The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

There were hills to the south and west. On my last day in Cali, I bought a map of the district and plunged into the countryside, keeping to the mule-tracks and by-passing the highest hill, a sort of local Golgotha with three crosses erected on its peak. I hiked throughout the morning and when the sun was directly overhead saw a stream splashing into a gully. I had sandwiches but no water, so I hurried to this stream for a drink. On the far side was a shack, with a goat tethered to one wall. An old man stood near the shack, pitching stones into the stream. He seemed Wordsworthian until his aim grew better and I realized that he was throwing the stones at me. I went no farther. Now the man was mumbling and shouting; he was either a lunatic or had taken me for a tax-collector. I headed towards a different path and eventually found some water.

There were shacks all over these hills, in the most unlikely places, built against boulders and cave entrances, and at the bottom of sand pits. I came to fear them, because at each one there was a mangy dog which ran out and yapped at me, snarling into its paws. I was genuinely frightened of being bitten by one of these mutts: they had a crazy rabid look, and a bark from one excited barks from other dogs hidden all over the stony hillside. Giving these dogs a wide berth, I strayed from the mule-tracks; and then my map was no help. I guided myself back to Cali using the crosses on Golgotha as my landmarks.

I mentioned the dogs to a Colombian that evening. There seemed to be a lot of mutts in the hills, I said. Were they dangerous?

'Some of the dogs are dangerous,' he said. 'But all the snakes are deadly poisonous.'

'I did not see any snakes.'

'Maybe not. But they saw you.'

To celebrate my departure from Cali, I went to an expensive Sunday-night buffet at one of the fancy restaurants. There was a group of American missionaries in the place, perhaps spending a weekend away from their mission. There were two enormous men, and two fat women, a pot-bellied boy and some smaller children; they were the sort of Bible-punching Baptists who are sometimes found bristling with poisoned arrows on a tributary of the upper Amazon, meddlesome mid-westerners groping and preaching their way through the blankest part of the South American map, only to meet, just in time for the church newsletter back home, a peculiarly grisly martyrdom. But tonight they were having a whale of a time: they made repeated trips to the buffet table, seconds, thirds, and then dessert. That pie is scrumptious!' The waiters looked on in bewilderment and incredulity as they were asked to dismember another chicken or hack another cake apart. I wanted very badly to talk to the missionaries, but they kept to themselves - all ten of them, at a long table. In Costa Rica, on the Mosquito Coast, I had found the setting for a story about castaways; here, across the room at this hotel in southern Colombia, I saw who those castaways might be. God had sent them here.

The centrepiece of the buffet was a three-foot ice carving, a lyre-shaped object which melted slowly and dripped onto the tablecloth as the evening passed. It was interesting, because in the Cali slums and in the villages I had seen that afternoon there was no ice, and in some places nearby no water. Here, ice was frivolous decoration, and I found its foolish shape objectionable. Studying this piece of ice sculpture, I was accosted by a fat woman. At first, I thought she might be one of the missionaries. But no, she was speaking Spanish.

'What do you call these in English?' she asked.

'Oranges,' I said, feeling once again that my moustache was a failure.

'Narrishes,' she said, and in Spanish, 'I want to learn English. You can teach me. These?'

'Grapes.'

'Crepes.'

'Good evening.' It was a man in black, with a dog-collar - a priest. 'Get your food, Maria,' he said. The woman smiled at me and then walked to the far end of the buffet table. 'She talks to everyone,' said the priest. 'You must forgive her. She is retarded.'

The woman was heaping her plate with food. She had a broad plain face and pale eyes, and the sort of unusual bulk, the benjy-fat you see in the mad and housebound, who do nothing but stare out of the window.

'Her father was very rich. He died two years ago,' said the priest. 'Extremely rich.' The priest made a noise, a slurp of pity.

'Is Maria in your parish?'

'Ah, no. She is all alone,' said the priest. 'I look after her.'

The priest had a matador's thin face and dark stare; he glanced at Maria, he glanced at me. He had an anxious smile and lines of suspicion set this smile in parenthesis. We were soon joined by a solemn man in a blue shirt.

This is Father Padilla,' said the first priest. 'He is a Capuchin. Father Padilla, this gentleman is an American. You must excuse me while I see to Maria.' He hurried to the buffet; Maria had begun to talk to another stranger.

I turned to Father Padilla and said, 'You are not dressed like a priest.'

'We do not wear those clothes anymore,' he said. 'In Colombia it is not the custom.'

'Capuchins?'

‘All.'

'But your friend,' I said, indicating the man in black, helping Maria with her plate, 'he is wearing his collar.'

Father Padilla frowned. 'He is not a priest.'

Strange: the priest in a sports shirt, the layman in a dog-collar. I said, 'He seems to be one.'

'He is a sort of helper, but not in my parish.'

The black-suited man looked up. Seeing that he had stopped filling her plate, Maria scolded him. The man jerked the tines of his fork into a slab of ham.

'She is rich?'I said.

'Very rich,' said Father Padilla. 'But in my district everyone is poor. They have nothing.'

I told him what I had seen in Armenia - the children in the doorway. How could such a situation be allowed to continue?

He said, 'It is incomprehensible to me that some people in this country are so rich and others so poor. It is a terrible situation. There are tens of thousands of children who live like that. Why is this so? I cannot explain it.'

