maybe I'll find that tour I was supposed to be on,' he said. He no longer sounded hopeful.

'Where are you staying?'

He told me. It was the most expensive hotel in Limón. I used that as my reason for looking elsewhere. A small, feeble-minded man approached and asked sweetly if he could carry my suitcase. It dragged on the street when he held it in his hand. He put it on his head and marched bandy-legged like a worker-elf to the market square. Here, Mr Thornberry and I parted.

'I hope you find your tour,' I said. He said he was glad we had met on the train: it had been kind of fun after all. And he walked away. I felt a boundless sense of relief, as if I had just been sprung from a long confinement. This was liberation. I tipped the elf and walked quickly in the opposite direction from Mr Thornberry.

I walked to savour my freedom and stretch my legs. After three blocks the town didn't look any better, and wasn't that a rat nibbling near the tipped-over barrel of scraps? It's a white country, a man had told me in San José. But this was a black town, a beach-head of steaming trees and sea-stinks. I tried several hotels. They were wormy staircases with sweating people minding tables on the second-floor landings. No, they said, they had no rooms. And I was glad, because they looked so disgustingly- dirty and the people were so rude; so I walked a few more blocks. I'd find a better hotel. But they were smaller and smellier, and they too were full. At one, as I stood panting - the staircase had left me breathless - a pair of cockroaches scuttled down the wall and hurried unimpeded across the floor. Cockroaches, I said. The man said, What do you want here? He too was full. I had been stopping at every second hotel. Now I stopped at each one. They were not hotels. They were nests of foul bedclothes, a few rooms and a portion of verandah. I should have known they were full: I met harassed families making their way down the stairs, the women and children carrying suitcases, the father sucking his teeth in dismay and muttering, 'We'll have to look somewhere else.' It was necessary for me to back down the narrow stairs to let these families pass.

In one place (I recognized it as a hotel by its tottering stairs, its unshaded bulbs, its moth-eaten furniture, its fusty smell), a woman in an apron said, 'Them - they're doublin' up.' She indicated a passageway of people - grandmothers, young women, sighing men, glassy-eyed children, black, fatigued, pushing old valises into a cubicle and several changing their clothes as they stood there in the passageway.

I had no idea of the time. It seemed late; the people in Limón who were not room-hunting were strolling the wet streets. They had that settled look of smugness which the stranger interprets as mockery or at least indifference. Saturday nights in strange cities can alienate the calmest of travellers.

Further on, a man said to me, 'Don't waste your time looking. There are no hotel rooms in Limón. Try tomorrow.'

'What do I do tonight?'

There is only one thing you can do,' he said. 'See that bar over there?' It was a peeling storefront with a string of lights over the door; inside, shapes - human heads - and smoke; and broken-crockery music. 'Go in and pick up a girl. Spend the night with her. That is your only hope.'

I considered this. But I did not see any girls. At the door were a gang of boys, jeering at men who were entering. I tried another hotel. The black owner saw that his reply to my question distressed me. He said, 'If you really get stuck and got no other place, come back here. You can sit out here on that chair.' It was a straight-backed chair on his verandah. There was a bar across the street: music, another mob of gawping boys. I slapped at the mosquitoes. Motorbikes went by; they sounded like outboard motors. This sound, and the boys, and the music made a scream. But I left my suitcase with this man and searched more streets. There were no hotels - no bars, no boarding houses; even the music was muffled. I decided to turn back, but I had gone too far: now I was lost.

I came to a precinct of Limón known as 'Jamaicatown'. In this white, Spanish-speaking country, a black, English-speaking area; a slum. These were the worst streets I had seen in Costa Rica, and each street corner held a dozen people, talking, laughing; their speech had a cackle in it. I was watched, but not threatened; and yet I had never felt so lost; it was as if I had burst through the bottom of my plans and was falling through darkness. I would continue to fall: there was absolutely nothing to do until dawn. My feet hurt; I was tired, dirty, sweating; I had not eaten all day. This was not the time or the place to reflect on the futility of the trip, and yet Costa Rica had seemed to promise better than this dark dead-end.

At one corner I asked some loitering men the way to the market. I asked in Spanish; they replied in English: they knew I was a stranger. Their directions were clear: they said I couldn't miss it.

I saw the row of hotels and boarding houses I had entered earlier in the evening. I had been disgusted by them then, but now they didn't seem so bad to me. I kept walking, and near the market square, skipping feebly across the street, one shoulder lower than the other because of the bag he carried, funny blue cap, bright green shirt, sailor pants, shuffling deck shoes: Thornberry.

'I've been looking all over for you.'

I needed his company: I was glad - someone to talk to. I said, 'I can't find a room anywhere. There aren't any in Limón. I'm screwed.'

He took my arm and winced. 'There are three beds in my room,' he said. 'You stay with me.'

'You mean it?'

'Sure-come on.'

My relief was inexpressible.

I got my suitcase from the hotel where the man had said that I could spend the night on his verandah chair. Mr Thornberry called the place a piss-hole (and over the next few days, whenever we passed it, he said, 'There's your verandah!'). I went to his room and washed my face, then we had a beer and grumbled about Limon. In gratitude I took him out to eat; we had broiled fish and hearts of palm and a bottle of wine, and Mr Thornberry told me sad stories about his life in New Hampshire, about his loneliness. Maybe he'd rent a house in Puntarenas for the winter. He couldn't take another cold winter. He had made a mess of his life, he said. It was the money - the IBM stock his sister had bequeathed to him. 'The things I want money can't buy. Money's just bullshit. If you have it. If you don't have it, it's important. I didn't always have it.'

I said, 'You saved my life.'

'I couldn't let you walk around all night. It's dangerous. I hate this place.' He shook his head. 'I thought I was going to like it. It looked okay from the train - those palm trees. That travel agency was lying to me. They said there were parrots and monkeys here.'

'Maybe you can get on a tour tomorrow.'

'I'm sick of thinking about it.' He looked at his watch. 'Nine o'clock. I'm bushed. Shall we call it a day?'

I said, 'I don't normally go to bed at nine o'clock.'

Mr Thornberry said, 'I always do.'

So we did. There was only one room-key. We were like an elderly couple, fussing silently at bed-time, yawning, chastely putting on our pyjamas. Mr Thornberry pulled his covers up and sighed. I read for a while, then switched off the light. It was still early, still noisy. Mr Thornberry said, 'Motorbike.' 'Music.' 'Listen to them yakking.' 'Car.' 'Train whistle.' 'Those must be waves.' Then he was asleep.

In spite of the ill-will I had felt towards him on the train, I considered Mr Thornberry my rescuer. To return the favour, I found a tour for him - a boat trip northwards up the coastal canal to the Laguna Matina, and an afternoon on the long lava beach at the mouth of the Rio Matina. Mr Thornberry insisted that I accompany him and ('Money's just bullshit') bought me a ticket. The boat was small, the canal was choked with hyacinths, so the going was slow. But orchids grew in clusters on the tropical trees, and there were herons and egrets soaring past us, and further on brown pelicans which flew in formation like geese.

'I don't see any parrots,' said Mr Thornberry. 'I don't see any monkeys.'

I went to the bow of the boat and sat there in the sun watching the jungle pass.

'Butterflies,' said Mr Thornberry, who had stayed under the canopy astern.

They were electric blue, and squarish, the size of pot-holders, mimicking the orchids they fluttered among.

'More herons,' said Mr Thornberry. 'Where are the parrots?'

Rising in me was an urge to push him off the boat. But I was ashamed of my irritation: he had saved me.

'Look how green everything is,' said Mr Thornberry.

We reached the lagoon at one-thirty, and moored the boat there because the black pilot feared that the tides at the estuary might drag us into the sea. We walked to the beach of grey lava. I swam. The black pilot screamed in Spanish for me to leave the water. There were sharks in the water, he said - the hungriest, the fiercest of sharks. I asked him whether he had seen any sharks. No, he said, but he knew they were there. I plunged back into the water.

'Sharks!'the black pilot yelled.

'Where?' I said. I was waist-deep in surf.

'There! Get out! Get out!'

Backing out of the water I saw the black dorsal fin of a shark slitting the water's surface. But the creature itself looked no more than a yard long. I had seen bigger sharks in East Sandwich on Cape Cod, and told the black pilot this. He insisted that I was crazy to swim, so I indulged him in his fears and went for a walk instead.

Mr Thornberry met me on the beach. We walked along the shoreline. 'Driftwood,' he said. 'It's all lava, you know. That's why the sand's so black.'

The boat's engine broke a shear-pin on the return journey. The pilot hailed a passing canoe and disappeared for an hour or more searching the canal huts for a new shear-pin.

'That other tour boat had a special chef,' said Mr Thornberry. 'This one doesn't even have an engine.'

'We might be stranded here for days,' I said. But this was malice; already I could see the black pilot making towards us in a canoe.

Back in Limón I found my own hotel. The weekend visitors had gone home: I had my pick of places. It was not a bad hotel, though the bed was damp with the sea-dampness of the air, and I was tormented by mosquitoes, and the noisy slosh of surf kept me awake for half the night. And yet, in solitude, I could think straight; I tried to work out the Thornberry paradox.

The next day I gave to roaming Limón, but on closer inspection Limón did not look any better than it had that first night, a steaming stinking town of mud puddles and buildings discoloured by dampness. The stucco fronts had turned the colour and consistency of stale cake, and crumbs of concrete littered the pavements. In the park there were three-toed sloths creeping in tree branches, and in the market and on the parapets of the crumbling buildings there were mangy vultures. Other vultures circled the plaza. Was there a dingier backwater in all the world? Columbus had come here with his son, Ferdinand. Ferdinand, fourteen at the time, had written an account of that fourth voyage, and he had described Limon as 'lofty, full of rivers, and abounding in very tall trees, as also on the islet [Uva Island, the Indians called it Quirivi] where they grew thick as basil, and full of very lofty groves of trees . . . For this reason the Admiral [Columbus] called it La Huerta [The Garden].' It might have been so; but the accounts of this voyage are contradictory. Ferdinand sometimes saw things differently from his father. In Limon, Ferdinand wrote, to Calm the fears of the sailors, the Indians sent out an old man with two little girls, the one about 8, the other about 14 years of age . . . the girls showed great fortitude, for despite the Christians being complete strangers to them in appearance, manners and race, they gave no signs of grief or fear, but always looked cheerful and modest. So the Admiral showed them good usage. . .' In his Lettera Rarissima to the Sovereigns, Columbus gave a different version of this. 'In Cariai [Limón] and the neighbouring lands,' he wrote, 'there are sorcerers. They would have given the world for me not to stay there an hour. As soon as I got there they sent right out two girls, all dressed up; the elder was hardly 11, the other 7, both behaving with such lack of modesty as to be no better than whores. They had magic powder concealed about them. As soon as they arrived, I gave orders that they be presented with some of our trading truck and sent them directly ashore . . .'

My desire to leave Limón was sharpened one morning while, with nothing better to do, I was standing in the plaza watching the vultures: were they vultures, or buzzards, or another bird of prey? I heard a sharp voice and saw an enormous black man coming towards me. He was carrying something silver; he wore a wool cap; he was barefoot. His eyes glinted with lunacy. He had a twitching gait.

'I am the Son of God,' he said.

He shook the silver object, then held it in blessing like a pyx. It was a ballpoint pen.

'I am the Son of God.'

People smiled. They let him pass. Perhaps they did not speak English.

'I am the Son of God.'

I stood aside.

Mr Thornberry was seated in the small lobby of his hotel. He looked deeply worried. He was studying a travel brochure. He jumped to his feet when he saw me.

'Let's get out of here,' I said.

'I tried,' he said. 'The plane's full. The bus doesn't leave until tonight.'

The train had left, too, at five that morning. I said, 'We can take a taxi.'

'A taxi? To San José?'

We went to the taxi rank in the plaza. I approached the driver of the least-dented car I could see and asked him: how much to San José? He thought a moment, then uttered a ridiculously high figure. I translated this for Mr Thornberry, who said, 'Tell him we'll take it.'

On principle I beat him down ten dollars and insisted that he had to get us to San José in time for lunch. He agreed and smiled. 'I've never done this before,' he said.

'This was a terrific idea,' said Mr Thornberry. 'I thought I'd never get out of that place.' He looked out of the window and squinted. 'Hut,' he said. 'Pig.' 'Cow.' 'Bananas.' Towards San José he became excited. 'Look,' he said, 'there's our pipe-line!'

11

THE PACIFIC RAILWAY: THE 10:00 TO PUNTARENAS

Walking down the main street of San José one morning after the Limón episode, I saw Captain Ruggles with a suitcase in each hand, hurrying away from his hotel. He wasn't leaving town, he said, he was only changing hotels. The previous night, and for the first time since arriving in San José, he had tried to hustle a girl up to his room. In the event, the manager had not allowed her past the lobby. What riled Andy was that the manager had said he had 'standards to maintain'. So Andy checked out.

'I'm going down the road,' he said. 'It's real fine. Where I'm going you can take anyone you want up to your room.'

'You've got your standards to maintain, too.'

'You bet. I make it a practice not to stay in any hotel where you can't take a two-headed nigger.'

I accompanied him to the hotel. It was a ramshackle building in the red-light district, catering to Panamanian sailors. The lobby was stacked with duffle bags, but that great stuffed thing near the check-in desk only looked like a duffle bag. It was Dibbs, eating a banana. What a small world this was.

'This is more like it,' said Andy.

Dibbs had seen us enter. 'Chicken-shit,' he said, and went back to his banana.

As the days wore on, Andy became dispirited. Each time I saw him he had the same complaint. 'I hate this place. I don't know what it is, but I can't fight it. I change hotels so I can take a hooker in, and I ask for a quiet room. They put me in the front. Sort of louvred windows, permanently open, like the front of a Ventura. The horns, the motorcycles, the exhaust fumes - they're driving me batty. I can't close the windows, I can't sleep - I haven't even brought a girl up. I wouldn't bring a girl in there. Listen, I don't even think these girls are pretty, do you?'

But it was also the red-necks. They depressed Andy more than the Panamanian sailors. He introduced me to a sixty-seven-year-old Texan. 'This is my forty-first trip to San José,' the man boasted. These girls cost money, but they're worth every cent.' His friend had been here twelve times, but his friend was younger. Andy's hotel was full of red-necks who had come down for the beer-drinking and the whore-hopping. They wore cowboy hats and boots, baseball caps and tee-shirts printed with slogans. They said you could have a fine time in San José. To his credit, Andy said, 'I don't want to end up like these jokers.' On his last evening, at my urging, he recited again Robert Service's poem, 'My Madonna'.

San José was not really vicious, but only superficially so. And yet I felt excluded from the serious, peaceable life of the city; it made my stay here seem odder than what I had experienced in Limón. It was odd in any case to be a traveller in a place where people were busily occupied: going to the dentist, buying curtains, searching for motor spares, taking their children to school, leading their lives in dedicated and innocent ways. The Costa Rican with his satchel of groceries and his young son, entering the government office to pay his electric light bill: he was everything that I was not. The red-necks were simply a fragment of the foreground. As a traveller in this settled society I was an intruder, a stranger watching people go through familiar motions that I could not affect or enter into. I had no business here, but it was worse when I noticed how closely their lives resembled the one I had left at home. What about my family? My car? My light bill? My teeth? In San José, the orderliness was a reproach; I had a sense of having deserted my responsibilities. I saw a young couple picking out a vacuum cleaner, and I felt guilty and homesick. Nothing was more unconsoling to me in all of Central America than the sight of this couple proudly carrying their new vacuum cleaner out of the San José store. I think I began to understand then why I was always happier in a backwater, why the strangeness of Santa Ana had charmed me, and why I had sought the outlandish parts of Guatemala or the wastes of Mexico. Perhaps this explained my need to seek out the inscrutable magnetisms of the exotic: in the wildest place everyone looked so marginal, so temporary, so uncomfortable, so hungry and tired, it was possible as a traveller to be anonymous or even, paradoxically, to fit in, in the same temporary way.

The map shows a railway that runs east of Limón and over the border into Panama; but this banana line is defunct. Even if it had been running it would have got me nowhere except to a place called Bocas de Toro where I would have had to charter a plane to fly to Panama City. This left me only one choice, the slow train to Puntarenas on the Pacific coast, and then by road or air to Panama.

But my chief reason for taking the Puntarenas train had nothing to do with travel. More than anything, I wanted to read a book. And I had a good book. Twice in San Salvador and once in Limón I had opened Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; each time it had been night and, while I had read the novel with fascination, on turning off the light the horrors of the story returned to me and made me wakeful. It was, without any doubt, the most terrifying story I had ever read: claustrophobia, shipwreck, thirst, mutiny, cannibalism, vertigo, murder, storm - it was a nightmare journey, and it produced nightmares in me. At home it might not have seemed so bad, but in three Central American hotel rooms - hot, stifling, narrow; the bulb-blistered lamp shade, the strange bed, the rat gnawing the ceiling - the book was an experience of pure terror. I put it away, and I vowed that I would not open it again until I was in a sunny railway compartment. It did not matter where the train was going; what mattered to me was that I should read it under ideal conditions, on a train, with my feet up, my pipe drawing nicely. This book was my reason for going to Puntarenas on that train.

The Pacific Station looked promising. One man was mopping the floor of the lobby, another washing the windows: such attentions are a good indicator that the trains run on time. And there was an eight-foot statue of Jesus Christ across from the ticket window: Godliness and cleanliness. The railway itself is much newer than the Atlantic line; it is electrified, it is swift and smoothly-running, and, apart from its quacking horn, it is silent; the seats inside the blue carriages are not broken, and because there are eight trains a day it is seldom crowded: perfect for reading.

Nor is the landscape remarkable enough to intrude. Costa Rica's south-west is very different from the north-east. The land seems to slope away to the Pacific coast, from the coffee bushes in the high suburbs, to areas of light industry, the cement factories and timber yards that supply material for the country's growth. By the time we left these industrial suburbs it was not yet noon; but it was lunch-time, not only for the factory hands, but for office workers and managers too. Costa Rica has a large middle-class, but they go to bed early and rise at dawn; everyone - student, labourer, businessman, estate manager, politician - keeps farmer's hours.

On this passenger train most of the people were off to the beach. The mood was festive, the luggage baskets of swim-fins, towels, sunhats, hampers of food. For most, this was a holiday. There were only a few blacks on the train (their homeland lies on the opposite coast) and the way the passengers had seated themselves - girls on these seats, boys over there, mothers minding children, older men and husbands sitting together at a safe distance from their womenfolk - reminded me of outings I had seen on holiday weekends in Boston, from the Italian neighbourhoods near North Station on the trains to City Point. The faces of these Costa Ricans had a Neapolitan cast, and their luggage was redolent of meatballs. They had radios, they sang, they shouted and ate ice creams.

Between chapters of Pym I looked out of the window. There were brilliant orange flowers on the branches of tall trees, and in fields near these trees rows of ripe tomatoes, peppers and beans. The day grew hotter, the land flatter; here, most of the tomatoes had been picked, the vines had started to wither, and some of the fields were yellow-dry. It could have been a different season from the one I had seen in the northeast, where - before the train had passed into the tropical lowlands -we had spent hours in altitudes that had the new green gardens of early spring. The look was autumnal for much of the way to Puntarenas: dry broken cornstalks drooped in the fields, the trees were bare or else held a few boughs of fluttering brown leaves, the grass was burned, and even the fence posts which had conveniently sprouted into saplings and become a thicket of trees were losing their leaves to the dry air. In Ojo de Agua and Cirvelas the farmers were haymaking.