The bogus priest came over with Maria. He guided her as if he was a zoo-keeper with a rare clumsy animal. He said, 'She wants to ask you a question.'

Maria was drooling. She held a silver implement in her hand. 'How do you say this in English?'

'Spoon.'

'Boon.' It was an infant's utterance. 'Come with me. You must eat with us at our table. You can teach me English.'

'I am sorry,' I said. 'I have to go.'

The bogus priest led her away.

Father Padilla watched them go. Then he said, 'I want you to know that I do not come here often. This is perhaps the second time. You understand?'

'Yes,'I said.

'Good luck on your travels,' he said. 'God be with you.'

15

THE AUTOFERRO TO GUAYAQUIL

In Central America and Colombia I had met a number of people, who were travelling north, who told me of the excitements of the Guayaquil and Quito Railway - the 'G and Q', or 'the Good and Quick', as it is known to those who have not ridden on it. It had taken thirty-seven years to build (it was finished in 1908), although it was less than 300 miles long. From an altitude of over 9,000 feet at Quito, the Auto ferro - a converted bus welded to a railway undercarriage - rises another 3,000 feet at Urbina and then drops down a series of confined switchbacks and loops (the Devil's Nose double zig-zag! the Alausi Loop!) to sea-level at the steamy southern port of Guayaquil. I had no difficulty getting information about it; the station was nearby, service was frequent and a ticket cost no more than a few dollars. I was confident that this trip would be easy; confidence made me procrastinate. I agreed to give a lecture in Quito; people at that lecture invited me to parties; I went to the parties and tried to be amusing. The train could wait: I would be on it any day now.

The weather in Quito was a source of wonder to me. It made ceaseless adjustments throughout the day. There were times when the cloud hung so low over the city that it seemed as if I could reach up and peel wisps of vapour from the ceiling of the sky. I lived on a hill and could see a zone of clear air and, just above it, this lowering cloud. The mornings were often sunny, the afternoons grey, and in the evening some cloud settled and another tide of it rolled across the city, putting out the lights in houses, blurring the neon signs, and finally obscuring the yellow street-lamps, until Quito seemed an uninhabited place, or less, merely a chute of air down which whorls of opaque fluff tumbled. One morning it drizzled, and very tiny birds - the size of cuckoos in cuckoo clocks: but they were hummingbirds - crouched in the branches of a bush, each bird requiring no more than the shelter of a small leaf to keep it dry.

In spite of the cold, and the altitude that made me breathless, I enjoyed Quito. Of all the mountain-top cities in South America, Quito struck me as being the happiest, and in retrospect Bogotá seemed a cruel towering place, like an eagle's nest now inhabited by vultures and their dying prey. Quito looked altogether cheerier, a plateau of church steeples, with light-coloured houses scattered across the slopes of the mountain which rose above it, and on the higher harder-to-reach slopes of Pichincha were the huts of the very poor who could see Peru from their doorways. But Quito had subtleties that were not discernible to me; a month after I had decided that it was one of the pleasantest places I had seen, and one of the fairest (there were no political prisoners in Ecuador), bus fares were raised to six cents and every bus in the city was destroyed by rioters.

'You must not judge people by their country,' a lady advised me. 'In South America, it is always wise to judge people by their altitude.'

She was from Bolivia herself. She explained that there were fewer national characteristics than high-level characteristics. The mountain people who lived on the heights of the Andes were formal and unapproachable; the valley people were much more hospitable, and the sea-level folk were the sweetest of all, though rather idle and lazy. Someone who lived at an altitude of about 4,000 feet was just about ideal, a really good scout, whether he lived in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, or wherever.

I gave a lecture in Quito and dined out on it for days, meeting writers and teachers and Coca-Cola salesmen. Quito has one of the best bookshops in South America, but I bought no books: my new friends pressed books into my hands, and instead of catching the train to Guayaquil I read the books and stared at hummingbirds. A few days after I arrived I expressed a vague wish to see some of Quito's churches (there are eighty-six), and immediately found myself being chauffeured around to these holy places.

In the Italian-style, Jesuit church, called La Compania, there was a painting of Hell. From a little distance this mural seemed to me an accurate representation of a night-time football game in El Salvador, but on closer inspection it was pure Bosch, Hell's great amphitheatre depicted in detail. Schoolchildren in Quito are brought to the church and shown this mural, so that suitably terrified they will stay on the straight and narrow. Each sin is labelled and the sinners receive appropriate punishment: the shrieking adulteress is being eaten by a wild hog; the impure man is having fire poured through a funnel in his mouth, and a fire-breathing dog is scorching his genitals with flames; the vain woman wears a necklace of scorpions, the drunkard is made to guzzle boiling oil, the tongue of the gossip is bitten by a snake, a giant scorpion smothers the unjust man; money-lenders, with unmistakably Semitic faces, are made into mincemeat, embezzlers chopped into bits, gluttons choking on garbage, liars stretched on the rack. Lettered in gold across the top of the mural was a quotation from Luke (13:3) in Spanish: Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.

The horror of the punishments is much greater than anything in Dante's Hell. The impartial beastliness more likely derives from that described by Saint Teresa of Avila, the Spanish nun whose Confessions include a terrifying vision of hell. Saint Teresa was canonized the same year the Compañia church was founded, 1622. I imagined that such a mural was most effective in persuading Indians to keep the faith. Indians, certainly, comprised the largest number of churchgoers in Quito, and there were Indian - that is, Inca - touches in the artistry of these churches. A quarter of the decoration in the Church of San Francisco was Inca. The church itself was built on the site of Atahuallpa's summer residence; the Inca motifs occur throughout the church - two sun gods carved on gold discs as soon as you enter the door are repeated on the walls of the interior, with fruit and flowers, the Inca harvest symbols decorating saints and crucifixion scenes. The Stations of the Cross are Spanish, the masks fixed to the walls above them are the large gold faces, some with headdresses that one sees in miniature on Inca jewellery - with exaggerated up-turned or down-turned mouths, like masks of comedy and tragedy.

These churches were filled with Indians on their knees, praying in ponchos and shawls, carrying papooses. In the Church of Santo Domingo they were lighting candles, in San Francisco they were doing the stations on their knees, and at La Compañia they were venerating the guitar of Ecuador's first saint - Saint Mariana de Jesus - who was so beautiful she went through life wearing a dark veil. It is said that a man once lifted this veil and beneath it he saw the grinning skull of Saint Mariana, which was God's way of showing him that he had trespassed. No one could explain the guitar; a guitar requires no explanation in South America. The Indians gazed on it; they were small, stout, bandy-legged, with thick black hair, like kindly trolls. They walked bent-over even when they were carrying nothing: it is a carrier's posture.

Almost half the population of Ecuador are Indians, but it seems like more than that, for the nature of their jobs makes them conspicuous. They sell tangerines and relics, cigarettes, sweets, and matches on every street; they work as cooks, gardeners, and day-labourers on building sites - living in the half-made house until it is finished, and then moving to the foundations of one being planned. In the smartest suburban street, father, mother and child can be seen gathering firewood and picking through dustbins. In a crowd of Ecuadorians the Indians can be spotted immediately: they are the burdened ones and are known by their bundles.

'Someone should do something about them,' a man said to me. 'You see a little man and he's always got a band around his head and carrying a huge bundle and walking uphill. If only there was something they could be given to help them.'

'Wheels?' someone suggested.

'Wheels wouldn't work on those mountain paths,' said the first man.

'A sort of sled,' said a woman. They could pull it.'

'Never get it uphill,' said the man.

I said, 'I suppose they could be provided with another Indian.'

My mocking suggestion was treated with the utmost seriousness.

'What you've got to understand,' said another man, 'is that as soon as an Indian puts on a pair of shoes he's not an Indian anymore.'

The Ecuadorian writer, Jorge Icaza, told me that it was the Indian-ness in Ecuadorian novels that made them Ecuadorian. Everything else was fakery and imitation. His own novel, Huasipungo, is full of Indian folklore and locutions: deliberately so, he said- he did not want to write a Spanish American novel or a European-style novel, but rather a truly South American epic. For this, he said, he had to invent an idiom and thereby start a tradition. 'I can tell you, this did not please the Academy at all.'

I had planned to ride the train to Guayaquil on this day, too, but it had not taken much to persuade me to change my plans and have lunch with three elderly Ecuadorian writers instead. Besides Icaza, who trembled and brooded and told me he had given up on North American writers ('These books say nothing to me'), there was Benjamin Carrion and Alfredo Pareja. Pareja, the youngest, looked like a Kentucky colonel and had travelled widely in the States. Carrion was in his eighties and reminded me of the actor Alastair Sim, the venerable and the gaga intermingled on his wondering face. They wore pinstripe suits and carried canes. In my drip-dry shirt and leakproof shoes I felt like a very small stockholder who had been granted an interview by the chairman of the board. Indeed, Carrion was the chairman of a daily newspaper he had founded.

They were in agreement on one point: the last interesting writer that America had produced was John Steinbeck. After that, all American writing had become unreadable.

Before I could get my shovel in, Icaza said that all literature was a struggle, each word was a struggle; and he described the composition of Huasipungo.

I mentioned Borges.

'No, no, no,' said Icaza.

'Borges said that the Argentine tradition was the whole of Western culture,' I said.

'Borges is mistaken,' said Carrion.

'We don't think much of Borges,' said Icaza.

Pareja looked unsure, but said nothing.

I said, 'I've always wanted to meet him.'

'Look,' said Carrion, 'it is the sales that matter. You have to be accepted. You have to make your name known or no one will look at you.'

He enlarged on this theme, and it really was like the boardroom of a South American company which had not shown much profit lately. Icaza and Pareja deferred to Carrion who was saying that critics' praise meant nothing if no one read your books. Publishing was a business, publishers were businessmen and had to make money to survive. And of course authors had to sell their books in order to be recognized. He knew. He was on the Latin American panel of the Nobel Prize Committee. He had put forward many worthy authors, but the Nobel Prize people always said, 'Who is this fellow? We've never heard of him.'

It was a problem, said Icaza.

Yes, that was a serious problem, said Pareja. It ought to be looked into.

I wanted to mention Borges again, but I felt I would get a dusty answer. Then I realized that Pareja was talking to me. The trouble with American writers, he said, was that he always identified them with American politics - with the United States government, Nixon, Vietnam. He did not find anything of interest in American politics, so he found the books unrewarding.