But there was no consistency in this country's agriculture. Latitude was no help in reading the crops: Costa Rica was mountainous as well as swampy and tropical, and it was flanked by two oceans. No sooner had I decided that autumn had come to this province than we entered shady villages and orange groves. And just before the village of Atena we climbed to the edge of a deep ravine of grey and brown rock. The ravine continued to the west and was a cut on the horizon, but a dust cloud hung in it and though I guessed it was deep I could not see to its bottom. The villages at its rim were dusty, too, six-barn hamlets and fruit farms, and the children at station platforms selling bunches of purple balls, a kind of fruit I had never seen before.

. . . the brig came on slowly, and now more steadily than before, and-I cannot speak calmly of this event - our hearts leaped up wildly within us, and we poured out our whole souls in shouts and thanksgiving to God for the complete, unexpected, and glorious deliverance that was so palpably at hand. Of a sudden, and all at once, there came wafted over the ocean from the strange vessel (which was now close upon us) a smell, a stench, such as the whole world has no name for . . .

The heat had quieted the passengers. They had stopped singing, and the train had become a sleepy local clicking in and out through the woodland slopes.

. . . we had a full view of her decks. Shall I ever forget the triple horror of that spectacle? Twenty-five or thirty human bodies, among whom were several females, lay scattered about between the counter and the galley in the last and most loathsome state of putrefaction. We plainly saw that not a soul lived in that fated vessel. Yet we could not help shouting to the dead for help!

Even the locusts were louder than this engine, and the passengers hardly noticed the fruit sellers who appeared on the short platforms of the village stations.

As our first loud yell of terror broke forth, it was replied to by something, from near the bowsprit of the stranger, so closely resembling the scream of a human voice that the nicest ear might have been startled and deceived. . .

There was a family just in front of me. The mother was seated across the aisle from her two daughters, who were pretty - one about sixteen, the other a year or two older. The father was standing some distance away, swigging from a beer bottle. There was an empty seat between the two girls; on this seat was a basket. I had shut my book to rest my eyes, and then I saw a boy lingering by the rear door. At first I thought he was watching me. He came closer. He was watching the two girls, the empty seat. He crept towards them and summoning his courage said, 'Is that seat occupied?'

The girls giggled and moved the basket. The boy sat down. After an awkward interval the boy began to talk: Where were they going? What were they doing? He said he was a student. Wasn't it lucky that they all seemed to be going to Puntarenas? He had a radio with him, he said. Would they care for a bit of music?

Please, I thought, not that.

The girls only smiled. The boy had not understood that they were travelling with their parents. The father went on drinking, but the mother on the other side of the aisle was staring at the boy. She had a fat face, and it was darkening with indignation. Her fingers were knotted and she was hunched in fury. Now the boy was describing the dance halls in Puntarenas. You could have a wonderful time, he said; he knew all the good places. He began naming the night-spots.

This was too much for the mother. She stood up and began screaming abuse at the boy. And she spoke so rapidly, at such a pitch, I caught only shrill phrases of it; but I did hear her accusing him of trying to pick up her daughters, talking to them as if he had no respect. You have no right, she said. Who do you think you are? She stopped screaming. The boy grinned in shame. He did not reply, and he could not leave. He was standing his ground, according to the code of the Latin male; but he was sheepish. The girls, who had said very little to the boy, said nothing at all now.

The mother began again. She called him a pig and an intruder. She threatened to report him to the^conductor. With each accusation she inched towards the boy, putting her fat furious face very near to his. Then she brought up her arm and, feinting with her fist, jabbed her elbow against his jaw. The boy was knocked sideways by the blow, and his hand went to his mouth. He looked at his fingers: blood. Now he started to protest, but he did so timidly, expecting to be hit again.

There was more. A young girl, about eleven - perhaps another daughter - rushed forward with a bottle of Coke. She shook the bottle and sprayed foam into the boy's face. Still, the two girls said nothing. The boy pulled a hanky out of his pocket and, wiping his face, made a pleading explanation: They said the seat was not occupied . . . they said I could sit down . . .ask them, go ahead, they'll tell you . . .'

The father swallowed beer. He looked around helplessly as his wife yelled herself hoarse. I rather admired the boy for not bolting, but at last under the woman's onslaught he took himself away and hid between the cars, nursing his wound. I made a point of seeking him out. I asked him about the mother. Was she a typical Costa Rican mother?

'Most of them are like that. She is angry. She does not want me to talk to her daughters. They said the seat was not occupied! Look what she did to my mouth.'

He yanked his lower lip down and showed me his bloody gum.

'But the father - that man drinking beer - he apologized to me. He came up to me a little while ago and said, "I am very sorry about this, but what can I do?" That woman is a pig.'

. . . on his back, from which a portion of the shirt had been torn, leaving it bare, there sat a huge sea-gull, busily gorging itself with the horrible flesh, its bill and talons deep buried, and its white plumage spattered all over with blood. As the brig moved further round so as to bring us close in view, the bird, with much apparent difficulty, drew out its crimsoned head, and, after eyeing us for a moment as if stupefied, arose lazily from the body upon which it had been feasting, and, flying directly above our deck, hovered there awhile with a portion of clotted and liverlike substance in its beak. The horrid morsel dropped at length with a sullen splash immediately at the feet of Parker . . .

There was a hand on my knee. Earlier, a woman had sat next to me. Now she gave my knee a squeeze. She said, 'I will be right back. Do not let anyone steal my suitcase!' Another squeeze; and she smiled. She was about thirty-five and had two gold teeth. She walked to the rear of the car and, as she passed the ticket-collector, pinched his bottom. This excited the ticket-collector, and when the woman returned to her seat the man wandered over to flirt with her. But, uncertain of the nature of the relationship between the woman and me, he withdrew. The woman squeezed my leg again. 'You like to read that book!'

. . . I sprang forward quickly, and, with a deep shudder, threw the frightful thing into the sea . . .

'What is it about?'

'Ships,' I said.

'You will have plenty of ships at Puntarenas.'

We were passing a church. In El Salvador or Guatemala, the passengers would have blessed themselves, made a slow sign of the cross; and the men would have removed their hats. Here, the church was not an object of much interest - and it was an imposing church, with two Spanish towers like plump thermos jugs, and scrollwork, and stained glass, and a pair of belfries. It aroused no reverential gestures among the train passengers. It might as well have been a barn, though a barn that size would certainly have had the train passengers crowing with approval.

Costa Rica is considered unique in Central America; prosperity has made it dull, but this is surely preferable to the excitements and urgencies of poverty. What is remarkable is its secularity. I was not prepared for this; I had never seen this commented upon; and I naturally expected, after my church-going in Guatemala and El Salvador, to see a similarly priest-ridden society, genuflections, the poor wearing rosaries as necklaces, and Never mind those huts - look at the cathedral! Mexico struck me as both pious and anti-clerical: priestly authority does not suit the Mexican temper. Costa Rica was neither. It seemed indifferent towards religion. I guessed that it had something to do with political pluralism - if that is the right phrase to describe the enlightened certainty that an election was rather more than a piece of fakery or an occasion to riot. The Costa Rican election had coincided with Shrove Tuesday; indeed, from what I had been told, it had supplanted it. It had been a fiesta - literally, a feast-day - full of self-congratulation and not distinguished by a high level of debate. The new president had not yet been sworn in: the holiday was still on. But a free election was like man's answer to the bossy authoritarianism of a religion that demanded humility and repentance; it seemed to prove that competition was possible without violence or acrimony. The Costa Rican's dislike of dictators had made him intolerant of priests. Luck and ingenuity had made the country prosperous, and it was small and self-contained enough to remain so.

The unambiguous wish in, say, geriatric parts of Florida (which Costa Rica much resembles) is to have comfort and the good life now, on earth. Only the poor peasant believes that he will become bourgeois in Heaven. A rising class wants its comforts on earth and has neither the time nor the inclination to be religious: this was obvious in Costa Rica. In time of crisis - sickness, collapse, the mortal wound - the Costa Rican would turn to the Church and demand a miracle, but middle-class people generally haven't the time to believe in miracles, and so, without consciously rejecting the Church, they seek answers in Politics or business. It has made them fair, but boring. The greatest church in Costa Rica is in Cartago, the Basilica of Our Lady of the Angels, the Patroness of Costa Rica. But the Cartago brochures merely point out that the Inter-American Highway passes through town; that there is a San José bus every five minutes; that it is cool there and 'Also, famous Irazú Volcano close by'. No brochure I saw mentioned churches. The Basilica is hardly an example of fine architecture, but that is not the point. The Costa Ricans are prouder of their modernity, their absence of militarism, their climate, their factories and their volcano than their churches. 'Fine medical and hospital facilities,' says the note on San José in a tourist leaflet, which sounds less a boast than an assurance to prospective immigrants. Seismically-cracked cathedrals and bloody statuary tottering on plinths have not prevented other Latin American countries from advertising their churches; but of course they have very little else to brag about. And, what is more important, they have kept the faith. The secularism of Costa Rica means that the church is something of an embarrassment, or at least a superfluity - history's legacy as a dusty artefact rather than a programme for the soul. For this reason, the Costa Ricans are probably the most predictable people in Latin America and, lacking religious enthusiasm, the most avowedly political.

The town, the church was now far behind. There were more stations, and the landscape changed at each one: now open and flat, now a ravine, now full of deforested hills, now an unlikely village of deflected light - green huts, blue trees and a whole hill of red grass, pastels glowing through a prism of dust.

. . . and now I was consumed with the irrepressible desire of looking below. I could not, I would not, confine my glances to the cliff; and with a wild indefinable emotion, half of horror, half of relieved oppression, I threw my vision far down into the abyss. For one moment my fingers clutched convulsively upon their hold, while, with the movement, the faintest possible idea of ultimate escape wandered, like a shadow, through my mind- in the next my whole soul was pervaded by a longing to fall. . .

After fifty miles or so - and it was blazing hot - the line straightened, and some food-sellers (they were dark-eyed, almost middle-eastern looking girls and women, in shawls and long skirts) got on the train. They carried baskets of oranges, tangerines, mangoes, and paper cones filled with peanuts and burned cashews. Ahead, past miles of parched farmland, was a blue lake. The train climbed a hillside: the lake was immense and the sun had whitened a portion of it, bleached the blueness out of it.

The knee-squeezer was still next to me.

'Is that a lake?'

'That is the ocean,' she said.

The Pacific; I looked around with a wild surmise, and then resumed my reading. When I glanced up again we were travelling along a narrow peninsula towards Puntarenas.

There were very few trees on this spit of land. There was the railway line, and a road, and a row of houses; there wasn't room for anything more. On the Pacific side freighters were anchored, on the protected side, sailing-boats and dinghies. For no apparent reason, halfway down the peninsula, the train stopped, and here we remained for twenty minutes. Hot stiff breezes blew through the open windows of the train and rattled the shutters; sluggish brown waves pushed at the rocky jetties beneath the train. The sun was low; it slanted through the car and heated it. The passengers were tired, and so silent. The only sounds were the wind and the sea. On the left side of the train there was no land, but only limitless ocean. The train could not have been stiller or more full of light.

. . . we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.

I shut my book. At length, the train started and continued the last half-mile into Puntarenas. Puntarenas was very hot, and even in the breeze very humid. I walked the streets. There were boarding houses and cheap hotels, bars, restaurants, curio stalls, people selling plastic water-wings and back-scratchers and sunhats. It was a run-down but busy resort. There was not much to do here but swim, and I did not care for the water which was littered with seaport detritus, frayed rope and old bottles, oil-slick and seaweed which had become like greasy rags. I had a glass of lemonade; I wondered if I should stay here, on the Gulf of Nicoya.

'You should go over to the other side,' said the stallholder who had sold me the lemonade. 'That is where all the Americans live. It is very beautiful.'

I saw some of them, shuffling through the streets of Puntarenas, the people who had come down here to die in this sunny youthful place. I was almost tempted to board a bus and look at their houses, but I had a feeling I knew what I would find. A suburb in the tropics might be worth seeing, but I doubted that it was worth examining in much detail; and I did not relish that sense of exclusion that I would feel, faced by people mowing the lawn and pushing vacuum cleaners. Nor, after all my travelling, did I wish to find myself describing Sarasota, down to its last funeral parlour and miniature golf course. Travellers do not belong in the suburbs, and the most civilized places tire the eye quickest; in such places, the traveller is an intruder, as he is in Sarasota. I wanted something altogether wilder, the clumsier romance of strangeness; these friendly Americans only made me homesick.

12

THE BALBOA BULLET TO COLON

It was 'Save Our Canal Day'. Two United States congressmen had brought the news to the Canal Zone that New Hampshire was solidly behind them in their struggle to keep the Zone in American hands (reminding me of the self-mocking West Indian joke, 'Go ahead, England, Barbados is behind you!'). The New Hampshire governor had declared a holiday in his state, to signify his support. One congressman, speaking at a noisy rally of Americans in Balboa, reported that 75% of the United States was against the Canal Treaty. But all this was academic; and the noise - there was a demonstration, too - little more than the ventilation of jingoistic yawps. Within very few months the treaty would be ratified. I told this to a Zonian lady. She said she didn't care. She had enjoyed the rally: 'We've been feeling left out, as if everyone was against us.'

The Zonians, 3,000 workers for the Panama Canal Company, and their families, saw the treaty as a sell-out; why should the Canal be turned over to these undeserving Panamanian louts in twenty years? Why not, they argued simply, continue to run it as it had been for the past sixty-three years? At a certain point in every conversation I had with these doomed residents of Panama, the Zonian would bat the air with his arms and yell, It 's our canali

'Want to know the trouble with these people?' said an American political officer at the embassy. 'They can't decide whether the Canal is a government department, or a company, or an independent state.'

Whatever it was, it was certainly a lost cause; but it was not the less interesting for that. Few places in the world can match the Canal Zone in its complex origins, its unique geographical status or in the cloudiness of its future. The Canal itself is a marvel: into its making went all the energies of America, all her genius and all her deceits. The Zone, too, is a paradox: it is a wonderful place, but a racket. The Panamanians hardly figure in the canal debate - they want the Canal for nationalistic reasons; but Panama scarcely existed before the Canal was dug. If justice were to be done the whole isthmus should be handed back to the Colombians, from whom it was squeezed in 1903. The debate is between the Ratifiers and the Zonians, and though they sound (and behave) like people whom Gulliver might have encountered in Glubb-dubdrib, they are both Americans: they sail under the same flag. The Zonians, however - when they become especially frenzied - often burn their Stars and Stripes and their children cut classes at Balboa High School to trample on its ashes. The Ratifiers, loud in their denunciation of Zonians when they are among friends, shrink from declaring themselves when they are in the Zone. A Ratifier from the embassy, who accompanied me to a lecture I was to give at Balboa High, flatly refused to introduce me to the Zonian students for fear that if he revealed himself they would riot and overturn his car. Two nights previously, vengeful Zonians had driven nails into the locks of the school gates in order to shut the place down. What a pestilential little squabble, I thought; and felt more than ever like Lemuel Gulliver.

It is, by common consent, a Company town. There is little in the way of personal freedom in the Zone. I am not talking about the liberal guarantees of freedom of speech or assembly, which are soothing abstractions but seldom used; I mean, the Zonian has to ask permission before he may paint his house another colour, or even shellac the baseboard in his bathroom. If he wishes to asphalt his driveway he must apply in writing to the Company; but he will be turned down: only pebbles are permitted. The Zonian is living in a Company house; he drives on Company roads, sends his children to Company schools, banks at the Company bank, borrows money from the Company Credit Union, shops at the Company store, (where the low prices are pegged to those in New Orleans), sails at the Company club, sees movies at the Company theatre, and if he eats out will take his family to the Company cafeteria in the middle of Balboa and eat Company steaks and Company ice-cream. If a plumber or an electrician is needed the Company will supply one. The system is maddening, but if the Zonian is driven crazy there is a Company psychiatrist. The community is entirely self-contained. Children are born in the Company hospital; people are married in Company churches - there are many denominations, but Baptists predominate; and when the Zonian dies he is embalmed in the Company mortuary - a free casket and burial are part of every Company contract.

Society is haunted by two contending ghosts, that of Lenin and that of General Bullmoose. There are no Company signs, no billboards or advertising at all; only a military starkness in the appearance of the Company buildings. The Zone seems like an enormous army base -the tawny houses, all right-angles and tiled roofs, the severe landscaping, the stencilled warnings on chain-link fences, the sentry posts, the dispirited wives and stern fattish men. There are military bases in the Zone, but these are indistinguishable from the suburbs. This surprised me. Much of the Canal hysteria in the States was whipped up by the news that the Zonians were living the life of Riley, with servants and princely salaries and subsidized pleasures. It would have been more accurate if the Zonian was depicted as an army man, soldiering obediently in the tropics. His restrictions and rules have killed his imagination and deafened him to any subtleties of political speech; he is a Christian; he is proud of the Canal and has a dim unphrased distrust of the Company; his salary is about the same as that of his counterpart in the United States - after all, the fellow is a mechanic or welder: why shouldn't he get sixteen dollars an hour? He knows welders who get much more in Oklahoma. And yet the majority of the Zonians live modestly: the bungalow, the single car, the outings to the cafeteria and cinema. The high Company officials live like viceroys, but they are the exception. There is a pecking order, as in all colonies; it is in miniature like the East India Company and even reflects the social organization ofthat colonial enterprise: the Zonian suffers a notoriously out-dated lack of social mobility. He is known by his salary, his club and the nature of his job. The Company mechanic does not rub shoulders with the Company administrators who work in what is known all over the Zone as The Building - the seat of power in Balboa Heights. The Company is uncompromising in its notion of class; consequently, the Zonian - in spite of his pride in the Canal - often feels burdened by the degree of regimentation.

'Now 1 know what socialism is,' said a Zonian to me at Miraflores.

I tried to explain that this was not socialism but rather the highest stage of capitalism, the imperial company; profit and idealism; high-minded exploitation. It was colonialism in its purest form. And by its nature colonialism is selective. Where are the victims, then, the poor, the exploited? The Zone is immaculate, but it only appears to be a haven of peace. About four years ago the schools in the Zone were reclassified - it meant they did not have to be integrated. Blacks, who had been brought years ago to work in the Zone, were regarded as Panamanians. So the integration issue was simplified: the blacks were encouraged to move out of the Zone. They did not move far - they couldn't, they still had jobs in the Zone. The fringes of the Zone are occupied by these rejects, and the far side of the Fourth of July Highway is a slum. They cross the highway to go to work, and in the evening they return to their hovels. And what is interesting is that the Zonian, when particularly worked up about the civilization he has brought to the Isthmus, points to the dividing line and says, 'Look at the contrast!' But it was the Zonian who decreed that those people should live there and that all Panama should stand aside and let him get on with the job.

It is hard to exaggerate the tenacious attitude of the Zonians. Their mirror-images are less the time-servers in Suez than the toilers in India during the last years of the British Raj. The Zonian is not noted for his command of Spanish, but on his own turf he is efficient and hardworking. A week before I arrived, the Zonian workers tried to organize a strike, to prove they had some bargaining power. But they failed, as strikers in Poland and Czechoslovakia always fail, and perhaps for the same reason: they were sat on and, when it came to it, the shutdown could not last - they did not have the heart to close down the Canal. In sympathy their children cut classes at Balboa High School, played hooky for their parents' sake - and for their own reasons. Zon-ians are aware that the world they inhabit is special, and they know it is threatened with extinction. But, because they keep to themselves, the menacing world is closer than the demon countries they whisper about - Russia, China, Cuba, 'the Arabs', 'the Communists'. The big stupid clumsy world of squinting cannibals begins where the Zone ends - it is right there, across the Fourth of July Highway, the predatory world of hungry unwashed people gibbering in Spanish. Even the sweetest Zonians haven't got a clue. A testimonial dinner was given for a librarian in the Zone. She was retiring after forty years in the Company library - forty years of residence in the Zone, supervising the local staff, ordering books, hovering in the stacks, attending functions, initialling memos, issuing directives, coping with the Dewey Decimal System. Everyone she had known came to her testimonial, and most -to her credit - were Panamanians. Speeches were made; there was praise, and a presentation. At the end of it, the librarian got to her feet and attempted to thank them in Spanish. She faltered and finally fell silent. In forty years she had not learned enough Spanish to utter a complete sentence of gratitude to the Spanish workers who organized the dinner.

'I don't care what you say,' the Zonian at Miraflores was saying to me, 'but it sure feels like socialism.'

We were watching the Chilean freighter Palma pass through the lock. There are no pumps in the Canal. The freighter enters the lock; the gates shut; and within a few minutes the huge ship is dropping to the level of the Pacific on this last liquid stair in its descent. The upper gates are closed, too, and 50,000 gallons of water flow from Lake Madden to replace the water the Palma used for its journey through the Canal. The freighter is towed by small engines on canal-side tracks - this is the single improvement that has been necessary in sixty years. Once, the ships were drawn by mules; the engines are still called 'mules'. One cannot fail to be impressed by the running of the Canal; there are few works of man on earth that can compare with it.

'Who are those people?' I asked.

There were five men in clean white Panama-style shirts, vaulting coils of cable and occasionally tripping as they made their way towards the steel front of the lock which was the shape of a battleship's bow. They were hurrying, puffing and blowing in the ninety-degree heat; their fancy shoes were not made for these slippery surfaces. I had asked whether I could roam around the lock, but I was told it was forbidden.

'Them are congressmen,' said the guide. 'That's all we get around here these days. Congressmen.'

The guide was black, a Panamanian, from Chiriqui Province. He had written his thesis at the University of Panama on the history of the Canal. He was completely bi-lingual. I wondered whether he was in favour of the Canal being handed over.

He said, 'If this Canal Treaty is ratified that's going to be the end of this place.'

'You want to see the Americans run it forever?'

He said,'I sure do.'

It was not a Panamanian view, but he was untypical. After that, every Panamanian I met said the Canal belonged to them; though the terms on which it should be given back varied from person to person. And yet the Zonians are probably right when they say that the Canal will be mismanaged when it is in Panamanian hands. It does not take much to upset its balance sheet; in fact, some years it loses money, and to show a profit the Panama Canal Company must tow an average of thirty-five or forty ships a day through the three locks, repeating this complicated procedure every day of the year. Was it outmoded? No, said the guide; apart from a few super-tankers it could handle all the ships in the world. Wouldn't a sea-level canal be simpler? No, said the guide; the Atlantic tides were different from the Pacific ones, and did I know that there was a poisonous variety of sea-snake in the Pacific? A sea-level canal would allow this creature into the Caribbean, 'and God knows what would happen then.'

'I'm glad you're on our side,' said the Zonian to the guide.

'Send anyone you want down here,' said the guide. 'I'll tell them the truth.'

I suggested to him that the truth of it was that, like the arguments for the British staying in India or the U.S. Marines patrolling Veracruz or Colonel Vanderbilt in Nicaragua, the adventure could not last. For better or worse ('Worse!' he said quickly), the Canal would have to become the property of the Republic of Panama. Surely, it was plain to him that the Treaty would be ratified and that this would happen.

'Maybe it will happen and maybe it won't,' he said. 'I can't say. But if it does happen it's going to be bad.'

'Good for you!' said the Zonian, then turned to me. 'We're going to give the Canal away, just like we gave Vietnam away. It's terrible. We should stay. We should have kept Taiwan - '

'Taiwan?’ I said.

'We gave it to the Chinese. That's why we have to keep this Canal. This is our last chance. Look at what happened to Vietnam after we gave it away.'

I said, 'We didn't give Vietnam away.'

'Yes, we did.'

'Madam,' I said, 'we lost the war.'

'We should have won it,' she said. 'Now you're talking like the reporters. They come here and say all the Zonians are red-necks, living in beautiful homes. Goodness, we're ordinary people!'

'That I can vouch for,' I said.

But when people said We in Panama I had to think hard to know who they meant. The Zonian lady's we referred to all Zonians, Ambassador Jorden said we and he meant the United States of America, the Ratifier's we ignored the Zonian: there was always exclusion in the pronoun. The American soldiers in the Zone were officially neutral, but when a military man said we he implied that he was against the treaty. The third or fourth generation West Indians, mainly from Barbados, said we in English and feared for their jobs, other Panamanians said we in Spanish and spoke of their long tradition and subtle culture; of the three tribes of Indians, the Cuñas, the Guaymies and the Chocóes, only 3% speak Spanish, and their we - spoken in their own tongues - is in opposition to the treaty. Alluding to the Canal (and in Panama people alluded to nothing else) no one I heard ever said /. People held the identity and opinions of their particular group, and they did not venture far from their tribal areas. Like Gulliver, I was in transit; I went from group to group, noting down complaints in handwriting which grew ever more bewildered and uncertain.

Not everyone complained. A girl I met in Panama City said, 'In most places you go, people say, "You should have been here last year." They said that to me when I went to Brazil, then Peru, then Colombia. But no one says it in Panama. This is the time to be here.'

The Canal, and the Miraflores Locks, had been my first stop. But I wanted to know a bit more about the place. I spent an evening at the casino in the Holiday Inn, watching people lose money by the armful. Winning made them grimmer, since the gambler's felt wish is to lose. They were pale, unsmiling, actually throwing their money down - and, say, those men at the blackjack table, hunched over diminishing towers of chips and gloomily flicking at playing cards: the congressmen! There were men in cowboy boots and ladies pulling hundred-dollar bills out of their cleavage and uproarious Americans being reprimanded by squinting croupiers in dainty suits because the Americans were spitting on the dice ('Do me a favour!' screamed one crap-shooter, and threw a pair of dice at the croupier). Gambling looked such a joyless addiction, and I had to leave - another minute would have turned me into a Marxist. The next day I took a closer look at the black tenements of Panama City; although their condition was dismal - broken windows, slumping balconies, blistered peeling paint on the wooden walls - they dated from the French occupation of Panama and retained some of the elegance of the original design. But it was not enough to hold my interest and the conversations I had with the aggrieved tenants told me only that this was yet another tribal area at odds with its neighbours.

One morning I gave a lecture at Canal Zone College. The subject was travel, and how strange it was to speak of the world and the romance of distance to people who could not conquer their timidity long enough to endure the short drive to Panama City, and who regarded the town of Colón just up the road as more savage and dangerous than a wholejungle of Amazonian head-hunters.

After the lecture I fell into conversation with a Zonian lady who said, 'I don't know what you expected to find here in the Zone, but I can tell you we live a very quiet life.'

That we again; and yet it was not the mob pronoun I had been hearing, but a more intimate word, spoken with a kind of marital tenderness and defiance. She was talking about her family. They had come down from Pennsylvania, initially for two years, but they had liked the Zone and decided to stay. After eleven years the place still had an attraction, though the Company was often oppressive in the way it managed their lives.

'And what do you do?' I asked.

'It's not me - it's my husband. He's the head of the Gorgas Mortuary. Don't laugh.'

'I'm not laughing,' I said. 'That's interesting.'

'You think it's interesting?' She had started to laugh. I could not contain my curiosity, my enthusiasm for visiting the mortuary; and when I thought I had convinced her that I really did want a tour, and as we were driving to the old grey building, she kept saying, 'Are you sure you want to do this?'

John Reiss was a tall stout mortician with a pink complexion and a friendly manner. His wife had said, 'He's wonderful with bereaved relatives - he just calms them down, I don't know how he does it.' He was soft-spoken and precise, interested in his work - interested particularly in embalming - and proud of the fact that corpses were sent to him from all over Central and South America. Like many other Zonians he was a member of the Elks' Club, the V.F.W., the Rotary, but his mortician's interest perhaps made him more of a joiner than most: a mortician is a public figure in America, like a mayor or a fire chief, and the Zone was a version of America. But Mr Reiss was also a member of the local barber shop quartet, and there was in his voice a kind of melodious croon, a singer's modulation, a mortician's concerned coo.

'To start off with,' said Mr Reiss in the Coffin Room, an instructional whisper in his voice, 'here we have the coffins themselves. If you were a local employee you got this coffin.'

It was a plain silvery steel coffin, with unornamented handles, a buffed metal box the length of a man and the depth of a horse trough. It was shut, the lid fastened. It was difficult for me to see this closed coffin and not to feel a distinct uneasiness about what it might contain.

'And if you were an American you got this one.'

This one was bigger and a bit fancier. There were rosettes on the side and simulated carving on the corners of the lid, some romanesque scrollwork, leaf clusters and the sort of handles you see on doors in Louisburg Square in Boston. Apart from the foliage, and the size, I wondered whether there was any other difference between this coffin and the silver one.

This is much more expensive,' said Mr Reiss. 'It's hermetically sealed, and look at the difference in the colours.'

Of course, this one was goldy bronze, the other was silver. They matched the status of the deceased. It was a racial distinction. From about the turn of the century until very recently, race was expressed by the Panama Canal Company not in terms of black and white but by the designations gold and silver. The euphemism was derived from the way workers were paid: the unskilled workers, most of them black, were paid in silver; the skilled workers, nearly all white Americans, were paid in gold. The terms applied to all spheres of life in the Zone; there were gold schools and silver schools, gold houses and silver houses, and so on, to gold coffins and silver coffins, the former hermetically sealed, the latter - like the silver house - leaky. So, even in his casket, the canal employee could be identified, and long after he had turned to dust, the evidence of his race lost in decay, his remains could be disinterred and you would know from the hue ofthat box whether the grit in that winding sheet had once been a white man or a black man. It must have been some satisfaction for the Company to know that, however evenly the grass covered these graves, the colour line that had been the rule in schools and housing (and even water fountains and toilets, the post office and cafeterias), was still observed beneath the ground.

'Nowadays,' said Mr Reiss, 'everyone gets this good coffin. That's ^{why the mortuary loses money. These things cost an awful lot.'}

Upstairs was the Receiving Room. There were refrigerators here, and on the wall of the bare flint-grey room the large steel drawers that most people know from the morgue scenes in movies, the floor-to-ceiling arrangement that resembles nothing so much as stacks of oversized filing cabinets.

Mr Reiss's hand went to one drawer. He balanced himself by gripping the handle; underneath it was a label: a name, a date.

'I have a man in here,' he said, tugging as he spoke. 'Died a month ago. We don't know what to do with him. From California. No family, no friends.'

'I'd rather you didn't open that drawer,' 1 said.

He pushed it gently and released it. 'No one wants to claim him.'

It was cold in the room; I shivered and noticed my skin was prickling with gooseflesh.This was the coldest I had been since leaving the sleet storm in Chicago.

'Shall we move on?' i said.

But Mr Reiss was reading a new label. 'Yes,' he said, tapping another drawer. 'This is a little boy. Only six years old.' His fingers were under the handle. 'He's been there since last June - anything wrong?'

'I feel chilly.'

'We've got to keep the temperature down in here. What was I saying? Oh, yes,' he said, glancing at his hand, at the label, 'he's going to be here until next June. But he'll be all right.'

'All right? In what sense?'

Mr Reiss smiled gently; it was professional pride. 'I embalmed him myself- he's all ready to go. Well,' he went on - and now he was speaking to the drawer, 'just to make sure, I look at him about once a month. I open him up. Check him over.'

'What do you see?'

'Dehydration.'

On our way to the Cremation Room, 1 said, 'For a minute, I thought you were going to open one of those drawers back there.'

'I was,' said Mr Reiss. 'But you didn't want me to.'

'I think I would have keeled over.'

That's what everyone says. But it's something you should see. A dead person is just a dead person. It happens to everybody. Death is one of the things you have to accept. It's nothing to be frightened of.' This was obviously the tone he adopted with the bereaved; and he was convincing. I felt ignorant and superstitious. But what if it had frightened me? How to erase the image of a death-shrunken six-year-old from my mind? I was afraid that, seeing it, I would be scared for the rest of my life.

The Cremation Room was hot: the air was stale and dusty and I could feel the heat across the room from the furnaces, which were larger versions of the old coal burners of my childhood. The heat had reddened the iron doors and they were coated with fine powder. Shafts of sunlight at the windows lighted tiny particles of dust which the hot air kept in turbulent motion.

'The reason it's so hot in here,' said Mr Reiss, 'is because we had a cremation just this morning.' He went to the side of one of the furnaces and jerked open the iron door. 'Local fellow,' he said, peering in. He pushed at some white smouldering flakes with a poker. 'Just ashes and a little bone.'

There were two aluminium barrels near the furnaces. Mr Reiss lifted the lid of one- an ash barrel. He reached in, groping in the ashes and took out a fragment of bone. It was a dry chalky hunk of splinters, bleached to sea-shell whiteness by the heat and dusted with grey biscuit-flakes of ash; and it had a knob on the end, like a prehistoric half of a ball-peen hammer.

'These are just odds and ends mostly.'

'That looks like a femur.'

'Good for you,' said Mr Reiss. 'That's what it is. How'd you know that?'

'I'm a failed medical student.'

'You shouldn't have failed - you certainly know your bones!' Mr Reiss closed his hand on the bone and squashed it like a cookie, reducing it to crumbs: / will show you fear in a handful of dust. 'We get a lot of amputations. This was a whole leg.'

He dropped the dust back into the barrel and clapped crumbs from his hands. I looked into the barrel and saw scorched safety pins and scraps of mummified cloth.

'There's a teaching hospital next door. They send us things to cremate. After the lessons are over. They're in terrible shape - brains removed, all cut open and dissected. Hardly recognize some of them.'

There were no other people in these mortuary rooms, no live ones. The emptiness, the absence of voices and furniture, made it seem like a mausoleum, and I had the feeling I had been locked in, sealed up with this soft-spoken guide who treated coffins and dehydrating corpses and friable thigh bones with an ordinariness that chastened me and made me wonder if perhaps in his casual way he was successfully concealing some horror from me. But Mr Reiss was saying, 'We're losing money hand over fist - because of the pay-grades. The hardware and coffins are so expensive we can't even cover our costs. The local workers are getting those real nice- ah, here we are,' he said, interrupting himself at the threshold of another empty room, 'the Embalming Room.'

There were four sloping sinks in the centre of the room, and beneath them rubber hoses draining into the floor. There were grey marble slabs as well, arranged as tables, and two ceiling fans and a strong odour of disinfectant.

'We've been asking for air-conditioning for years,' said Mr Reiss.

'I can't imagine why,' I said. 'It's quite cool in here.'

He laughed. 'It's about eighty degrees!'

Strange: I was shivering again.

'But they won't give it to us,' he said. Those fans aren't enough. It can get pretty smelly in here when we're working.'

'I've been meaning to ask you what you call the corpses,' I said. 'Do you ever refer to it as "the loved one"? Or the body, the victim, the corpse, or what?'

'"The loved one" is what they say in books,' said Mr Reiss. 'But they're just exaggerating. People have a lot of funny ideas about morticians. Jessica Mitford - that book. She didn't go many places. We're not really like that. "The remains" - that's what we usually call it.'

He stepped to one of the deep sinks and went on, 'We put the remains on the table here and slide it into the sink. Then we raise an artery. The carotid's a good one - I like the carotid myself. Drain it completely. Blood goes all down there, through the pipe' - he was speaking to the sink and using his hand to indicate the flow of the blood - 'into the floor. Then - see that hose? - we fill it with embalming fluid. It takes time and you have to be careful. It's harder than it looks.'

I was mumbling, making notes with frozen fingers. I said I thought it was interesting. Mr Reiss seized on this.

'It is interesting! We get every type in here. Why, just recently,' he said, beating his palm on the embalming sink in emphatic excitement, 'a bus went off the bridge - you know the big bridge across the Canal? Thirty-eight people died and we had them all, right in here. Boy, that was something. Planes, car crashes, drownings, murders on ships, people who get mugged in Colón. Take a murder on a ship passing through the Canal - that's real tricky, but we handle it. And Indians? They drink and then they try to paddle their canoes and they drown. We get every type you can mention. Interesting is the word for it.'

I had gone silent. But Mr Reiss remained by the sink.

'I've been down here in the Zone for eleven years,' he said, 'a mortician the whole time.' Now he spoke slowly and wonderingly, 'And you know what? I've had something different every single day. Want to see the Autopsy Room?'

I looked at my watch.

'Golly,' he said, looking at his own. 'It's past one o'clock. I don't know about you, but I'm real hungry.'

The Elks kitchen was shut. We went to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2537 and, ordering chop suey and iced tea, Mr Reiss said, 'But there's no comparison with the States service-wise. You don't get the attention here that they offer there. In the States you get a real nice service and big cars and a little ceremony. Here, all we give you is a hearse.'

'And an embalming,' I said.

'I've always been interested in embalming,' he said.

The chop suey came, a large helping of wet vegetables, a dish of noodles. There were very ifew other diners in the V.F.W. cafeteria, but, clean and dark and air-conditioned, it was like any post in America. I asked Mr Reiss how he had become a mortician.

'Usually, it's a family-type business. Your father's a mortician, so you become one, too. So I'm very unusual in a way - my family wasn't in the business.'

'Then you just decided, like that, to be a mortician?'

Mr Reiss swallowed a mouthful of chop suey and patting his lips with his napkin said, 'I always wanted to be a funeral director - as far back as I can remember. Know something? It's the earliest memory I have. I must have been about six years old when my old granny died. They put me upstairs and gave me candy to keep me quiet. They were liquorice things in the shape of hats - derby hats and Stetsons. Well, I was upstairs - this was in Pennsylvania - and I started yelling and I said, "I want to see Granny!" "No," they said, "keep him upstairs, give him some more candy." But I kept yelling and they finally gave in and let me come down. My cousin took me by the hand and we went over to Granny in her casket. See, they had the funerals in houses then. When I saw her I asked all sorts of questions, like "How do they do it?" and "Who did this?" and so forth. I was real interested. And I decided then what I wanted to be - a funeral director. When I was nine or so I was sure that's what I wanted to be.'

I could not help imagining a classroom in Pennsylvania, and a curious teacher leaning over a quiet pink-faced boy, and asking, 'Tell me, Johnny, what do you want to be when you grow up?'