I said that American novels - the good ones - were quite separate from American politics.

'To me they are the same,' he said.

'Aren't you confusing the hunter with the fox?' I said.

No, he didn't think so. The others agreed with him, so on this note the board meeting was adjourned.

'Maybe they thought you were criticizing them,' an American political officer told me the next day.

I said I had tried to be tactful and had only mentioned Borges out of an abiding admiration for his work.

'Latin Americans are funny,' he said. 'They hate to be criticized. They can't take it- so don't do it. They loathe criticism, or what they think is criticism. The Ecuadorian government is a kind of triumvirate of dictators-the army, the navy, the air force-three generals. When they think they're being criticized they plant dynamite near the critic's house and make an explosion.'

That sounded serious, I said.

'No, no,' he said. 'No one gets hurt. It's just a reminder. The only fatality so far was a critic who had a heart attack when he heard the blast.'

On this man's office wall there was a map of Ecuador. But it did not resemble in the least my map of Ecuador. The man explained that it was an Ecuadorian map and that half the territory was actually Peru. The Ecuadorian maps of Peru and the Peruvian maps of Ecuador were also radically different, each country showing itself as very large and in possession of an Amazonian province.

This man was such a fund of information, I asked him about the Indians. Well, he said, there were very few Inca noblemen and they used the Indians as cheap labour. The Spaniards conquered and replaced the Inca noblemen, using the Indians in the same way. The situation had not changed very much: the Indians were still on the bottom, and because they were mostly illiterate they could not vote.

'I'm surprised the Indians don't strangle these people,' I said.

There had been stranglings in Quito ever since I had arrived. The next day the strangler was caught. The story was in the newspaper El Universo under the title Obsessed With Ties. The murderer was a homosexual, but there were greater revelations. He found his victims by dressing as a woman (he was shown wearing an assortment of female wigs in a series of photographs). He had strangled four men. His statement to the police was paraphrased by the paper: 'When he had a sexual relationship with a distinguished person, or one wearing a tie, he had a desire to strangle him, while with other people he was perfectly normal.'

'Things are looking up,' said the American writer Moritz Thomsen. The author of Living Poor and The Farm on the River of Emeralds - two superb books that put Thomsen in a class with the Patagonian resident, W.H. Hudson - he has lived in one of the wilder districts of Ecuador for fourteen years. 'If you drive in some parts of Ecuador the Indians throw rocks at you. Lots of people get their windshields broken.' He grinned and narrowed his blue eyes. 'So I guess there's hope for a revolution.'

It was Moritz who said to me one afternoon on a Quito street, 'I don't get it, Paul. How do you write a travel book if all you do is go to parties?'

'Write about the parties?' I said. But he was dead right, and I was ashamed of myself. I vowed to take the train to Guayaquil the next day.

There was no train the next day. Mr Keiderling at the American Embassy had the solution. I would be flown to Guayaquil providing I gave a lecture there. He would cable the office in Guayaquil and ask them to get a ticket for me on the Autoferro back to Quito. 'It's the same train,' he said. 'It's just a different direction.'

That seemed all right to me, so I flew to Guayaquil.

Visitors to Guayaquil are urged to raise their eyes, for on a clear day it is possible to see the snowy hood of Mount Chimborazo from the humid streets of this stinking city; and, if you look down, all you see is rats. Chimborazo was shrouded in dense yellow-brown air which throughout the day spat discoloured rain and kept pedestrians sheltering under the shops that overhung the pavements. There were torrents of rain at night, but neither the spittle nor the downpour had any effect on the rats. Rats can swim, they can tread water for three days and gnaw through cinder blocks and climb vertical walls; they can live for days without food and can endure extremes of heat and cold; they are vicious, fearless and robust, and their breeding habits make them very nearly indestructible. They are probably alone among vermin in being noisy creatures: they have no real stealth. They don't sneak, but rather stumble carelessly with a kind of tottering half-derailed motion. Rats within thirty yards or so announce themselves: they chatter and squabble constantly, leaping at each other. They are too evil to require any cunning.

In Guayaquil, they are of the species Rattus rattus, the black or ship rat, which carried the Black Death - bubonic plague - from Asia to Europe. The plague was intermittent in Europe for four hundred years, and in the late eighteenth century it began to move back, via the Middle East, to Asia. It is thought that the plague ended in Europe because the black rats were driven out by a hardier unsociable species, but one less dangerous to humans, the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus). The black, flea-ridden rats boarded ships and in the hot, wet, port cities of Africa and South America they thrived, bringing plague, which is still endemic on these continents. I could get no figures on death by plague in Guayaquil - the question was considered discourteous - but people do die there from the bite of the rat-flea. It is a short, horrible sickness: you are bitten and two days later you die.

There was a louvred panel on the upper wall of my Guayaquil hotel room. For two nights I was kept awake by the chirp of a fan belt. It would start in the darkness, the chirping of a band slipping on an un-oiled wheel. I mentioned this to the manager.

There is no fan in your room,' he said.

I went back to the room and stood on a chair and held a match to the louvred panel. What I had taken to be an air-conditioning device was a nest of rats - there were three of them, pattering and chirping in the dirt behind the panel.

There are rats in my room,' I said to the manager.

'Ah, yes,' he said. He was not surprised. I waited for him to say more, but he only smiled.