Inevitably, our talk turned to the Canal Treaty. I asked what would happen to him and the Gorgas Mortuary if the Treaty was ratified.

'I think we'll be all right, whatever happens. I don't know what's going to happen about the Treaty, but if they take us over I hope they keep us on. Most of us love this Canal, and we do a good job at the mortuary. I think they'll just rehire us. Everyone's worried, but why? They can't run the Canal without us. And I'm real interested in staying here.'

That night I was invited to a dinner. 'You're going to have to sing for your supper,' the host said. I asked him what I should talk about. He said it didn't matter very much - perhaps something about writing?

'No matter what you say,' he said, 'the only thing they're really interested in is what you think about the treaty.' I said it was my favourite subject.

I talked to the assembly of Panamanian writers and artists about The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. No one had read it and so it was like speaking about a book which had just appeared, a candidate for the best-seller list, as fresh and full of news as a spring morning in Boston. They listened with rapt attention to the plot, the sequence of atrocities, the muffled music of the thrilling ending; and they looked at me with the near-sighted commiserating expressions I had seen on the faces of my students in faraway lecture halls, as I attempted to explain how, with such clever knots and loops, Poe had made of such stray pieces of string such a convincing hangman's noose.

'I am interested to know,' said a fellow afterwards, at question-time, 'what your position is with regard to the Panama Canal Treaty. Would you mind telling us?'

'Not at all,' I said. I said they were welcome to their opinion of the Zonians, but that they could easily underestimate the sentiment Zon-ians had for the Canal. It was not an age when people were very attached to their jobs, but the Zonians were proud of the work they had done and were dedicated to the running of the Canal. No amount of Panamanian nationalism or flag waving could compare with the technical skill it took to get forty ships a day through the Canal safely. I admitted that Zonians were fairly ignorant of Panama, but that Panamanians had little idea of the complexities of life in the Zone and the sort of fervour Zonians had.

This view brought smiles of disagreement from the audience, but, as no one challenged me, I went on to say that in essence the Canal Zone was colonial territory, and that one could not really understand any colony unless he had read Frankenstein and Prometheus Bound.

Over dinner, Í talked with an elderly architect. He also wrote stories, he said, and most of his stories were satires about the Chief of Government and Commander of the National Guard, General Omar Tor-rijos. What did Torrijos think of his stories? He had wanted to ban them, said the architect, but this was impossible because the stories had won a literary prize.

I said, There are people who think that Torrijos is a mystic.'

'He is a demagogue, not a mystic,' said the architect. 'A showman-very astute, but full of tricks.'

'So you think the Americans should keep the Canal?'

'No. I will tell you. The Canal is every Panamanian's dream. Just as you have your American dream, this is ours. But it is all we have. The real tragedy is that it will come to us while Torrijos is in power. He will take credit for it, you see. He will say, "Look what I have done! I have gotten our Canal back!" '

That was probably true. The American government, through an aid programme, had built a number of apartment houses just outside Panama City. It was public housing, a sop to the thousands of homeless Panamanians. Officially, the apartments were known as 'Torrijos Houses'. It would have been far more just to give them the name of their real benefactor, the American tax-payer. I explained this to the architect and said I had more right than Torrijos to have my name on the apartment houses, since I paid American taxes and the General did not.

'But you put him in power.'

'I did not put General Torrijos in power,' I said.

'I mean, the United States government put him in power. They wanted him there so that they could negotiate with him. They would have had a much harder time dealing with a democratically elected government. It is well-known that Torrijos has made concessions that a democratically elected leader would never have made.'

'Didn't Torrijos hold a referendum on the treaty?'

'That was a bluff. No one knew what it was about. It proved nothing. The people have had no say whatsoever in this treaty. And, look, the United States is giving Torrijos fifty million dollars for his army alone! Why? Because he demanded it. They have given much less to Somoza in Nicaragua and he has stayed in power.'

'So you're stuck with Torrijos?'

'No,' said the architect. 'I think that when the United States gets what it wants from him they will throw him away - like trash. '

The architect was becoming quite heated. He had forgotten his food; he was gesturing with one hand and mopping his face with the handkerchief in his other hand.

'Do you want to know what Torrijos is really like?' he said. 'He is like a boy who has crashed his first car. That car is our republic. Now he is waiting for a second car to crash. The second car is the treaty. What I say to Torrijos is, "Forget about the car- learn how to drive!" '

'You should eat something,' I said.

'We are not used to him,' he said, glancing at his plate. 'This dictatorship is strange to us. Since we got our independence in 1903 he is the first dictator we've had. I have never known anyone like him before. Mr Theroux, we are not used to dictators.'

I was so interested in what the architect had said that I made a point, a few days later, of speaking with a Panamanian lawyer who had helped to draft the legal aspects of the treaty. I concealed the architect's name: the lawyer was a close friend of Torrijos and I did not want the man thrown into jail for uttering seditious opinions. The lawyer listened to the arguments and then said in Spanish, 'Rubbish !'

He continued in English, saying, 'Omar wasn't put there by the gringos.'

I found his phraseology objectionable. But the American Ambassador was present. I could not say, 'Don't call me a gringo and I won't call you a spie,' to this swarthy citizen of Panama.

'In 1967 none of the elected people could agree on a draft treaty,' said the lawyer.

'Is that why General Torrijos overthrew the government in 1968?' I said, averting my eyes from the Ambassador.

The lawyer was snorting. 'Some people,' he said slowly, 'think the attempted coup against Torrijos in 1969 was instigated by the CIA. What would your friend say to this?'

I said, 'If the coup was unsuccessful the CIA was probably not behind it. Ha-ha.'

'We make mistakes occasionally,' said the Ambassador, but I was not very sure what he meant by that.

Torrijos showed great courage in signing the treaty,' said the lawyer.

'What courage?' I said. 'He signs and he gets the Canal. That's not courage, it's opportunism.'

'Now you're talking like your friend,' said the lawyer. 'He is obviously of the extreme Left.'

'As a matter of fact, he's rather conservative.'

'Same thing,' said the lawyer, and walked away.

My last task, before I took the train to Colón, was to give a lecture at Balboa High School. Mr Dachi, the Public Affairs Officer at the American Embassy, thought this might be a good idea: the Embassy had never sent a speaker to Balboa High. But I was not an official visitor; the State Department wasn't paying my way, and there was no reason why the traditional hostility the Zonians felt for the Embassy should be directed towards me. Out of friendship for Mr Dachi (whom I had met in Budapest) I agreed to give the lecture. The American Embassy man who accompanied me said that he preferred to remain anonymous: it was a rowdy place.

Everyone who went to an American high school in the 1950's has been to Balboa High. With its atmosphere of simmering anarchy - the sort of anarchy that takes the form of debagging first-year students in the John or running a Mickey Mouse pennant up the flagpole - and a devotion to spit-balls, sneakers, crew-cuts, horsing around in the gym, questing after intellectual mediocrity in the pages of literary anthologies ('Thornton Wilder has been called the American Shakespeare') and yet distrusting excellence because anything unusual must be a flaw (if you wear glasses you're a brain and known throughout the school as 'Einstein'), taking 'science' because that is what the Russians do and using it as an opportunity for leering at anatomical drawings in the biology book, regarding education as mainly social, coming to terms with sweaty palms and pimples, praising the quarterback, mocking the water-boy - yes, Balboa High was familiar to me. The current craze for rock-and-roll made it seem even more of a throw-back: Elvis read the motto on one tee-shirt, and on another Buddy Holly.

To confirm my impression I went into Boys and looked around. It was empty but the air was whiffy with illicit cigarette smoke, and on the walls: Balboa is Number One, America's Great and, repeatedly, Panama Sucks.

I had not been inside an American high school for twenty years; how strange it was that the monkey house from which I had graduated had been reassembled, down to its last brick and home-room bell and swatch of ivy, here in Central America. And I knew in my bones what my reaction would have been at Medford High if it had been announced that, instead of Latin at ten o'clock, there would be an assembly: a chance to fart around !

It was probably good-natured unruliness, the buzz, the yakking, the laughing, the poking and paper-rattling. Half the student body of 1,285 was there in the memorial auditorium. The microphone - of course! - gave off a locust-like whine and now and then cut out entirely, making my voice a whisper. I watched the mob of tubby and skinny students and saw a teacher hurry across an aisle, shove her way along a row of seats and, rolling the magazine she held into a truncheon, smack a giggling boy on the head.

The principal introduced me. He was booed the moment he approached the lectern. I took my place and was applauded, but as the applause died away the booing increased. My subject was travel. 'I don't think they can take more than about twenty minutes,' the principal had told me; but after ten minutes the murmuring in the audience had nearly drowned my words. I continued to speak, glancing at my watch and then brought the proceedings to an end. Any questions?

'How much money do you make?' asked a boy in the front row.

'What's it like in Africa?' asked a girl.

'Why bother to take a train all that way?' was the last question. 'I mean, if it takes so wicked long?'

I said, 'Because you can take a six-pack of beer in your compartment and guzzle it and by the time you've sobered up you've arrived.'

This seemed to satisfy them. They howled and stamped and then booed me loudly.

'Your, um, students,' I said to the principal afterwards, 'are rather, um-'

They're real nice kids,' he said, thwarting my attempt to be critical. 'But I thought when I came down here that I'd find some real sophisticated kids. This is a foreign country - maybe they'd be cosmopolitan, I figured. The funny thing is, they're less sophisticated than the kids back home.'

'Ah, yes, unsophisticated,' I said. 'I couldn't help noticing that they've dumped red paint on the bust of Balboa in front of your school.'

'That's the school colour,' he said.

'Do they study Panama's history?'

This gave him pause. He thought a moment and then said uncertainly, 'No, but when they're in the sixth grade they have a few classes in social studies.'

'Good old social studies!'

'But Panama history - it's not what you'd call a subject or anything like that.'

I said, 'How long have you been here?'

'Sixteen years,' he said. 'I consider this my home. Some people here have houses in the States. They go home every summer. I don't do that. I plan to stay here. Back in 1964 a teacher of ours ran away - he thought it was the end. Remember the flag-burning? If he had stayed he would have had nearly thirty years service and a good pension. But he didn't. I'm going to see what happens here. You never know - this treaty business is far from settled.'

Another teacher, a young woman, had wandered over to hear what the principal was saying. When he finished, she said, 'This isn't home for me. I've been here ten years and I've always felt, well, temporary. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and open the curtains and see those palm trees and I think, "Oh, heavens!" '

'What'd you think of the students?' asked a male teacher, smiling, as he accompanied me out of the building.

'Pretty noisy,' I said.

'They were behaving themselves,' he said. 'I was surprised - I expected trouble. They've been raising hell recently.'

Behind us, I heard the unmistakable sound of glass breaking, and youthful laughter, and a teacher's exasperated yell.

It was the high school students who nick-named this train 'The Balboa Bullet'. Like the canal, it is American in character, of solid appearance, efficiently-run and well-maintained. Boarding at Balboa Heights you could not be blamed for thinking that this was the old train to Worcester. In the way tickets are sold and conductors in pill-box hats punch them and hand you a seat-stub (Keep This Check In Sight) it is slightly old-fangled and very dependable. But that too is like the Canal: both Canal and railway have worn well, lasting through the modern age without having had to be modernized.lt travels from the Atlantic to the Pacific in under an hour and a half, and it is nearly always on time.

I had been in Panama long enough to be able to recognize some of the landmarks - 'The Building' overlooking Stevens Circle, the mansion houses on Balboa Heights, and Fort Clayton which has the look of a maximum security prison. Most of the houses had a monotonous sameness - the two trees, the flower-bed, the boat in the breezeway. There are no pedestrians on the side-walks - in most places there are no pavements. Only the servants lounging at kitchen doors break the monotony and hint at life being lived.

The first stop was Miraflores: 'Mirror-floors,' in the corrupt Zonian pronunciation. And then the Canal drops behind a hill and does not reappear until Pedro Miguel where, at that set of locks, there are dredgers whose shape and smoke-stacks gave them the look of old Mississippi riverboats.

The train, unlike any other train in Latin America, contains a cross-section of the country's society. In the air-conditioned cars are the American army officers, the better-paid Zonians, tourists, and the businessmen from France and Japan who, at this crucial time, have come down to make a killing in real estate or imports. I was in the non-air-conditioned car by preference, with an ill-assorted group of Panamanians and Zonians, enlisted men, canal workers on the afternoon shift, blacks in velvet caps and some with Rastafarian dreadlocks and octoroons in pig-tails and whole families - black, white and all the intermediate racial hues.

In the air-conditioned car the passengers were looking out of the windows, marvelling at the Canal; but here in the cheaper seats many of the passengers were asleep and no one seemed to notice that we were passing through woods which thickened and, shadier and with hanging vines, turned into half-tame rain-forest. It became jungle, but it remained to the east; on the west, next to the Canal, there was a golf course, with brown tussocky fairways and forlorn golfers marching towards the rough - snakes and scorpions plague the duffers on this course. There are no billboards, no signs at all on the roads, no litter, no hamburger stands or petrol stations: this is an American suburb in apotheosis, the triumph of banality, a permanent encampment of no-nonsense houses and no-nonsense railway stations and no-nonsense churches, and even no-nonsense prisons, for here, in Gamboa, is the Canal Zone Penitentiary and it looks no better or worse than the barracks at Fort Clayton or the Zonian houses at Balboa. The severity is given emphasis by a policeman in a state trooper's Stetson leaning against the fender of his squad car, filing his nails.

Only in the tunnels was I reminded that I was in Central America: people screamed.

Out of the tunnel deeper jungle began, tree jammed next to tree, vine creeping on vine, pathless and dark. It bears no relation to the Canal; it is primeval jungle, teeming with birds. That is the margin of the Zonian's world, where Panama resumes after the interrupting ribbon of the Zone. And it is in its wildness as unreal as the military manicure of the Zone. It does not matter that there are alligators and Indians there, because there are puppy-dogs and policemen here, and everything you need to ignore the jungle that does not stop until the Andes begin.

At Culebra we crossed the continental divide, and two ships were passing in the Cut. For these two ships to be sliding sleepily along, seven years of digging were necessary; it was, said Lord Bryce, 'the greatest liberty ever taken with nature'. The details are in David McCullough's canal history, The Path Between The Seas: to dig nine miles and remove 96 million cubic yards of earth it cost $90 million; 61 million pounds of dynamite were used to blast open the canal, and much of it was used right here at Culebra. But it was a hot sunny afternoon; the birds were singing; Culebra seemed little more than a natural river in the tropics. The Canal's history is unimaginable from what it is possible to see in the Zone; most of it is underwater, in any case. Bunau-Varilla's remark that 'the cradle of the Panama Republic' was Room 1162 of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City is true, but seems, like all the other historical details connected with the Canal, monstrous and fanciful.

And what could be odder than the sight of a great sea-going ship in the jungle? Inland, swamps and lagoons were more frequent, and then the lake began. Gatun Lake was formed by the Canal; until the sluice gates opened in 1914 there was only a narrow river, the Chagres. Now there is a vast lake, bigger than Moosehead Lake in Maine. Near Frijoles, a cool breeze blew across it and whitened the water and made it choppy. I could see Barro Colorado Island. As water filled the valley to create the lake the animals made for Barro Colorado, the birds flew to its trees, and so this hill was turned into an ark. It remains a wild-life sanctuary.

All the transistor radios - there were five - in my car were playing a current hit, Stay in' Alive, as the train crossed the causeway from Monte Liro to the Gatun side. It was like being in Louisiana, not merely because of the blacks and their radios and that music; but most Zonians had been recruited out of New Orleans, and this passage was practically identical to crossing the long lacustrine bridge on Lake Pontchartrain on the Chicago train called, not entirely by coincidence, 'The Panama Limited'. The islands in Gatun Lake are so young they still look like hilltops in flood-time, but there is no time to examine them. Here, the train does sixty, going clickety-click across the causeway. I regretted that it was not going farther, that I could not simply sit where I was, puffing my pipe, and be taken to Colombia and Ecuador. But no good train ever goes far enough, just as no bad train ever reaches its destination soon enough.

The last set of locks at Gatun, and the surrounding buildings, the camp, the houses, the military signs - all this jogged a memory in me I thought I had lost. It put my Panama experience into perspective. I had felt at Balboa High a familiar melancholy. It had been like my high school. But one American high school is much like another; they all have a timeless gamesmanship, a pretence of study and a rather comic look of skirmish between student and teacher. And the atmosphere is always the same, the smell of textbook glue and paper, corridor wax, chalk dust and sneaker rubber; the distant strongbox clang of locker-doors, the shouts and giggles. It was no aid to perception to be in Balboa High.

But Gatun moved me. Gatun was a piece of my past I thought I had lost; I had forgotten it, and it was not until we passed through that I realized how special it was. Except for this trip, the memory might have been irrecoverable. Round about 1953, when I was twelve and skinny and too near-sighted to catch a baseball, my uncle - an army surgeon - did me the favour of inviting me to spend the summer with him and my aunt and cousins at Fort Lee in Virginia. He was an officer. Punished-looking privates picking up gum-wrappers at the roadside used to salute his car, even when my aunt was driving it - saluting the insignia, I suppose. We were always going to the pool when this happened, to the Fort Lee Officers Open Mess. We usually went to the pool. There was a boy my age there, named Miller. He had a yellow stain on his swimming trunks. 'That's pickle juice,' he said. 'I spilled it in Germany.' It seemed an amazing explanation, but I believed him: he owned a German bayonet. Miller had been in Virginia long enough to ignore the heat. I had never known such temperatures. I volunteered to caddy for my uncle, but after six holes I had to sit in the shade and wait for him to return for the thirteenth, which was nearby. I tried to acclimatize myself like Miller, but invariably I ended up in the shade of a tree. My uncle said I probably had dropsy. 'This is my nephew,' he would say to his golf partner. 'He's got dropsy.' The nickname 'Dropsy' dogged me throughout the summer. Fort Lee was an army camp, but it did not match the stereotype I had seen in war movies; it looked like a state prison that was being used as a country club. Apart from the soldiers - saluting, saluting - there were blacks, lurking everywhere, gardening, idling at the Tastee-Freez ice-cream parlour, walking down the unshaded roads, driving the DDT spraying truck which tore through the back yards leaving a cloud of poison as pretty as fog and, afterwards, piles of dead grasshoppers. The woods were thin and piney, the earth redder than any I had ever seen, the houses cool (my aunt had 'coffee mornings'). At the restaurants near the camp there were small rectangular signs near the doors, like the tin name-plates in Boston that said DUFFY or JONES; but here, the name-1 innocently believed it was a name - was always WHITE. A train ran nearby, to Hopewell and Petersburg; the insects were as loud in the daytime as at night, the buildings pale yellow, with red-tile roofs, and fences, and stencilled signs - like this.

As the train approached Gatun, and stopped, I was back in Fort Lee, returned to a moment twenty-five years before, when I had watched with the same sense of fear and excitement the military buildings and the stunted trees in the red soil, the unaccountably bright flowers, the WACs, the yellow school bus, the row of olive-drab Fords, the baseball diamond and the black people, the Little League field, the cemetery, the young soldiers who looked aimless whenever they were not marching, the dust settling in the heat.The two worlds met: here it was rural Virginia, and still the Fifties, and the smell was the same and the memory so clear, I thought: The next stop must be Petersburg.

It was Mount Hope, but Mount Hope was a continuation of the same memory. It is not often that I have travelled so far and been able, so easily,to uncover a fragment of the past that had remained lost to me. And as in all recollection there is something that looks inexact, like the memory of the name-plate WHITE. The perspective of years allowed me to see how old and small that other world was, and how I had been fooled.

The spell was broken at Colón. Colón had a divided look I could never grow used to. It was colonial in such a naked way: the tenements of the poor on one side of the tracks - what passed for the native quarter; and the military symmetries of the imperial buildings on the other side, the yacht club, the offices, the houses set in gardens. Here the governors, there the governed. It is the old form of colonialism because, unlike the equally grasping multi-national corporations which are so often invisible, you can see at a glance from the appearance of things that you are in a colony, and the make of every car tells you that it is an American colony.

The tenements were like those I had seen in Panama City, decaying antiques. With a coat of paint and a dose of rust-remover they would have looked like the houses in New Orleans's French Quarter or those in the older parts of Singapore. If Gatun and so much else in the Zone looked like Fort Lee, Virginia, circa 1953, what lay just outside it seemed like the hectic and faintly reeking commercial districts of prewar Singapore - the sour tangs of the bazaar, the cloth and curio emporiums, the provisioners, the ships' chandlers who, in Colón as in Singapore, were Indians and Chinese.

I had been told that the Indians in the Zone had come from India to work on the railway. It is not an easy fact to authenticate - workers are workers: they are the silent men in history books - but the labour supply in the building of the Canal was drawn from ninety-seven countries; India must have been one of them. I could not find any Indian in Colón who had come for this reason. Mr Gulchand seemed to be typical. He was a Sindhi, and a Hindu - he had a coloured portrait of the Mahatma in his shop. After the partition of India, the province of Sindh became part of Pakistan, and fearing Muslim rule, Mr Gulchand went to Bombay. It wasn't home, but at least it was Hindu. He started an import-export business and, in the course of this enterprise, had occasion to deal with Filipinos. He visited the Philippines. He liked it well enough to move his business there in the Sixties. The Vietnam war created a brief boom in the Philippines. Mr Gulchand's business prospered. His move accomplished several things: it estranged him from the Anglo-Indian sphere of influence and put him in close touch with Americans. And he learned to speak Spanish. He was now half-way across the world. Only the Pacific Ocean separated him from the emporium of Colón and the promise of greater wealth in Panama, more import-export, Central American connections and the city all Latin Americans regard as their metropolis: Miami. He had been in Colón for five years. He hated it. He longed for the more comprehensible disorder of Bombay, the more familiar anarchy.

'Business is slack,' said Mr Gulchand. He blamed the Canal Treaty. It was an old story: the colony about to collapse around the shopkeepers' ears; recessional; bolting whites; prices down. I can't give this stuff away.

What did he think of Colón?

'Wiolent,' said Mr Gulchand. 'And darty.'

He told me to take my watch off. I said I would. Then, trying to find the post office, I asked a black man the way. 'I will show you the way,'he said. 'But that,' he went on, tapping my watch crystal, 'you must remove it or you will lose it.' So I took it off.

The shop-signs were variations on the same theme: Liquidation Sale, Everything Must Go!, Total Liquidation, Close-Down Sale Today. 'I don't know what's going to happen,' Mr Reiss had said in the Gorgas Mortuary, speaking of the treaty. But it was clear from these shop-signs in Colón that it would be ratified and these shops soon empty.

I asked another Indian what he would do if the treaty was ratified.

'Find new premises,' he said. 'Other country.'

The Indians said the blacks were violent; the blacks said the Indians were thieves. But the blacks did not deny that some blacks were thieves. They blamed the young, the Rastas, the unemployed. Everyone in Colón looks unemployed, even the shopkeepers: not a customer in sight. But if business is slack - and it certainly seemed slack to me - it might be understandable. Look at the merchandise: Japanese pipes that look as if they're for blowing soap-bubbles; computerized radios and ridiculously complicated cameras; dinner services for twenty-four and purple sofas; leather neckties, plastic kimonos, switchblades and bowie knives; and stuffed alligators in eight sizes, the smallest for $2, the largest - four feet long - for $65; stuffed armadilloes for $35, and even a stuffed toad, like a cricket ball with legs, for a dollar. And junk: letter-openers, onyx eggs, flimsy baskets, and pokerwork mats turned out by the thousand by the derelict Cuña Indians. Who needs this stuff?

'It is not quality of merchandise,' said another Hindu shopkeeper. 'It is absence of customer. They are not coming.'

I was thirsty. I went into a bar and ordered a beer. A Panamanian policeman was standing near the juke-box. He pressed buttons. Stayin' Alive soon filled the bar. He turned to me and said, 'This is not a safe place.'

I went into the French Wax Museum. The bleeding head of Christ led me to think it might be devotional; and there was also a martyr in the window. Inside, it became more anatomical, with two hundred corpses and exhibits. There were fetuses in wax, and sex organs, Siamese twins, lepers, syphilitics and an entire Caesarean section. Know the truth about the trans formation from a man to a woman ! said the brochure. The exhibit was androgynous and yellow. See Cancer of the Liver, the Heart and Other Organs! See the Miracle ofBirthl A note in the brochure said that this Wax Museum was operated to benefit the Panama Red Cross.

If I was to stay in Colón I would have to choose between the chaos and violence of the native quarter or the colonial antisepsis of the Zone. I took the easy way out, bought a ticket back to Panama City and boarded the 5:15. As soon as we pulled out of the station, the skies darkened and it began to rain. This was the Caribbean: it might rain anytime here. Fifty miles away, on the Pacific, it was the Dry Season; it was not due to rain for six weeks. The Isthmus may be narrow, but the coasts are as distinct as if a great continent lay between them. The rain came down hard and swept across the fields; it blackened the canal and wrinkled it with wind; and it splashed the sides of the coach and ran down the windows. With the first drops the passengers had shut the windows and now we sat perspiring, as if soaked by the downpour.

'I said, " Where's your ticket?" '

It was the conductor, fussing down the aisle, using his Louisiana drawl on a black.

'You cooperate with me, buddy - you're on my train ! '

He spoke in English. This, after all, was the Zone. But these were not Zonians - they were canal workers, most of them the blacks who had been reclassified as 'Panamanian'. So it seemed especially incongruous for this American conductor, irritably tugging his peaked railway cap and busy with his ticket-punching, coming to rest before a Spanish-speaker with a ticket stub and saying, That'll be five cents more - fares went up a year ago.'

He moved along: another ticket problem. 'Don't give me that crap!'

At the height of the empire in the Dutch East Indies, men just like this one - but Dutchmen - wore blue uniforms and ran the trams and trains through Medan. This was in North Sumatra, a world away from Amsterdam. But they had learned their trade in Amsterdam. They wore leather pouches-and sold tickets and punched them and rang the tram-bells. Then the archipelago became Indonesia and most of the trains and all of the trams stopped running, because the Sumatrans and the Javanese had never run them.

You're on my train: it was a colonial cry. But I would be doing this conductor a disservice if I did not say that after he had dealt with all the passengers he relaxed; he joked with a cackling black girl and he chatted with a family which filled three long seats. And for the amusement of the passengers hanging out of the window - they were now open: it had stopped raining three miles out of Colón - he chased five small boys who were playing on the platform at Frijoles.He stamped his feet and shouted, 'Git! Git! Git! Git! Git! Git!' Then he talked to the men who stood near the train holding bunches of fish they had caught in the lake, which was twenty feet from the railway line.

In Balboa and Panama City, the early evening baseball games had started in the parks; we passed three in a row, then another pair. And the American tourists, who had occupied every seat of the air-conditioned coach, tottered out of the train and walked across the platform to their air-conditioned bus. It struck me that we must have the most geriatric tourists in the world; and, even though they were treated like kindergarteners, they were curious about the world. For them, bless their yellow pants and blue shoes, travel was part of growing old.

All over the Zone it was Club-going Hour. At the officers mess and the VFW, the American Legion and the Elks, at the Church of God Servicemen's Center, the Shriners Club, the Masons, the golf clubs, the Star of Eden Lodge No. 9, of the Ancient and Illustrious Star of Bethlehem, the Buffaloes, and the Moose, and at the Lord Kitchener Lodge No. 25, and the Company cafeteria in Balboa the day's work was done and clubby colonials of the Zone were talking. There was only one subject, the treaty. It was seven o'clock in the Zone, but the year - who could tell? It was not the present. It was the past that mattered to the Zonian; the present was what most Zonians objected to, and they had succeeded so far in stopping the clock, even as they kept the canal running.

At Balboa High some students were waiting for it to grow dark enough so that in stealth they could drive nails once again into the locks, and jam them, and prevent school from opening. At midnight, the arts teacher suddenly remembered that she had left a kiln on and was afraid the school would burn down. She phoned the principal and he changed out of his pyjamas and checked. But there was no danger: the kiln had been left unplugged. Nor were the locks successfully jammed. The next day, school opened as usual, and all was well in the Zone. I was asked to stay longer, to go to a party, to discuss the treaty, to see the Indians. But my time was getting short; already it was March, and I had not yet set foot in South America. In a few days, there was a national election in Colombia, 'and they're expecting trouble,' said Miss McKinven at the Embassy. These considerations, as Gulliver wrote, moved me to hasten my departure sooner than I intended.

13

THE EXPRESO DE SOL TO BOGOTA

When strangers asked me where I was going I often replied, 'Nowhere.' Vagueness can become a habit, and travel a form of idleness. For example, I could not remember why I had come to Barran-quilla.

True, I had to fly somewhere from Panama - there is no road or rail link through the Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia; but why I chose Barranquilla I did not know. Perhaps the name was printed in large type on the map; perhaps it had seemed important; perhaps someone had told me that it was the right place to go in order to catch the train to Bogotá. But none of these suppositions had much basis in fact. Barranquilla was inconvenient and filthy, and I was at an additional disadvantage in arriving in this rat-hole the day before the national senatorial elections. There would be riots, I was assured; mob violence was expected; farmers were being bussed in from the mountains-they had sold their votes for 200 pesos (about £2.50) and for this they got a free ride to the polling stations. The man I was talking to had no teeth. If one learns a foreign language one never quite reckons on speech defects; it was difficult for me to understand this man's Spanish through his champings. But I got the message. For two days, no liquor would be sold; all the bars would be shut and, once polling had begun, no taxis or buses would be allowed to leave the city, which was near the mouth of the Magdalena River, on the Caribbean. You will have to wait, the man said. And while I waited I tried to think why I had come to Barranquilla. I drank soda water and five-cent cups of coffee. I started Boswell's Life of Johnson under a palm tree in the hotel garden. I listened to the honking cars. Several times I walked through town and saw truckloads of supporters with the names of their candidates on their banners and tee-shirts, or much fuller trucks carrying armed soldiers. It looked as though armies were massing for battle. I retreated to sit under the palm tree with Boswell and tried to remember why I had not gone straight to Santa Marta, where the train leaves for Bogotá.

In my meanderings around Barranquilla I had met an American foreign service official. He felt that he had been marooned in the place; he ran the cultural centre; his name was Dudley Symes. On election day, he telephoned me at my hotel and asked whether I wanted to see the people voting. Was it safe? I asked.

'We'll see,' he said. 'I figure if we keep a very low profile, no one will bother us.'

I trimmed my moustache and put on a wrinkled short-sleeved shirt, dark trousers and my leakproof shoes: I would blend perfectly, I thought. But it was pointless. Dudley wore sandals and bright plaid Bermuda shorts, and his car, a great lumbering Chevrolet, was unlike any other I saw in Barranquilla. A low profile, he had said, but people stared at us wherever we went, and the car was nearly unmanageable on the narrow broken roads in the middle of town. Almost immediately we were in a traffic jam. And the people who had sold their votes, whose homeward-bound buses could not leave for another day, milled around wearing the paper hats of their particular candidate; they looked curiously into our car. There was shouting, and singing, and at various campaign headquarters - store-fronts draped in bunting -hundreds of supporters (tee-shirt, paper hat) chanted candidates' names and awaited the results. (In the event, the votes were not correctly counted for two weeks.) The voters were clearly identified as supporting this party or that party; it would not have been hard for any of the opposing parties to pick a fight. But the soldiers were numerous, and the only blood-curdling sounds I heard were those of the twanging tin-drum music and braying voices - one party headquarters trying to drown out another.

Dudley manoeuvered his car down a back street, cursing the potholes and blowing his horn at the crowds. It was hot and humid; the faces of these people were shining with perspiration.

'See any violence?' said Dudley.

I said no.

'These people,' he said - and he might have been speaking about the boys who were now thumping the rear fenders of his car with their fists - 'are known as "the happy people of Colombia".'

Happy was not precisely the word I would have used. They looked hysterical; their voices were shrill; they wiped their faces on their campaign tee-shirts, darkening the face of the man already printed there; they cat-called from cars, and we saw one new car run smack into the rear of a jeep and drive it into a tree. The new car's radiator burst and water dribbled into the street.

'His daddy will buy him a new one,' said Dudley.

'Who calls them the happy people of Colombia?' I asked.

'Everyone,' said Dudley. 'That's why nothing ever happens here. The government doesn't do anything here. They don't have to. They know the people are happy, so they don't give them anything.'

Some of the cars, and all the buses and trucks, had thick bunches of palm fronds tied to the bumpers just ahead of the tyres. They looked like tropical decorations. They were no such thing. In election time, playful Colombians sprinkled broken glass and nails on the roads; a vehicle without the palm fronds would have its tyres punctured, and then the occupants could easily be robbed or intimidated. But if the palm fronds were tied correctly they swept the glass and nails aside.

'Now if I was a little smarter,' said Dudley, 'I would have put some of those things on my car. I will, next time, if I live that long.'

Dudley was black. He had worked for a number of years in Nigeria and Mexico. He spoke Spanish with a drawl. He said Barranquilla was the worst place he had ever been, and he wondered sometimes if he would not be better off back home in Georgia.

'You seen enough of this election?'

I said I had. And I had seen enough of Barranquilla. The city had no centre. It was no more than hundreds of dusty roads running at right angles; a traffic jam at every corner, a rally on every street; soldiers positioned at polling stations, policemen aimlessly tweeting their whistles. Music, and mobs. The editorial in the morning Chronicle had said, 'Living in a democracy often makes one take its liberties for granted.' This might have been a democracy - it certainly looked chaotic enough to be one. The voting was unreadably busy and the crowds in the streets looked as if they expected something momentous to happen.

But nothing happened. The next morning, all the parties claimed a victory of some sort. Perhaps that was the answer. In a dictatorship only one party wins; in a Latin American democracy all the parties win; and such victories can only end in squabbles. It was like a Latin American football game. The score, the playing, the strategy mattered very little; the mob satisfaction mattered most. And it had to be a free-for-all because, no matter what happened, Barranquilla would remain Barranquilla. 'I once went to Buenaventura,' an American said to me. 'Someone told me that Buenaventura was the worst place in Colombia, and I couldn't believe that anything could be worse than Barranquilla. It was pretty bad, but it wasn't anything like this.'

While the election was going on, the Germans, the British, the Lebanese, the Americans, the sunbathing Japanese - all the communities that live in Barranquilla, all members of the Cabana Club -were observing the curfew from the swimming pool and patio of the Prado Hotel. The women read old copies of Vogue, the girls played radios, the men twirled the gold crucifixes around their necks; they flirted and idled. A mile away, in town, the farmers sat down in doorways, with the money in their pockets from the votes they had sold, and they waited until the curfew was lifted, so that they could go back to the mountains.

One commodity links all the people in Barranquilla: dope. Some grow it, some sell it, some buy it, some smoke it. Many people are in Barranquilla's jail for trafficking in dope (Henri Charrier, 'Papillon', spent a year in the same jail after he left Devil's Island), but far more have become millionaires by trading in marijuana. They even have a group name: they are marijuaneros - marijuana-ists. The profit is obvious in Barranquilla- more obvious than in any other city in South America, because Barranquilla is poorer than any other city. Less than a mile from the littered streets of downtown Barranquilla, on gentle hills that have a view of the Magdalena mudflats and the haze which hangs over the Caribbean shore, there was street after street of the strangest houses I had ever seen. They are the houses of the smugglers and drug peddlers who are known imprecisely as 'the Mafia'. The houses are built like bank vaults. They have high walls or unclimbable fences surrounding them. Most are faced with marble slabs and many have no windows. Windows here are long slits, six inches wide. They are more than burglar-proof; they are capable of withstanding a siege. These houses make the fortified suburb of the Bel-Air Estate in California look positively friendly and unprotected. And how, one asks, do the citizens of such a poor town find the money to build such prisons, each house a series of slabs arranged mausoleum-style? Why so many guard dogs, air-conditioners, coils of barbed wire?

It helps to look at the map to find the answer. Barranquilla is strategically located. It has a port. Between the mountains to the east are many flat hidden valleys, where planes can land and take off without being detected. The mountains rise to a high peninsula called the Guajira. The weather is perfect on the Guajira for growing marijuana, and the Guajira is a one-crop economy. Pot-smokers the world over recognize the taste of its product, known as Colombian Gold. Most of the houses in that Barranquilla suburb belong to farmers who have made their pile in the drug trade. The profits are vast for both farmer and smuggler. It is not unusual for a plane to leave with a ton of raw marijuana, and the smuggling has become such an institution that Barranquilla is the centre of the cocaine trade as well. The coca leaves are grown in Peru, smuggled into southern Colombia, processed in Cali, packaged in Bogotá, freighted to the coast, and by the time they arrive in Barranquilla it is ready for consumption. A kilo is worth half a million dollars in the States. The risks are high, but so are the rewards.

The planes are chartered in Miami; the small ones make refuelling stops in the Caribbean, the larger ones fly direct to the Guajira. Occasionally, arrests are made - flying an empty plane into Colombia is a criminal offense- but only the small-fry are sent to jail. The rest buy their way out or pull strings in Bogotá - only the most naive person balks at the suggestion that many Colombian politicians are closely involved in the drug trade. The successful American smuggler can make millions in this way; the Colombians use their money by buying expensive houses, or cars, refrigerators, hi-fi sets and deep freezes in Miami; they set themselves up in Barranquilla as gentry. But, apart from their unusual houses, they try to remain inconspicuous. One drug dealer imported a Rolls-Royce Comiche at a cost of $400,000; but the other dealers would not let him drive it on the streets of Barranquilla -they felt it was too ostentatious, and that reprisals would be made against them. As for the small-fry who are caught and jailed - not much can be done for them. Their money is confiscated and they serve long sentences. There were twenty Americans in the Barranquilla prison when I passed through, and the American consulate which had been closed for a number of years had reopened solely to deal with them. But the consulate also issues visas: the demand for American visas increased a hundred-fold after the Barranquillans became rich in the drug trade.