I said, 'Suppose we give the rats that room. They seem very happy there.'

'Yes,' said the manager in a tentative way. He didn't see my irony at all.

'The rats can have that one, and I'll move to a different one.'

'You want to change your room, is that it?'

But all the rooms in this expensive hotel (it was named after a famous rat-hunting German explorer and naturalist) smelled of rats. It was a smell of chewed clothes and droppings and damp, and it was in every corner. And one could easily see where the rats had gnawed through walls and ceilings.

I had been eager to go to Guayaquil: I had distant relatives there. In 1901, my great-grandfather had left his village of Agazzano near Piacenza in northern Italy and gone to New York with his wife and four children. His name was Francesco Calesa, and he found New York disgusting and America a great disappointment. Twenty days on the steamship Sicilia had been bad enough, Christmas on Ellis Island was purgatorial; New York was pure hell. He had been heading for a farming job in Argentina, but a yellow fever outbreak in Buenos Aires made him change his plans. Perhaps he had hoped to do some farming in America, but he was fifty-two and had no money. His situation was hopeless. When he could bear it no longer he made plans to go back to Italy. His wife, Ermengilda, resisted and finally refused to go with him. So the marriage was fractured: he returned to Piacenza where his married daughter was living (she had fled America with her husband a year before); his wife stayed in New York City, raised the rest of the children alone, and introduced a strain of stubborn singlemindedness into the family. My great-aunt, who remained in Italy, had a daughter Maria Ceruti, who married into a Chiavari family called Norero. The Noreros were distinguished as doctors and they had risen by establishing themselves in Ecuador - in Guayaquil, where they manufactured biscuits, sweets, pasta and spaghetti. They became prominent in Ecuador, and they brought this notoriety back to Chiavari. I had no problem finding them in Guayaquil. Everyone knew the Noreros. The only surprise was that I, a stranger, should be related to this now powerful family.

I met Domingo Norero at the family factory, La Universal. It was a large building-the city had few of them. A strikingly beautiful Italian girl was with him: his sister, Annamaria, on a visit from Italy. It was not easy to explain the family connection, but the place-name Chiavari was like a password. Annamaria lived in Chiavari, Domingo too had a house there, and their mother was there at the moment.

In his third-floor office, which was penetrated with the smell of chocolate biscuits, we had a family reunion. Domingo, a tall, thin, rather English-looking fellow, remembered my grandmother's visit to Italy. His grandfather had started the factory in Guayaquil, and on the death of this pioneer the business had passed to Vicente, Domingo's father. Ill-health, and an interest in Inca history, caused Vicente to retire; now he added to his already large collection of Pre-Colombian art and he wrote historical monographs on the subject - he had recently published, in Italian, Pre-Colombian Ecuador, a history. Domingo, only twenty-seven, had married at nineteen; his wife was blonde and bird-like, their two children as handsome as princelings. His yacht, the Vayra, was moored on the River Guayas, his Chevy Impala was parked at the factory, his jeep and his Mercedes were at his villa in the outskirts of town. But he was, for all his wealth, a modest person, if a bit rueful that the running of the entire business had fallen to him.

'I had no idea I had so many relatives in the States,' he said. 'But do you know how many cousins you have in South America? There are Noreros all over the continent- Chile is full of them.'

It gave me pause. These tycoons and walled-in businessmen I had seen, and cursed, in Colombia and Ecuador - they were perhaps my own flesh and blood. The proof was the Villa Norero. It was the sort of estate I had been seeing all through Central America and this part of South America, and it had made me doubtful that the old order would change. This one was Moorish in design, with Arabian tiles and pillars, and a swimming pool in the landscaped grounds - lemon trees, palms, and formal flower beds. The motto over the door on the family crest read: Deus Lo Vulte - 'God Wishes It' or 'God's Will'.

We had a drink, and I talked with old Vicente, a dignified man who was president of the Guayaquil branch of the Garibaldi Club. Vicente was the spitting-image of Giorgio Viola, the Garibaldino of Conrad's Nostromo. Conrad, in his previous incarnation - Captain Korzen-iowski - had been here, and in Nostromo he reinvented Ecuador as Costaguana, Guayaquil as Sulaco and the volcano Chimborazo as Mount Higuereta. No one looked more at home in Ecuador than Vicente Norero, and he would not have looked out of place in Conrad's novel, either. He inscribed one of his books for me and we set off in two cars for the Guayaquil Yacht Club. The previous day I had passed it alone and had not seen a club; the rats tumbling out of bushes and screeching around the river-front path had held my attention.

Lunch lasted the afternoon. As we talked and ate I could see the river out of the window. It was wide, and great tufted mats of weed -'lettuces' the locals call them - floated on its surface, and logs and tree branches. Such flotsam and jetsam made it seem more a monsoon flood carrying the landscape away, than a river. But, though Guayaquil seemed a thoroughly nasty place, the family reunion had taken away much of its sting, even if it reminded me of my link with these adventurers. We were all profiteering in the New World, even I with my leakproof shoes and my notebooks was plundering the place with my eyes and hoping to export a few impressions.