The election was over, but the Bogotá train was not leaving until the next day. With a day to kill I did what most people do with time on their hands: I went sight-seeing. I took a dreadful local bus west along the coast road to the old-it was founded in 1533 -city of Cartagena. Cartagena had been what Barranquilla is now, a place of smugglers, pirates and adventurers, and the fortifications are like the Barranquilla houses on a large scale. If you can ignore the pitiful huts along the way, and the scary road, and the scream of the horn, and the heat, Cartagena is charming. It is venerable and attractive, a museum in the open air. The castle, the sea walls, the plazas and churches and convents are all pretty and well-preserved. But it is boredom and idleness that motivate sightseers, and even in this fine city there was not enough to take away my feelings of restlessness. I wandered into the Hotel Bolivar. The upstairs dining room was empty, but cool; four fans turned on the ceiling and the boughs of trees rattled against the balcony. I had fresh hearts of palm and a dish of Cuban rice and wrote a letter to my wife on the hotel's note-paper, and at once it seemed a day well-spent.

On my way to the post office to mail my letter I passed the curio shops. The curios were identical to the ones I had seen all through Central America: leather goods, Indian embroidery (it struck me once again that the Indians had been subverted, if not blinded, by having been turned into seamstresses: or was the crocheting of table napkins a native art?), clumsy carvings, cow-hoofs made into ashtrays and alligators into lamp stands and more stuffed toads with glass eyes. Trade was brisk. Here was a line of tourists near a cash register: one carried a coconut mask, another a stitched tablecloth, and others fibre mats and alligators. The last, a rather abstracted woman in a sweat-stained frock, held a coiled whip.

One street in Cartagena I found worthy of study. Here there was nothing but pawnshops, each with the sign We Buy And Sell Everything. It was not the old clothes, the toasters, the watches and used boots that interested me; it was the tools. Half the merchandise in these pawnshops was builders' equipment. There were wrenches, drills, screwdrivers in many sizes, awls, clawhammers, planes, axes, monkey-wrenches, plumb-bobs, spirit-levels, plasterers' hods and spikes and trowels. All had been pawned, all were for sale. And I began to understand why no one was working on those half-built houses between Cartagena and Barranquilla: the workers had pawned their tools. If there had been a few tools in each shop, or only a few shops selling tools, it would not have seemed so remarkable. But these pawnshops were like hardware stores, and the signs said that the pawned goods would be kept for three months and then sold; this was resignation and no mistake. There were enough tools in the shops to rebuild Colombia, and enough idle people, too. But it was a smuggling, thieving society; a hammer or a saw was not a tool - it was a form of currency, an article oftrade.

But, so far, what had I seen? Only this small stretch of coast. I decided to move on; I might, I thought, find something different. I began to seek information about the train and I rediscovered, after that pleasant train-ride in Panama, the difficulties of train travel in Latin America. It was never simple. And it was not the poor service or the bad trains, but rather the fact that no one knew anything about them. The general routes are well-known from Mexico to South America; many people travel from capital to capital. But they fly, and the poorer travellers take the bus. Few people seemed to know that the railways exist, and those who claim to know have never taken them. One person says it takes twelve hours from Santa Marta to Bogotá, another swears it is twenty-four hours; I was told there was no sleeper, but the Cook's Timetable listed one. Was there a diner, did I need a sleeping bag, was it air-conditioned? 'Do yourself a favour,' I was told. Take the plane. That's what Colombians do.'

I found that I was always travelling to a popular place by an unknown route. I seldom had any idea of how much it would cost, or how long it would take, or even whether I would arrive. This made for a certain anxiety, since I was always presuming or drawing my own conclusions from the thin black line that signified a railway on the map. I knew I was not in Europe, but this train service was less dependable than any in Asia. No timetables were published locally, little information was available, and what there was to know could only be found out at the station itself, if I had the good luck to locate it (The railway station - are you sure you want the railway station?' I was asked by any number of vague locals). The information I needed I usually got from a man sweeping out the waiting room or a mango seller at the door. Before each journey, I inquired at the station from these people (who knew the answer because they were always there: they saw the trains come and go); I found out the times of the trains. But I was still uneasy; I had seen nothing in writing, I had no ticket, no official confirmation. Ticket windows were only opened a few hours before the train was to go. The mystery was not solved until the day of travel. I would arrive at the ticket window and give my destination, and the ticket seller would be surprised to see me, and a little incredulous, as if I had penetrated his secret by some devious stratagem. He would hesitate and giggle; but the game was over -1 had won by finding him. He had no choice but to sell me a ticket.

And it did seem something like an elaborate game in which I was pursuing something that often eluded me; discovering the train, finding the station, buying the ticket, boarding and dropping into a seat became an end in itself. The travel was epilogue when it was not anticlimax. I was so preoccupied with this ticket-business that I frequently forgot where I was going, and, on being asked, found the question of dubious pertinence and said, 'Nowhere.'

A Colombian song goes,

Santa Marta has a train,

But it hasn 't got a tram!

Santa Marta, where Simon Bolivar died penniless in a borrowed shirt, is the oldest town in Colombia. In the past few years it has become a resort, but the expensive hotels are outside town, away from the bars and pool halls. The town makes strenuous claims to being Bolivar's shrine, and like every other town of size in Latin America it has an impressive statue of the liberator. There is a corrosive irony in this Bolivar-worship, but it is quite in key with the other misapprehensions on the continent. Bolivar came to Santa Marta because he was in danger of being assassinated in Bogotá. He was regarded as a dictator in Peru, a traitor in Colombia, and in Venezuela - his birthplace - he was declared an outlaw. For setting Latin America free, his reward was penury and vilification. The monuments are an afterthought and the words chiselled onto them the battle cries he uttered when the revolution seemed a success. Which town council could raise a subscription to engrave his last judgements on any of these marmoreal plinths? 'America is ungovernable,' he wrote to Flores. 'Those who serve the revolution plough the sea. The only thing to do in America is to emigrate.'

Bolivar had come here to Santa Marta with the intention of fleeing the country. It could not have been much of a place in 1830; it was very little now: a small town, a beach, some cafés, a brothel ('Misteri'), a strip of shoreline on the flat blue Caribbean. On this cloudless March day, sanctified by sunlight, the town was very empty. I got off the Bar-ranquilla bus and walked along the sea front, asking passers-by for directions to the station. The girls in the brothel, so pleased when I entered, howled in annoyance at me when I said I was merely inquiring the way to the railway station.

The ticket window was closed, but on it, sello-taped to the glass and scribbled in ballpoint, were the times of the trains: one departed, one arrived; and the name of the departing train, Expreso de Sol. I sat on a bench and waited for the window to open. Then I heard shouting and saw four policemen chasing a young man through the lobby. They wrestled him to the floor and wrapped chains around his legs and wrists. Then, they sat him next to me. He had wild hair and fresh wounds on his face and was breathing hard, but once he sat down he did not move. I stood up and walked to a different bench. If he decided to make a break for it, one of those armed policemen might feel impelled to shoot. I made sure I was out of the line of fire.

A tiny old lady with a shopping bag (she too was on her way to Bogotá) walked over to the prisoner. She put her face close to his, then exchanged a few words with the policemen. She chose to sit near me.

'What is he?' I asked. 'A thief?'

She looked at me and screwed up one eye. She had thick glasses that distorted her eyes and she wore a rather mad expression.

'Crazy!' she hissed.

The ticket window opened. I went over and asked for a sleeper to Bogotá.

'You have a family?'

'Yes.'

'They are travelling with you?'

'They are in Great Britain.'

'Then I cannot sell you a bed,' she said. 'Those compartments are for families. Six people or more.'

I bought an ordinary ticket and asked, 'What time does the train arrive?'

She smiled, but looked doubtful. 'Tomorrow?'

'And a bed is impossible, is that right?'

'If you really want one, ask the conductor when you get on the train. He might sell you one.'

I'll bribe the conductor, I thought; but when I saw the train and examined the sleepers - small dirty rooms with padded shelves - I was not encouraged. I hurried down the street and bought some loaves of bread, some cheese and what the girl called 'eastern baloney'. There was no point in bribing my way into a sleeper: there was no bedding, no water, no locks on the doors. I would take my chances here in the open car, in a sloping plastic seat. Something told me this was going to be a long trip.

We left at sunset, and at once I had an urge to get off the train. Already I was uncomfortable, and the journey was not worth this discomfort. Children were crying in their mothers' arms and as soon as we left the station people began complaining loudly about the broken lights and the crowds and the heat. You're sitting in my placel a boy yelled at an old man, who was travelling with his elderly wife. I'm not moving, said the man. Everyone was perspiring and muttering. / can hardly breathe, said a woman. What a smell! said a cruel-looking man into his hand. I had been moved by the tenderness on the platform, the fathers kissing their children goodbye, the boys hugging their girlfriends, the husband and wife holding hands. But now these same people were squawking irritably and I loathed them. I thought: They have to be here. They have a purpose. They're going home, or to work, or to meet friends. I had no such justification.

I was a victim of my plans. I had got this far and had boarded the train for no other reason than to be on the train. It was going to Bogotá, so I was. But Bogotá meant nothing to me: I was going there in order to leave it. At the best of times such a trip could be a lark, but this one had begun joylessly. It was too late to get off the train; we were moving away from the sunset, into darkness; the whistle was blowing and the passengers, quieted by the racket of the wheels, were smiling rather sadly. I was sorry that the train was not taking me out of Colombia, but only deeper into it, on a route that everyone had warned me about - the heat, the mosquitoes, the Magdalena swamps - to a capital no one praised.

Out of Santa Marta we crossed a green plain at the far end of which were mountains of pale velvet, a nap of shrubbery which was yellow in the salmon-coloured light that shone from the hinge of sun. Then, along the Caribbean for several miles, and the pink sky made the swamps pink and the still pools mirrored the new stars. This, with the palms and the fertile fields, gave me a little hope. The tidal pools were stirred by the breeze and lost their colour.

The train was almost full, but at Ciénaga, the first stop, a cry went up from the crowd waiting at the platform, and fights broke out as the people pushed into the cars. 'Colombia has taken ardently to the air,' says The South American Handbook. 'No one rides the trains,' I was told in Barranquilla. Some people denied that the train even existed; and I had had to search for days'to get information about it. How, then, to explain these crowds? Perhaps it was very easy. Despite the protestations that it was a rich civilized country, it was actually a country of semi-literate peasants, most of whom lived in inaccessible areas. Such conditions - poverty, illiteracy, remoteness - created an oral tradition, and it was this, the hearsay of the bush telegraph, that conveyed information about the trains. We were late arriving at Ciénaga, but the people had been there on the platform all day: it had been said that a train was due. Now they scrambled to the few empty seats, dragging boxes and suitcases after them. But the rest- and there were many - simply stood in the aisle, or sat on their cardboard boxes. The aisle was jammed. It was like a homeward-bound commuter train of exhausted strap-hangers. The difference was that this train was going 750 miles to Bogotá.

There was no air in the car. It had begun to rain, a warm night-time drizzle; the passengers had shut the windows. The lights flickered, the train lurched, and the passengers were so closely packed that the slightest lurch had them yelling in complaint. Now, I thought, someone is going to turn on a radio. But, before the thought came whole, the music started, an awful trumpeting and harmonizing, the Latin quick-step that was like acid in my ears. The rain, the music, the hot steamy car; and the mosquitoes, the dim lightbulbs that looked like withered tangerines. I propped my window up and pulled out Boswell, but I had not read two sentences when the lights failed entirely. We were in darkness.

Darkness proved better than dim light. These were country people: darkness put them to sleep. Soon the car was quiet, the rain let up, the moon was as round and yellow as a wheel of cheddar, and out of the window - mine was the only one open - I could see the flat swampy plain, and some huts with fires burning outside. The bog-dark land smelled of mud and rain; the passengers slept or stood silently rocking in the aisle. The darkness was puf e and serene. I thought: / am alive.

At nine o'clock, or just after, we passed Aracataca. The novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born here; this was the Macondo of Leaf-Storm and One Hundred Years of Solitude. In the light of fires and lanterns I could see mud huts, the silhouettes of palms and banana trees, and glow-worms in the tall grass. It was not late, but there were few people awake; glassy-eyed youths who had stayed up watched the train go by. 'It's coming,' says a woman in Marquez's Macondo, when she sees the first train approach the little town. 'Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it.'

I made myself a baloney sandwich, drank two of the beers I had bought in Santa Marta and went to sleep. The noise, the rhythm of the clicking on the rails, was a soporific; it was silence and a stillness in the car that woke me. At midnight, I came awake: the train had stopped. I did not know where we were, but it must have been a fairly large place because most of the people in the car-including the man next to me-got off. But an equal number boarded here, so we were no less crowded. Children woke and cried, and people pushed and fought for the empty seats. An Indian girl sat next to me; her plump profile, outlined by the station lights, was unmistakable. She wore a baseball cap and a jersey and slacks, and her luggage was three cardboard boxes and an empty oil-drum. When the train started, she snuggled up to me and went to sleep. My shirt was damp with sweat, but the humid breeze was no help; and I knew we would not be out of this swamp until late the next day. I fell asleep, but when I woke again at another lonely station - a low building, a man, a lantern -1 saw that the girl had moved across the aisle and was snuggling against a murmuring man.

Dawn was tropical, the sun a grey puffball in a humid cloud. I made sure I had not been robbed in the night: my passport and money were safe in my leather pouch. And, studying my map, I saw that we were about an hour out of Barrancabermeja. The land was thinly populated, savannah giving on to swamp. We were as yet too far from the Magdalena to be able to see it, and the hot clouds obscured the mountains. This was simply a small train on a straight track, labouring through a region where there were no roads, only huts, and an occasional bull in the grass, and vultures and herons. And the huts were poor, no more than mud shelters with grass roofs.

'How about a coffee?'

It was a man carrying a tray of filled cups. I bought two and gave him the Colombian equivalent of a penny. With an empty seat next to me I could spread out, drink coffee, light my pipe and read Boswell. This was not so bad; and I had that same sense of virtue I had experienced in Mexico, having endured a hideous night in a cramped seat.

It remained cloudy for most of the morning, which was just as well. I had been told that when the sun broke through the heat would be unbearable. Perhaps that was no more than talk: everything else people had told me was wrong. They said there would be jungles, but I had seen no jungles. This was all swamp and nearby were low hills with odd worn-down configurations, as if a great flood had washed over them and made them small and smooth. People said there would be mosquitoes. There were, but the flying beetles were much worse - they not only bit fiercely, but got tangled in my hair. And the heat was no worse than Santa Marta's, and nothing like as bad as Zacapa's. They said we would run out of ice, but indeed there was no ice at all on this train; and even at the time the threat had not seemed to me particularly dire. So after eighteen hours on this swampland express 1 could truthfully say that I had seen worse trains in my life. It was not praise, but neither did I hold the conviction that the train should be insured and wrecked.

I wished to remain sane on this trip, so, in a businesslike way, I brought my diary up to date, writing until lunch-time. Then I walked the length of the train, carrying my sandwich ingredients, and finding an empty table in the unused dining car, made myself a submarine sandwich. Another walk, and finally I settled down with Boswell. The sun had come out, the swamps shimmered; and the book was perfect. Doctor Johnson remarks on everything, including travel. Boswell is off to Corsica: 'When giving me advice as to my travels, Dr Johnson did not dwell upon cities, and palaces, and pictures, and shows, and Arcadian scenes. He was of Lord Essex's opinion, who advises his kinsman Roger Earl of Rutland, "rather to go an hundred miles to speak with one wise man, than five miles to see a fair town." '

The book became my life-line. There was no landscape in it. I had all the landscape I wanted out the window. What I lacked was talk, and this was brilliant talk, sage advice, funny remarks. I could identify with Boswell ('Why is a fox's tail bushy, Sir?'), and the combination of this train and the Magdalena valley, and Boswell on my lap, was just the ticket. I think if I had not had that book to read as I made my way through Colombia, the trip would have been unendurable.

But it was demeaning, after those conversations at Mrs Thrale's and at the Mitre, to enter into discussions with the rest of the passengers. I had thought I was the only foreigner on the train. I was wrong - I should have known the moment I saw his cut-off dungarees, his full beard, his earring, his maps and rucksack that he was a fellow-traveller. He was French. He had a sore throat. A French traveller with a sore throat is a wonderful thing to behold, but it takes more than tonsilitis to prevent a Frenchman from boasting.

He looked contemptuously at my drip-dry shirt, my leakproof shoes, my sunglasses.

'You're a tourist?' he said.

'Like you,' I said in a friendly way.

'I am travelling,' he said, forcing the distinction. 'I have come from San Andres Island. Before that, I journeyed through the States.'

'So did I. But I came through Central America.'

'You saw Tikal?'

'No, but I saw Zacapa. No one goes to Zacapa.'

'I have seen Tikal. Very beautiful. You should have seen it. How long have you been travelling?'

'A little over a month.'

'Five months I have been travelling! Five. I left Paris in October. I spent one month in New York City.'

'Travelling in New York City?'

This stung him. 'Going here and there,' he said. 'Where are you going?'

'Bogotá.'

'Yes, but after that.'

'Southern Argentina.'

'Patagone.' He was making tracings with his finger on his French map. 'I am going here,' he said, tapping a green bulge in Brazil. 'Down the Amazon, from Leticia. It will take fifteen days, or more, by river.' He looked up at me. 'Argentina has a bad government.'

'Brazil has a wonderful government,' I said. 'Ask those Indians on the Amazon, they'll tell you.'

He stroked his beard, not sure whether I was mocking him. 'Chile and Argentina are worse. That's why I'm not going there. You are taking this train all the way to Bogotá?'

That's right.'

'I am not. I am getting off at La Dorada. Then by bus.'

'Is that quicker?'

'No, but you save money - five dollars or more.'

'I've got five dollars,' I said. He started to cough. He stood up to give himself room, and coughed, bowing from the waist each time. I said, 'You should do something about that throat. Want an aspirin?'

'No,' he said. 'It is not serious.'

I went back to Boswell, then dozed and looked out of the window. The landscape did not change. The valley was so flat, so broad, it had no sides that were visible; and the foliage was too dense to be clearly discernible. But later in the day the savannah reasserted itself, and I could make out the faint pencillings of hills, and cattle grazed nearer the track, and horses, which broke into a gallop at the sight of the train. Flocks of white herons blew across the grass tips like flecks of paper in a breeze.

At one town there was a bar; it was called The Blue Danube' in Spanish, this bar near the much-mightier Magdalena. Outside it was a hitching post, with three saddled horses tied to it; the riders were at the window, drinking beer. It was an appropriate wild-west scene in this poor empty land, the settlers' shacks and the pig-pens and the rumours of emeralds. It was no better in the train. The passengers were either asleep or sitting silently, traumatized by the heat. Half of them were flat-faced Indians in shawls or felt hats.

In the late afternoon, we had word at one station that near Bogotá there had been a derailment, probably caused by a landslide. The Frenchman confirmed this, but said that he didn't mind - he was getting off at La Dorada. The news of this derailment did not really surprise me. In Barranquilla, Dudley had put me in touch with anAmerican who was working on transport problems. This fellow had shown me the latest statistics for derailments on the line between Santa Marta and Bogotá. He only had the figures up to 1972, but these were enough: in 1970 there were 7,116 derailments, in 1971 there were 5,969, in 1972 there were 4,368. He said the situation was getting worse; so I set out from Santa Marta expecting to be derailed, or to be held up by one. (It is also said that bandits stop this train and rob the passengers, but the Colombians on the train denied that this was so.)

'You think we're going to make it?' I asked the conductor.

'You will be in Bogotá tonight,' he said. 'That is the truth.'

Soon after, the mountains appeared, the cordillera of the Andean chain; and with them the brown Magdalena River on which men paddled dugout canoes or fished from the shore with contraptions that looked like butterfly nets. The mountains were at first scattered buttes and solitary peaks, and some were like citadels, squarish with fortress-like buildings planted around the summits. But it was an illusion -there were no buildings. My eye, unprepared for these heights, was misled, and made the strangeness into familiar shapes. The train rolled straight at these blue, grey, green peaks, and what I took to be loops of cloud - faint tracings in the sky - were mountains, too; and everything around me which had seemed no more than vapour had substance.

The train started to climb towards the vapour and fog. Here, it was still hot and dry; there, it was raining. We entered the rain, which was a cold zone in a drenching downpour. The fields and gardens were bright green, and here were villas the likes of which I had never seen before. They were on the hillsides, behind hedges and walls, with names like 'Seville' and 'The Refuge'. They had swimming pools and flower gardens and lawns as evenly-coloured as carpets. Some were like castles, and some were built like Swiss chalets, and one was made entirely of orange tiles, like a fairy-tale house with conical roofs. The Indians and the ragged people in the Expreso de Sol, who had come from the coast, watched these houses pass with astonishment and something like alarm. I wondered whether they realized that single families occupied these grand houses on the mountainside. The houses seemed fantastic to me; what, then, would a person from a Magdalena village think of them?

I asked one of the passengers. He gaped through the window, his face was wet with rain. It was cold, but he was in his shirt-sleeves. 'Who lives in these houses?'

'The bosses,' he said in Spanish.

But this was Colombia. There was no swamp without a mountain, no mansion without a cluster of huts. The huts were nearer the tracks, and in the villages hunched-over peasants hurried through the rain. It was cold, but we had moved from the plain to the mountains with such rapidity that my shirt was still damp with sweat, and now it chilled me to the bone. I put on my leather coat and still I shivered.

Then, on this mountainside, the train stopped. As if by a prearranged signal everyone got off. There were buses waiting. No announcement had been made about the derailed train ahead, the landslide; but everyone knew. We went the last few miles in an old bus, skidding on the rain-slick mountain roads. For the first time on this trip I felt I was in mortal danger. We arrived in the high rainy city in darkness.

The mournful countenance of Bogota's antique buildings is pure Spanish, but the gloom of its setting is Andean and all its own. Even on a sunny day, the three peaks - the convent, the cross, the Christ statue - are wet and dark; the city is spread across a gigantic shelf of granite. Over a mile and a half high, it experiences mountain weather; it rained for most of the time I was there, and this cold drizzle imprisoned it in dreary solemnity. My mood was no better. The height gave me the staggers. I tottered from one end of the city to the other, slightly dizzy and feeling palpitations.

Before the skyscrapers were put up, Bogota's church spires must have given the place a sullen beauty. They are the best examples of the golden age of Spanish architecture, and what with a climate like that of north-west Spain it is not hard to believe in some parts of the city that you are, as Boswell puts it, 'perambulating Salamanca'. Bogota's contact with Spain was considerable, since for hundreds of years it was easier to get to Spain - sailing down the Magdalena to the sea - than to anywhere else in Colombia. Culturally and geographically, Bogotá was aloof from South America and its own hinterland. It remains so, a lofty city with an unscalable class system. Cows crop grass in Bogota's parks, but this hint of the pastoral is all but obscured, like the church spires, by Bogota's ugly office buildings.

With the sight of my first Indian in Bogotá, my Spanish images quickly faded from mind. There are 365 Indian tribes in Colombia; some climb to Bogotá, seeking work; some were there to meet the Spanish and never left. I saw an Indian woman and decided to follow her. She wore a felt hat, the sort detectives and newspapermen wear in Hollywood movies. She had a black shawl, a full skirt and sandals, and, at the end of her rope, two donkeys. The donkeys were heavily laden with metal containers and bales of rags. But that was not the most unusual feature of this Indian woman with her two donkeys in Bogotá. Because the traffic was so bad they were travelling down the pavement, past the smartly dressed ladies and the beggars, past the art galleries displaying rubbishy graphics (South America must lead theworld in the production of third-rate abstract art, undoubtedly the result of having a vulgar moneyed class and the rise of the interior decorator - you can go to an opening nearly every night even in a dump like Barranquilla); the Indian woman did not spare a glance for the paintings, but continued past the Bank of Bogotá, the plaza (Bolivar again, his sword implanted at his feet), past the curio shops with leather goods and junk carvings, and jewellers showing trays of emeralds to tourists. She starts across the street, the donkeys plodding under their loads, and the cars honk and swerve and the people make way for her. This could be a wonderful documentary film, the poor woman and her animals in the stern city of four million; she is a reproach to everything in view, though few people see her and no one turns. If this was filmed, with no more elaborate scenario than she walking from one side of Bogotá to the other, it would win a prize; if she was a detail in a painting it would be a masterpiece (but no one in South America paints the human figure with any conviction). It is as if 450 years have not happened. The woman is not walking in a city: she is walking across a mountainside with sure-footed animals. She is in the Andes, she is home; everyone else is in Spain.

She walked, without looking up, past a man selling posters, past the beggars near an old church. And, glancing at the posters, examining the beggars, I lost her. I paused, looked aside, and then she was gone. So I contented myself with the posters. They were of Bolivar, Christ and Che Guevara; but they were hard to tell apart. They seemed like versions of the same person: the same sorrowing eyes, the same mulish good looks and heroic posture. The political posters in Barranquilla had been similarly emblematic-the right-wing candidates had looked fat and complacent, while those of the left resembled a composite of this patriot, saviour and revolutionary. The other posters were of blonde nudes, Jane Fonda, Joseph Stalin (bearing a warning about 'Yankys'), Marlon Brando and Donald Duck. The one I bought was the best of the bunch. It showed Christ on the cross, but he had managed to pull his hand away from one nail, and still hanging crucified, but with his free arm around the shoulder of a praying guerilla fighter, Christ was saying, 'I also was persecuted, my determined guerrilla.'

The beggars were everywhere, but they tended to linger near the churches and holy places, much as in Calcutta, to catch people when they are conscience-stricken. They were blind, lame, palsied; children, women, old men, infants - naked in the cold - being dangled on the knees of cringing hags. Here were two sisters, one in an orange crate with a scribbled sign saying she is paralyzed (And this is my sister . . .). Some are not begging, but merely camped out on a traffic island in the middle of the city, boiling grey liquid in tin cans; or holed up next to a wall, or living (like the young boy I saw every day I was in Bogotá) in the rubble of deserted buildings. The signs the importuning beggars carry are pathetically blunt: I am a leper and / am sick and We are orphans, and some carry placards with potted histories of bad luck and disease. The ones who do tricks draw crowds - the Indian contortionists, the blind musicians.

See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,

The sot a hero, lunatic a king.

To remark on the numbers of beggars is perhaps to make an observation of no great insight, like saying it is a continent of soldiers and shoeshine boys. One could even say that, in Colombia as elsewhere, it takes a degree of organization to beg. But why, I wondered, were so many of them children? Not sick or lame, and not carrying signs, they lived among the ruined buildings and ran in packs through the streets. They were lively, but they lived like rats. I asked several Colombians about them, and the Colombians were surprised by the ignorance of my question. They were gamins, they said - the word is the same in Spanish and English; and I ought to be careful of them, for most were pickpockets and sneak-thieves. It does not occur to the wealthy Colombian that these urchins are anything but vermin, and why house them or feed them when it is so much cheaper to put up a high fence around the house to keep them out?

I spent my days in Bogotá church-going (elegant interiors with a touch of voodoo: ladies jostle in line to collect pints of holy water; No Jugs, Only Bottles reads the sign), and climbing the hills, and admiring the old American cars - here a Nash, there a Studebaker - until I began to lust after one myself and regret that my father had sold his 1938 Pontiac. It struck me that the next great craze in America will be these indestructible cars of the 40's and 50's, restored to perfect condition. And when I grew tired of suspicious-looking youths who approached me ('Ay, meester, joo from New Jork?'), and depressed by the beggars and gamins, I turned to Boswell for cheer. It was in Bogotá, one grey afternoon that I read the following passage: 'Where a great proportion of the people are suffered to languish in helpless misery, that country must be ill-policed and wretchedly governed: a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization. - Gentlemen of education, he observed, were pretty much the same in all countries; the condition of the lower orders, the poor especially, was the true mark of national discrimination.'

14

THE EXPRESO CALIMA

There is a very good reason for the Bogotá railway to end at the town of Ibagué. After Ibagué there is such a precipitous pass that, to imagine it, you would have to picture the Grand Canyon covered with greenery - deep green gorges and green peaks and ledges and cliffs. The genius for building railways through such places disappeared around the turn of the century. Not long ago, the Colombians extended the railway from Girardot to Ibagué, but having got that far they were flummoxed by the Quindio Pass. There are impassable rapids in it, and high mountains around it; the walls of the gorge are vertical. It is remarkable that a road exists, but it is not much of a road. It takes six hours to go the 65 miles from Ibagué to Armenia, where the train resumes, heading south to Cali and Popayán; from there, it is a short hop to Ecuador.

Descending the cordillera from Bogotá, I felt I had recovered my health. My head cleared at this lower altitude, the trench between two mountain ranges. The hills were fine-textured, like great soft piles of green sand, poured on the plain beside the tracks. Telegraph lines ran by the railway, and the district was so humid that small plants had taken root on the slack wires. They grew in the air like clusters of orchids, their blossoms and leaves dangling.

At Girardot the train stopped. Everyone got out. I stayed in my seat reading Boswell.

'We have arrived,' said the conductor. He was on the platform; he spoke to me through the window.

'I have not arrived,' I said. 'I am going to Ibagué.'

'You will have to take the bus. This train does not go there.'

They did not tell me that in Bogotá.'

'What do they know in Bogotá? Ha!'

Cursing, I walked to the bus station. The Ibagué bus had already left, but there was another bus to Armenia leaving in a few hours. That would take me through the Quindio Pass; a night in Armenia, then chug-chug to Cali. I bought my ticket and went to have lunch. I had left Bogotá too early to have breakfast, so I was ravenously hungry.

The restaurant was small and dirty. I asked to see the menu. There was no menu. I asked the waitress what there was to eat.

'Dish of the day,' she said. Today it is beans Antioch-style.'

Beans Antioch-style: it did not sound bad. We were in the province of Antioquia. Perhaps this was a local delicacy? But names can be so misleading. They could call this dish anything they pleased, but I knew hog-jowls when I saw them. Flies buzzed around me, around the fatty maw in my plate. I ate the beans and a slice of bread and handed it back.

Girardot lies on the upper reaches of the Magdalena River, but here the river is too shallow to be navigable by anything larger than a canoe. And the bridge over it was being painted. The bus became stationary in traffic and for an hour and a half it did not move. This meant a late arrival in Armenia and, what was much worse, a dangerous night-time ride along the hairpin curves of the Quindio Pass. The Colombians are good-tempered people. They are used to waiting for buses that are late, used to riding buses and trains that do not arrive. They do not complain; they rarely speak. I complained, but got no response. So I read about Doctor Johnson. 'He used frequently to observe, that there was more to be endured than enjoyed, in the general condition of human life. . . For his part, he said, he never passed that week in his life which he would wish to repeat, were an angel to make the proposal to him.' And I thought: A week ago I was in Barranquilla.

I looked up. Our bus had not moved: that same sign advertising beer; the child still in the doorway with his tray of fried cakes; the piles of broken brick; and on the road the line of trucks and buses.

'This is terrible,' I said.

The man next to me smiled.

We were nowhere. We had come from nowhere. Ibagué, Armenia, Cali: they were names on the map, no more than that.

'Where are you from, sir?'

I told him.

'Very far,' he said.

'And you are from?'

'Armenia.' He gestured at the sky. His poncho was folded on his lap. It was very hot.

'Do you think we will get there?'

He smiled, he shrugged.

I said, 'I wish I was home. I have been travelling, but I keep asking myself if it is worth the trouble.'

The man laughed. If my Spanish had been better I would have translated what I had just read: He never passed that week in his life which he would wish to repeat.

We talked about the men painting the bridge. For this trivial chore the traffic in Girardot had halted and no vehicle was allowed across the bridge. Painting was difficult, said the man; was it not? They were trying to do a good job. He sat and sweated and mocked. The coastal Colombians had been loud and effusive, but these mountain people were stoical and sometimes wry.

'It doesn't matter,' said the man. 'I'm going home. I will be inside my house tonight.'

'You are lucky,' I said. 'You could walk home if you wanted to.'

'No. I could not walk through the Quindio Pass.'

More waiting, more Boswell. 'Mr Elphinstone talked of a new book that was much admired and asked Dr Johnson if he had read it. Johnson: "I have looked into it." "What, (said Elphinstone) have you not read it through?" Johnson, offended at being thus pressed, and so obliged to own his cursory mode of reading, answered tartly, "No, Sir, do you read books through!" '

We began to move - slowly, but I was grateful for the motion after this purgatorial waiting in the sun. It was not only the painters who had held up traffic, but a police patrol, boarding buses and inspecting trucks for drugs. Or it might not have been drugs. They climbed onto our bus and walked up and down the aisles with their hands on their pistols. Then they singled out half a dozen people and made them empty their suitcases at the roadside. This happened four times in the trip from Girardot to Armenia, and one of the times I was asked to empty my suitcase. 'What are you looking for?' I asked. The policeman did not reply. Inside the bus, the man next to me said, 'You should not have asked the policeman that question. You see, he is not looking for anything. He is just making trouble.'

The mountains were as yet still distant. The stretch between Girardot and Ibagué was surrounded by green hills and shady meadows and farms: corn, cattle and well-watered valleys. It seemed idyllic, and at every house the bougainvillea was in blossom, purple and orange. The colour alone seemed a form of wealth. The landscape was gentle, and the deep green grass made me feel mellower: to have seen this was to have discovered a part of this poor, country in which people lived in contentment, with space and a mild climate. I was still reading, looking up from time to time. Boswell was just right for this trip, and often in these uplands of Colombia I was given clarification by the book, or emphasis; or - as it happened in this pleasant valley - a kind of deflation.

'The modes of living in different countries, and the various views with which men travel in quest of new scenes, having been talked of, a learned gentleman . . . expatiated on the happiness of a savage life; and mentioned an instance of an officer who had actually lived for some time in the wilds of America, of whom, when in that state, he quoted this reflection with an air of admiration, as if it had been deeply philosophical: "Here am I, free and unrestrained, amidst the rude magnificence of Nature, with this Indian woman by my side, and this gun with which I can procure food when I want it: what more can be desired for human happiness?" . . . Johnson: "Do not allow yourself, Sir, to be imposed upon by such gross absurdity. It is sad stuff; it is brutish. If a bull could speak, he might as well exclaim, - Here am I with this cow and this grass; what being can enjoy greater felicity?" '

It was true; I could not presume on the contentment of these Colombian peasants. It helped to have Doctor Johnson nearby to strike a cautionary note.

We stopped in Ibagué to endure a police search, and then headed out of town. We had not gone a hundred yards before we started to climb a mountainside. We turned and turned again, gaining altitude; and in minutes Ibagué was beneath us, rooftops and steeples and chimneys. We had entered the Quindio Pass.

In my travel-weary frame of mind, it took a great deal to tear me away from the charms of Boswell and Johnson. But at the Quindio Pass I put the book aside and did not pick it up again for several days. I had seen nothing to compare with this, well, rude magnificence of nature. Not even the Central American chain of volcanoes, or Death Valley near Zacapa, or the wild heights of Chiapas were as grand as this. In this green canyon, deep down, ran a river; but the river was white and unreachable. What houses and small farms there were in the canyon were fixed somehow to the cliffsides; and the cliffs were so steep the huts seemed painted there, primitive two-dimensional splashes of huts and plots. The straight-down precipice meant that the bean furrows ran one above the other, like the grooves on a vertical washboard. I saw no people venturing out; it looked as though they would simply fall down as soon as they left their front door, and how they hoed their washboard gardens I could not tell.

There were only the gardens; there were no animals - there was no room for them, nothing flat enough to hold a chicken, much less a pig. And the farms were few - a dozen vertiginous small-holdings and the rest green steepnesses and plunging ravines of thin air. The road was cut into the mountainside and it was so narrow that the buildings which faced onto it - nearly all of them were bars - were propped over the ravine, underpinned by timber scaffolding. Birds nested in these lofty beams.

The one town on the way, Cajamarca, lay on a small ledge. I could not see it until we were in it, but a moment later the houses dropped away, and Cajamarca was rusty roofs and hat-brims, a hamlet magnetized to a cliff. The tortuous road helped to explain Bogota's remoteness. This was the only way south and west, to the coffee regions and the main port of Buenaventura. Flying back and forth over Colombia, one would have no idea of the difficulty in getting petrol and food to Bogotá, and the longer I travelled overland here the more Bogotá seemed a fastness in the Andes which bore no relation to the other towns. And it was still a country in which river and mule-track mattered. In the rainy season a road like this through the Quindio Pass - it was only partly paved - seemed unthinkable. Even on this dry bright afternoon five trucks lay wrecked on the road, and the drivers perhaps sceptical that any help would arrive had built small camps beside the trucks, the way pygmies do when they manage to kill an elephant they cannot move.

It was probably less the splendour of the heights than the depthless terror of the empty space beside them that silenced the passengers. Most were Indians, with dark sulky faces under porkpie hats and wrapped in ponchos for the cold. They were impassive and did not move except to stuff bits of goat's cheese into their mouths. After the disgusting meal at Girardot, I had got hungry, and as we waited on a bend for a truck to pass us a boy had come up to the bus yelling, 'Cheese! Cheese! Cheese!' The word echoed against the ravine walls. Lumps of it, the texture of unrisen dough, were wrapped in banana leaves. I bought a lump and ate it, pinch by pinch. It was salty and tasted of goat, but it was no worse than Gorgonzola.

Four hours passed in this way in the labouring bus: cheese, curves, and occasionally glimpses of the ravine that took my breath away.

At the highest point in the pass we were in cloud. Not tufts of it billowing in the genie-shapes I had seen near Bogotá that morning, but a formless white vapour we had entered and become lost in. It was a void and it had taken away the road. It dripped into the bus and it obscured the ravine; it veiled the peaks in some places and obliterated others further on. It shut out the sun, or rather dimmed it, giving it a bulbous pearly stare. The vapour changed from white to grey and there was no road, no valley, no mountains, no sky, only a grey sea-kingdom of mist, like the horror scene that greets Arthur Pym at the end of his voyage. It was a species of blindness, of blind flight, like a children's tale of a rattletrap bus that takes to the air, of enchantment so pure and unexplainable - and now we'were buffeted by wind - that I lost all sense of space and time. It was most of all like an experience of death; as if, try as I might, I could see nothing beyond the silly immediacy of this bus but a grave featureless vapour, my senses in collapse.

The grey turned white, became discoloured and bits of green were thrown up. We were descending now. The green was almost black in the damp cloud; then it was olive, the unfenced margin of road beside the gorge which a skid would land us into. No one would see us drop; there would be no sound but a gulp as we were swallowed at the pit of that mile-deep gullet.