Annamaria was in business, too. Her husband and two children were in Italy. This was a business trip, she told me, in Genoese-accented Italian. 'I do a lot of business,' she said. 'I make parts for toilets, and also disposable injections - one jab and you throw them away. And these.' She shook ringlets out of her eyes and reached across the table, picking up an empty bottle with delicate fingers. 'I make bottles. I make everything.'

'You make money?' I asked.

'Yes, money- I make money,' she said, and laughed. 'But I like to cook very much at home.'

'You haven't said why you came to Guayaquil,' said Domingo to me.

My train explanation was too complicated. I said I was giving a lecture at the local cultural centre and then planned to take the Autoferro back to Guayaquil.

'That's nice,' said Annamaria, 'if you only do it once.'

They pointed out the railway station, which was across the messy river, in Duran. They said that they had never taken the train themselves, but this did not surprise me. I had been in Latin America long enough by now to know that there was a class stigma attached to the trains. Only the semi-destitute, the limpers, the barefoot ones, the Indians, and the half-cracked yokels took the trains, or knew anything about them. For this reason, it was a good introduction to the social miseries and scenic splendours of the continent.

'I hope you come to Guayaquil again,' said Domingo, and then we parted: the Noreros to their profitable pursuits and I to profitless gassing - a lecture on American literature.

And the ticket I had been promised? 'We tried to get you a seat,' said the embassy's man in Guayaquil. 'But it's full for the next few days. If you want to stick around Guayaquil for a while we could probably get you on, but don't hold me to it.'

'Why is this train so popular?' I asked.

'It's not popular, it's just small.'

One night in Guayaquil, a middle-aged Irishman in a loud check suit said to me, 'You probably won't believe what I'm going to tell you.'

'Give me a chance,' I said. His manner was benign, his voice gentle, and he had the sartorial inelegance of a man not used to matching the suit with the tie. With his directness was a whispered intimacy, of a soulful searching kind. I guessed that he had been a priest.

'I was a Jesuit priest,' he said. 'In the priesthood for fifteen years, I was. I served my novitiate in Ireland and Rome, and after I was ordained I went to the States. I was in Ecuador for a while as a missionary, then I had a parish in New York. I used to go to Belfast every now and then to see my family. It was very bad in '72 - "Bloody Sunday", British atrocities. My brother was tortured, my sister burned out of her house. I was really shaken. "Preach love to your fellow-men," they say, but how could I preach love to my fellow-men after what I had seen? Of course, it didn't all happen like that - it didn't hit me overnight. I had had doubts for seven years, but after that trip I was in bad shape. When I got back to New York, I went to my bishop and told him I wanted to have a six-month leave of absence. It's quite a normal thing, you know. Priests are human. They drink too much sometimes, they have personal problems - they need time to sort themselves out. With a leave of absence I would have no duties. I didn't have to say mass, only assist at mass. You know what I'm telling you.

'My bishop was flabbergasted. He couldn't believe what I was telling him. He said he had made a list of doubtful priests. He had actually drawn up this list of priests - fellers he thought would be leaving the priesthood sooner or later. And the funny thing was - I wasn't on the list. But he gave me a leave of absence all the same, and he said to me, "You'll be back."

'I had time on my hands - assisting at mass didn't take any time at all. So I got a job selling insurance. Was I good at it! I sold policies all over New York. Being a priest helped, I suppose - you can't beat the sincere manner if you want to sell insurance. I didn't care much about the money. It was the people that interested me, talking to them in their homes. And they didn't know I was a priest. I was a salesman you see, flogging my policies.

'At the end of six months I went back to my bishop and asked him for another leave of absence. He was surprised, oh yes, but I hadn't been on his list. He even smiled at me and said again, "I know you'll be back." But I knew I wouldn't.

'It's so easy to be a priest, isn't it? Well, you wouldn't know about that. But it is easy. All your needs are taken care of. There's no rent to pay, no food to buy. No cooking, no cleaning. You get presents. "Need a car, Father?" "Here's a little something for you, Father." "Anything we can do, Father? Just name it." I didn't want that, and I didn't want to go on selling insurance - in a way, that was like being a priest, too. I couldn't go home, and I couldn't stay in New York. I knew one thing -1 wanted out.

'I made a last visit to Belfast, saw the family, and the political things were just as bad as ever. My brother saw me to the plane, and as we were walking along I thought: You'll never see me again. That was the hardest thing I've ever done. It was harder than leaving the priesthood - turning my back on my brother and walking to the plane.

'I came straight to Ecuador. I had always been happy here and I had friends here. That was five years ago. I married an Ecuadorian. I've never been so happy in all my life. We have a child of fourteen months and one on the way - that's why my wife isn't with me tonight.

'Do I go to church? Of course, I do. I left the priesthood - I didn't leave the church. I never miss mass. I go to confession. You see, when I go to confession I'm not talking to the priest, I'm talking to God. I've got a job here. It's not a very important job, but I'll be here for some time.

'The hardest thing is not being able to tell anyone. How do you say, "I left the priesthood. I am married. I have children"? No one knows. It would be terrible for my mother. But funny things happen, strange things. My sister wrote to me a few years ago. She said, "If you ever decide to go over the wall, we'll understand." Why did she say that? And last Christmas, my other sister sent me some money. "You might need this," she says. She had never done that before - priests don't need money. But I can't face my mother. I think I have always taken suffering on myself to save other people from suffering. Would my mother understand this? I don't understand the depth of her understanding. You know what I'm telling you. It's a great pity. I dream about going home. In one of these dreams, I'm in Belfast. I see my old house and I walk up to the front door. But I can't go in - I'm frozen there on the steps, and I have to walk away. I have this dream every week.

'Oh, yes, I write home all the time. My letters - these letters about myself in Ecuador, the parish and so forth - they're masterpieces. Not a word of truth in them. I know my brother and sisters would understand, but I think it would kill my mother. She's over eighty, you see. She wanted me to be a priest. She lives for me. But, when she dies, I'll leave for Belfast the next day - I'll be on that plane like a shot. That's what hurts me most. That she can't know about me. And I can't ever see her again.

'Do you think I should write about it? I wish I could, but I can't write. I'll tell you what, Paul - you write it. It would make a good story, wouldn't it?'

To that Irishman, the Indians were sorely-pressed people who had not been given a chance; to Jorge Icaza, the Indians had the key to all culture; to my distant cousins, the Noreros, the Indians had real distinction and their past had been glorious; to most others, the Indians were hewers of wood and drawers of water and, on the whole, bumpkins.

I heard another view in Guayaquil. Mr Medina was a spinsterish and rather thorny Ecuadorian, with a thin moustache and a narrow head and severe grey eyes. His tie was tightly knotted, his trousers perfectly creased, the toes of his shoes polished and very sharp - it was hard to believe that there were five toes under those claw-like points. We had begun by talking about rats. Some people poisoned the rats, or trapped them, he said, but there was a better method. You used a high-pitched whine that was not audible to the human ear. It had the effect of driving the rats away - they found the noise unbearable. The local flour mills had been beset by rats, but this high-pitched whine -1 think he called it 'sonar' - had been a success. Sometimes, rats were locked into rooms with the sound, and in the morning they were found dead: the sound had tortured them to death.

'Juke-boxes have that effect on me,' I said. 'Especially Ecuadorian juke-boxes.'

'You cannot hear this sound, though apparently it gives some women headaches,' he said. 'I wish there was something like this they could use on the Indians.'

'What a neighbourly idea,' I said.

He gave me a thin smile. 'Ecuador's problem is a race problem,' he said. 'The Indians are lazy. They are not like your Indians. Sometimes they cut their hair and work, but not often. There are no poor people in Ecuador - there are only Indians. They are uneducated and unhealthy.'

'Why don't you educate them, then? Provide doctors and schools. That's why they're wandering forlornly around Quito and Guayaquil - they think that they can find in the cities what they lack in the countryside.'

They have no idea why they come to Guayaquil. They don't know what to do here. They sell a few things, they beg, some work, but they are all lost. They were always lost.'

'Even before the Spanish came?'

'Definitely. The Inca Empire was over-rated.'

'Who agrees with you?' I asked.

'Most people do, but they are afraid to say it. If you stayed here longer you would agree with me. The Incas - who were they? They had no great culture, no literature, nothing. It did not impress the Spaniards, it does not impress me even now. I don't know what these people are talking about when they show these pots and masks. Can't they see how crude these things are? The Incas weren't warriors - they didn't fight the Spaniards. They were simply overpowered.'

I said that the Spaniards had arrived at a period of civil war. Ata-huallpa had usurped the Inca throne from his brother. The people were fatalistic - they thought the Spaniards had been sent to punish them. It wasn't hard to conquer people who believed they were guilty already.

They were a degenerate race,' said Mr Medina.

The Incas had a system of social security that was a damn sight better than anything Ecuador has produced.'

They were what y ou see - lazy people with a different mentality. '

'Different from yours, you mean?'

'And from yours. This talk about the Incas in Ecuador is nonsense -Ecuador history is Spanish history, not Indian history.'

That sounds like an epitaph,' I said. 'Whose grave will it be written on?'

Mr Medina was growing impatient with me. He gathered his fingers together and rapped the table and said, 'Do you know what fetishism is? That is their religion - fetishism. They have to see the statue and touch the cross. It comes from their own religion and it is horrible to see. They do not believe what they can't see. That is why they touch the holy things and grovel in the church.'

I said, 'People do that in Boston, Massachusetts.'

'Stay in Guayaquil,' he said. 'You will change your mind.'

But I could not think of any reason for staying in Guayaquil. Moreover, the Autoferro on which I was supposed to have a seat remained booked up. If I went back to Quito, I was told, I could then take the Autoferro back to Guayaquil and fly to Peru. I decided to do this and left the very next day, and it was arriving in Quito on that planethat reminded me of the hopelessness of air travel and how futile it would be if every arrival and departure were recorded in the out-of-the-window glimpse: Beneath us, lay the folded fabric of ploughed fields, the toy-town appearance of a city in the Andes . . . No, anything but that. If I was to travel it would be overland, where every sight and every place had its own smell; and I knew that if I wrote about what was minuscule out of the window of a jet I would sound like a man on the moon.