The bus door was open - broken on its hinge. The bus swerved, and at one bend there was a thump. An Indian on one of the front seats had been holding a bundle on his lap; the bundle had bounced out of his hands, rolled across the floor and out of the open door.

The Indian stood up.

'Please, sir,' he said. 'I have five pesos in that.'

About fifteen cents. The driver slowed down.

'And some of my things,' said the Indian.

The driver stopped in the middle of the road. He could hardly have pulled off to the side - five feet to the right there was only emptiness. The Indian got out and, poncho flapping, he ran down the road for his bundle.

'Five pesos,' said the driver. 'That is valuable, eh?' He pulled at his moustache and the passengers roared with laughter. The driver was encouraged. 'What does it matter if we have to travel in the darkness? That fellow needs his bundle and his five pesos, eh?'

The passengers were still burbling when the Indian returned. He put the bundle on his seat and thumped it and sat on it. We continued through segments of cloud which filtered the sun and made it pale yellow and dripped this yellow colour onto the trees and the grass. Ahead, in another valley, lay a yellow town flanked by yellow fields and yellow hills. This was Armenia.

Armenia, Antioquia, and not far away the town of Circasia. The names were Asiatic and baffling, but I was too tired to wonder at them. The bus rumbled through town, and though it was dark I saw a large hotel in the middle of a block. I asked the driver to stop, then walked back to that hotel and checked in. I thought that working on my diary until midnight would put me to sleep, but the altitude and the cold made me wakeful. I decided to go for a walk and see a bit of Armenia.

If the town had been dark or in any way threatening, I would not have gone out alone. But it was well-lighted and as it was a Friday night - Saturday was market-day - it was full of country folk who had come into town to sell their vegetables. There were crowds of people standing in front of the windows of electrical shops, watching television. They were mainly farmers, Indians and peasants from villages which had no lights, let alone televisions. I watched with one group. The programme was a documentary about Australian aborigines. Many of the aborigines were naked, but an equal number wore slouch hats and cast-off clothes that were not very different from those worn by these fascinated watchers in Armenia.

'. . . these paleolithic people,' said the narrator; and the aborigines were shown building lean-tos, and overturning logs and gathering witchetty-grubs, and impaling lizards and roasting them over fires. The aborigines, seen from this Colombian valley, did not seem so badly off. It was sunny there in the Australian outback and, stalking a kangaroo, the aborigines looked alert and full of hunter's cunning. And here were the aborigine children. The narrator made some condescending remarks about their health and their history, and in Bogotá this probably did seem like the dawn of the world and a scratching settlement of cavemen. But the people in Armenia marvelled only at the nakedness, the lank penis, the fallen breasts. They laughed in embarrassment. The know-it-all voice of the narrator droned on, calling attention to the meal of maggots, the dwellings of twigs, the crude digging tools.

'Look, look,' said the watchers here in front of the electrical shop. 'Where is this place? Is it Africa?'

'Far,' said one man. 'Very far away.'

Five minutes later, walking back to the hotel, I paused on the pavement to light my pipe. I heard coughing; it came from a dark doorway, and it was the coughing of a child. An adult's cough is frequently an annoyance, a child's is always helpless and pathetic. I peered into the doorway and said, 'Are you all right?'

Three children jumped to their feet. The tallest was black and wore a man's suit-jacket which came to his knees; the others, in torn shirts and shorts, were sleepy-eyed Spanish-looking boys. They said hello. I asked them their ages. The black boy was ten, the others were both nine; it was one of the nine-year-olds - a thin, sickly boy - who had been coughing.

'I was just doing this arithmetic,' said the other nine-year-old. He showed me a scrap of paper with a column of figures written on it; they were neatly-done in pencil and covered the paper. 'Look, I made a million.'

'Good for you,' I said. 'Your teacher will like that.'

They laughed. The black boy said, 'We don't have a teacher.'

'No school?'

'We used to go.'

'Where do you come from?'

The black boy's village was unintelligible to me. He said his parents were there, but they had sent him away because there were too many children at home. How many? I asked. More than ten, he said. The house was small, there was no food.

The second boy said, 'My mother and father are in Cali. That is where my house is. I have a lot of brothers and sisters. But there was a problem. My father was always hitting me and beating me. I was afraid, so one day I came here to Armenia.'

I said, 'Is this your brother?'

The third boy giggled and began again to cough.

'That is my friend.'

'Look,' I said, 'if I give you some money, will you share it?'

'Yes,' said the second boy. He put his arm around the black boy. 'This is my best friend.'

'What about him?' I indicated the third boy.

He was the smallest and the most ragged, he wore no shoes, his arms were thin and dirty; he raised them as he coughed.

The black boy said, 'He is with us, too. He wants to stay with us. He is afraid to be alone.' The black boy was a bit doubtful. I could tell from his tone that this frail boy was considered a burden.

I gave them some money and told them to share it, then I asked (but I knew what the answer would be), 'What are you doing out so late?'

The second boy said, 'We were trying to sleep.'

'Where do you sleep?'

'Here.' They .pointed to the doorway, where a rectangle of cardboard, a small flattened box, lay like a doormat next to the sidewalk. It was a damp chilly night and this side street in Armenia - all the shop-windows shuttered - was as dark and windswept as a mountain pass.

'Where do you eat?'

'People give us food.'

I said, 'You should go home.'

'That is worse,' said the second boy.

'We can't go home,' said the black boy. 'It is too far and too difficult. We can live here.'

'It is not a good idea to live here, is it?'

'We have to.'

It was past midnight, but their replies were prompt; their intelligence was obvious and, for moments, it was possible to forget that they were small children. They were street-wise and as alert as adults; but there was nothing in this doorway they inhabited but that piece of cardboard. I had seen children "begging in India, the mechanical request for a rupee, the rehearsed story; they were as poor and as lost. But the Indian beggar is unapproachable; he is fearful and cringing, and there is the language barrier. My Spanish was adequate for me to inquire about the lives of these little boys and every reply broke my heart. Though they spoke about themselves with an air of independence, they could not know how they looked, so sad and waif-like. What hope could they possibly have, living outside on this street? Of course, they would die; and anyone who used their small corpses to illustrate his outrage would be accused of having Bolshevik sympathies. This was a democracy, was it not? The election was last week; and there was no shortage of Colombians in Bogotá to tell me what a rich and pleasant country this was if you were careful and steered clear of muggers and gamins. What utter crap that was, and how monstrous that children should be killed this way.

We talked some more, but people passing had begun to stare at me. What was this, some pervert cajoling homeless boys into performing unspeakable acts? I went away, but I did not go far. About fifteen minutes later I walked by. The children were in the doorway, lying down. They slept over-lapping each other, like sardines, the smallest boy in the middle, the black boy using the flap of his jacket to keep out the cold - wrapping it around the other two. I was wearing my leather jacket; I was not warm. I watched the boys from a distance. They were restless and fidgeting, their bare legs outstretched. I walked to the corner and paused to let a car pass. When its sound died out I heard the smallest boy's cough, a deep dragging tubercular cough, followed by a harsh gasp.

Such children are not news. Armenia had a paper, and on the front page the next morning, with the news of the election - the votes were still being counted - was an item about an incident that had taken place in Columbus, Ohio. It triumphantly announced that a seven-hour operation had been performed to separate a pair of Siamese twins. Mark and Matthew Myers were now in satisfactory condition, said the doctor. 'Mark is kicking perfectly.' This was news: the freakish element suited the readers of this provincial paper - freaks had an abiding popularity all over Latin America. But it seemed more remarkable to me that children should sleep on cold nights in doorways, on strips of cardboard. They were not mentioned; they were not noticed: after all, the child in the doorway had the singular misfortune of having been born without two heads. There was nothing strange in Colombia about homeless children; because it was commonplace it had ceased to be seen as savage.

I turned the page. Here was a full-page advertisement for an expensive housing estate. Who Says You Have To Leave The Country To Live California-style? That was the headline. The houses were being built a mile from Armenia, a mile from that doorway. They were described in lush detail. They had 'fabulous interiors' and two-car garages. And for safety and convenience, the text went on, the estate would be completely walled-in.

The railway station in Armenia is a substantial yellow chunk of South American turn-of-the-century architecture, a Roman villa which, enhanced by shabby neglect, looks even more like a Roman villa. This railway gave Armenia, Medellin, and - by a circuitous route - Bogotá, access to the seaport of Buenaventura. The trouble with the railway station - the trouble with so much in Colombia - was that people warned me away from it. 'Do not go there alone,' said the lady in the hotel. 'I would not go there alone.'

But I was travelling alone, I said.

'It is very dangerous.'

I asked why.

'Thieves.'

There were thieves, people told me, at the railway stations, at the bus stations, in the markets, the parks, on the hill paths, on the back streets, on the main streets. When I asked directions to a particular part of town, no directions were given. 'Do not go,' they said. On the Expreso de Sol, I was told Bogotá was dangerous. In Bogotá I said I was going to Armenia. 'Do not go - it is dangerous.' The railway station? 'Dangerous.' But the train was leaving at six in the morning. 'That is the worst time - the thieves will rob you in the dark.' How, then, should I get to Cali? 'Do not go to Cali - Cali is more dangerous than Armenia.'

I did not take these stories lightly. A tourist's warning is like the mugging story in New York: it is a whisper of fear rather than a report of actual experience. But a Colombian's warning about a place he knows well is something to heed. He has every reason to reassure the stranger and persuade him to linger. But the message of most Colombians was: Get out of town, hire a taxi, take a plane, go home.

This was impossible. I took the precaution of removing my watch when I went out. But as I never stayed more than a few nights anywhere I was usually on the move, with my suitcase and (credit cards were no help in the hinterland) several thousand dollars. I was easy game: I knew that, and this was why I had grown a moustache - that and my slicked-down hair would make me anonymous. The thieves, I was told, approached you in pairs. They stuck a knife in your ribs or they slashed open your suitcase. And I had been approached ('Con ere, meesta. Leesen - joo my fren . . .'); it annoyed me to be singled out, after having taken trouble with my disguise. But I was lucky -1 ran, or I ducked out of sight. I was never robbed, in Colombia or anywhere else.

The persistent warnings about this threat of thieves gave me a fantasy that entertained me throughout Colombia. I was walking down a dark street with a pistol in my pocket. A thief accosted me and held a stiletto at me. Your money, he said. I pulled out my pistol and, getting the drop on him, robbed him of his last peso. So long, sucker. I chucked a cigarette at him and watched him creep away, pleading for his life.

But without this imaginary pistol I was nervous in Armenia. It was dangerous. I woke early and hurried through the dark slum to the far side of town. That was dangerous. The railway station, on its side street, contained huddled Indians and indistinct shadows. That was dangerous, too. I bought my ticket, jumped cnto the train, found a corner seat and kept my head down until the train left. This Colombian train, by Colombian standards, was luxurious - much better than the Expreso de Sol which had taken me on that long haul from the coast. There were net curtains on the windows, and at this hour it was not crowded. With any luck I would meet the boastful Amazon-bound Frenchman in Cali and I would tell him that the train was thirty-five cents cheaper than the bus.

The hills had been visible from the streets of Armenia; the train drew out and we were in them, and I could see how, beyond this range of green ones, was another range of blue ones, and a third range of black ones, much higher and more sharply defined. We travelled through the Cauca Valley, past groves of fern-like bamboos: they were clumped against the river which ran the length of the country. I could see the road, too. The road crossed the railway and climbed the hillsides, but the railway kept to the straight line of the riverbank. The buses on the road heaved back and forth, then shot out of sight; the train moved at its turtle pace, chugging south, stopping frequently. We travelled into heat; I was encouraged, because this was the way to Patagonia, this rumbling south. It was the delays, and easterly and westerly traverses that exasperated me and made me think how mistaken I had been in Boston to assume that I could board a local train and arrive in Patagonia within a couple of months. I had been gone well over a month and where was I? On a sleepy train in a green and distant country. The people here had no notion of where Patagonia was.

This was a lush place - bananas and coffee growing together, cultivation as far as the eye could see. Where were the owners of these estates? I saw only the peasants; small huts, pigs, skinny horses, people living dustily among garbage, all of Colombia's blameless savagery. The grazing cows had irimmed the hills and meadows, so that the grass looked newly mowed, and each expanse had the manicure of a golf course. But this was hyperbole; unless it rained soon the entire area would become over-grazed and unable to support these herds.

At Tulua Station I bought a bottle of 'British'-brand soda water. I drank it on the train after we got underway. An old lady was watching me.

'It is hot here,' I said, self-conscious under her gaze.

She said, 'It is much hotter in Cali.'

'Really? I thought it was cool there.'

'Very hot. You will not like it.'

'You are from Cali?'

She smiled. 'Venezuela.'

'How long have you been travelling?' I asked.

'Two days. I flew to Bogotá. The bus to Armenia, and now this train. I am going to visit my sister. Why are you going to Cali?'

I had no answer for this. I had no good reason for going to Cali, other than the fact that it was south of Bogotá and on the way to Ecuador. If I told her my ultimate destination I felt she would ask me more unanswerable questions.

I said, 'I have a friend in Cali.'

The lie depressed me. I had no friend in Cali. Apart from some distant relations in Ecuador I did not know a single soul anywhere on this continent. I had been offered the addresses of people, but one of my rules of travel was to avoid looking up my friends' friends. In the past, I had done so reluctantly, and the results had been awkward, not to say disastrous. But travelling alone, a selfish addiction, is very hard to justify or explain.

'That is good,' said the woman. 'You will need a friend in Cali.'

This made my depression complete.

It was too hot to read. I had packed Boswell in my suitcase with my watch and my ring. I finished my soda water and looked at the men washing their trucks in the middle of the Rio Barragan. It was a tropical habit, the washing of motor vehicles in rivers; but this zone was both tropical and temperate. The green hills would not have looked unusual in the Catskills, except for the tall straight palms on their slopes, and the bananas, and that pig. We crossed into lower hills of shaggy green: bananas, chickens, and more pigs - it was impossible to look out of the window without thinking of breakfast.

After forty miles the hills became wilder still, and at sixty the climate had changed utterly. Now the hills were brown and overgrazed, and all the landscape sun-scorched, and no green thing anywhere. The bald hills, stripped of all foliage, were rounded on their slopes and had little wave-like shapes beating across them. It was a brown sea of hills, as if a tide of mud had been agitated and left to dry in plump peaks; this was the moment before they crumbled into cakes and dunes and dust slides. Glimmering beyond them was pastel flatness of diluted green -the cane fields which lie between the two cordilleras. From here to Cali, the cane fields widened, and at level crossings there were cane-cutters standing - there were too many of them to sit down - on the backs of articulated trucks, like convict labour. They had been up before dawn. It was four o'clock, and they were being taken home, through the fields they had cleared.

What towns I had seen, from the forecourts of railway stations, had seemed unprepossessing. There were a few factories at Bugalagrande and dried-out fields of shrivelled corn. Every town's hills had a distinctive shape - Bugalagrande's were great slumping circus tents. At Tulua I saw two churches, one with the dome of Saint Peter's, the other like Rheims; but Tulua was an otherwise dismal-looking place, like the Moslem railway junctions in eastern Turkey, all dust and sun and huts and a mosque or two. There were signs near these Colombian stations, indicating a place or giving a traffic warning, and all included a piece of advertising. The effect could be odd: National Police Institute Drink Coca-Cola; No Passing Smoke Hombre Cigarettes; Drive Slowly Bank of Colombia. After the town of Buga (a grand old station, with waiting rooms lettered First Class and Second Class - but they were both equally empty and derelict), the tracks became perfectly straight; such straight tracks were always an indication that, with no hills ahead, we were moving directly into the heat, across the plains with nothing ahead but a wiggling mirage cast up from the swamp-scalded earth.

The sun was blazing through the net curtains. I could not change my seat, so I walked to the rear of the train and found an open shady door where I sat and smoked my pipe and watched the cane fields pass. Another man had the same idea. We talked awhile. He wore a crumpled hat, a faded shirt; no shoes. He said he was a coffee picker. He worked in Cali, but did not like picking coffee in Cali. The pay was poor and the coffee was not much good either. 'Armenia is where the best coffee comes from,' he said. 'It is the best in the whole of Colombia.' In Armenia the pay was better - the highest prices went for Armenia's coffee.

'How much do you earn in Cali?'

'Eighty pesos.' This was less than three dollars.

'A week? A day? A basket?'

'Eighty a day.'

'Why don't you get paid by the basket?'

'In some places they do. Not in Cali.'

Tsit hard work?'

'It is work,' he said, and smiled. 'I can tell you it is very hot.'

'How much did you make a day last year?'

'Sixty-four pesos.' Two dollars.

'And the year before that?'

'Fifty-six pesos.' A dollar fifty.

I said, 'So you get more every year.'

'But not enough. Do you know what it costs to buy meat, flour, eggs, vegetables?'

'You might get a hundred next year.'

'They get a hundred in Armenia now,' he said. 'Sometimes a hundred and fifty. That is why I went up there. I want to work in Armenia.'

'How many hours do you work?'

'All day.'

'You start early?'

'Oh, yes. We start early, we finish late.'

'I am sorry to ask you so many questions,' I said.

He used a nice Spanish phrase to excuse me. 'I am at your command, sir.'

'How much do you pay for half a kilo of coffee?' I asked.

'If you work on an estate it does not cost much,' he said.

Then I told him what a pound of coffee costs in the United States. At first he did not believe me, then he said, 'But, no matter what you say, we are still very poor in Colombia. Everything is expensive here and it just gets worse.' He shook his head. 'Look, that is Palmira. We will be in Cali soon.'

I had been glad to have my leather jacket in Bogotá and Armenia. Now, in this heat, it seemed absurdly out of place. At Cali I was so hot I inadvertently left it on the train and had to run back and retrieve it. I was walking across the platform when I noticed a porter talking rapidly and angrily to an old man with a sack of oranges. I pretended to tie my shoe-lace, and listened.

'I helped you with that thing,' said the porter. 'The least you can do is give me something.'

'I am not giving you anything. You did not do anything.'

'Five pesos,' said the porter. 'Give it!'

The old man turned away.

The porter, wringing his hands, walked ten steps. But he did not say anything.

The old man turned and showed his teeth. 'You are a son of a whore.'

The porter heard him. He turned. 'You are a whore and your mother was a black whore.' He saw me staring and said, 'Look at that stupid man!'

Cali ('Very dangerous') was so dull that, simply to keep myself occupied one afternoon, I bought a roll of dental floss and carefully flossed my teeth. Nor was I lucky with Cali's hotels; I stayed three nights in the city and each morning checked out of the madhouse I had slept in the night before and set off in search of a new one. I toured the churches and watched long lines of little old ladies waiting to have their confessions heard. What could their sins possibly be? / have had evil thoughts, Father. I inquired into Cali's recreations. 'If I were you I would go up to Armenia,' said a Colombian in my second hotel. 'That is a lovely little town.' I told him I had already been to Armenia and that it had reminded me of the most poverty-stricken parts of India. This was always a conversation-stopper: no matter how poor the Colombian believed himself to be, he felt libelled by any comparison with another poor country.