Back in Quito, the people I had met the previous week welcomed me as if I was an old friend. The temporariness of travel often intensifies friendship and turns it into intimacy. But this is fatal for a man with a train to catch. It sounds, as I write this, as if I am coyly hinting that I enjoyed a passionate affair that was keeping -me from moving on. ('Just one more day, my darling, and then you may break my heart and go . . .') It wasn't that. It was a simpler, tidier business, but it still meant delay. I could handle strangers, but friends required attention and made me feel conspicuous. It was easier to travel in solitary anonymity, twirling my moustache, puffing my pipe, shipping out of town at dawn; and South America was a problem in geography that could only be understood if one kept moving: to stay put was to be baffled. People complained of the barbarism of the places, but as far as I was concerned they were not barbarous enough.

'Ecuador is nice, in its tiny way,' the writer V.S. Pritchett had told me before I set off. It is, and I felt certain that I would return, for when at last I got my train ticket, the Autoferro left without me.

16

THE TREN DE LA SIERRA

The name of the lovely cream-coloured railway station in Lima is Desamparados, which means 'forsaken'. But the word seems a piece of baseless gloom until the Tren de la Sierra has crossed the plains to Chosica and climbed the pink walls of the narrow Rimac Valley; here, the passengers begin to fall ill. I knew from my palpitations in Bogotá and my wheezy indolence in Quito that I was a candidate for altitude sickness; the rising gorge I experienced on the way to Ticlio was as much a feature of the landscape as a physical symptom: I suffered as we ascended the Andes, and I decided that no railway journey on earth can be so aptly described as going on ad nauseam.

A strike was threatened by the railway workers in Peru, but though this was no more than a rumour, the warning was substantiated by streaks of graffiti dripping from the mellow outside walls of churches and cloisters: Down with the Imperialists and Oppressors, Support the Railway Workers and More Money! Repeatedly in this large impromptu script was the word Strike, but the Spanish word for strike is also the word for rest or leisure, so all over Lima the exhortation could also be read as Relax! If the railway workers had been undeserving louts using a period of political confusion in order to make unreasonable demands, I would have been more confident of my chances to see the strike forestalled by the intervention of some sweet-talking arbitrators. But this was not play-acting; the railways workers -indeed, workers all over Peru - were grossly underpaid. Elsewhere in Latin America, the provocations or simple pleas of workers had been checked; where the charade of elections failed, the soldiers and police succeeded. Peru, once a golden kingdom occupying a third of the continent, had taken a mighty tumble and in defeat looked incapable of supplying those muttering workers with any hope. Few great cities in the world look more plundered and bankrupt than Lima. It is the look of Rangoon, the same heat and colonial relics and corpse-odours: the imperial parades have long ago marched away from its avenues and left the spectators to scavenge and beg. Ever since Mexico, the description 'formerly an important Spanish city, famous for its architecture' made me stiffen in apprehension, but no city had fallen as far as Lima.

Like a violated tomb in which only the sorry mummy of withered nationalism is left, and just enough religion to console a patient multitude with the promise of happier pickings beyond the grave, Lima -epitomizing Peru - was a glum example of obnoxious mismanagement. Official government rhetoric was dispirited and self-deceiving, but the railway workers' anger was sharpened by their sense of betrayal, and their hunger.

I felt that any strike here would be a protracted affair, and so I left Lima on the train to Huancayo the first chance I got. After arriving at that railhead in the mountains I would make my way by road via Aya-cucho to Cuzco and there begin my long descent through Bolivia and Argentina to the end of the line in Patagonia. It was a hasty plan, but how could I know that in three days I would be back in Lima trying to find another route to Cuzco?

The Rimac river flowed past the railway station. At seven in the morning it was black; it became grey as the sun moved above the foothills of the Andes. The sandy mountains at the city's edge give Lima the feel of a desert city hemmed-in on one side by hot plateaux. It is only a few miles from the Pacific Ocean, but the land is too flat to permit a view of the sea, and there are no sea breezes in the day-time. It seldom rains in Lima. If it did, the huts - several thousand of them - in the shanty town on the bank of the Rimac would need roofs. The slum is odd in another way; besides being entirely roofless, the huts in this (to use the Peruvian euphemism) 'young village' are woven from straw and split bamboo and cane. They are small frail baskets, open to the stars and sun, and planted beside the river which, some miles from the station, is cocoa-coloured. The people wash in this river water; they drink it and cook with it; and when their dogs die, or there are chickens' entrails to be disposed of, the river receives this refuse.

'Not that they eat chickens very often,' explained the Peruvian in the train. The river, he said, was their life-line and their sewer.

Travelling across this plain it is not immediately apparent how any penetration can possibly be made into the escarpment at the far end - it seems too steep, too bare, too high; the valleys are no more than vertical cracks and there is no evidence of trees or men anywhere in these mountains. They have been burned clean of vegetation and have the soft bulge of naked rock. For twenty-five miles the mountain walls remain in the distance; the train seems deceptively quick, rolling along the river, and then at Chosica it stops. It resumes after five minutes, but never again on the trip does it regain that first burst of speed.

We entered the valley and zig-zagged on the walls. It was hardly a valley. It was a cut in the rock, a slash so narrow that the diesel's hooter hardly echoed: the walls were too close to sustain an answering sound. We were due at Huancayo at four o'clock; by mid-morning I thought we might arrive early, but at noon our progress had been so slow I wondered whether we would get to Huancayo that day. And long before Ticlio I had intimations of altitude sickness. I was not alone; a number of other passengers, some of them Indians, looked distinctly ghastly.

It begins as dizziness and a slight headache. I had been standing by the door inhaling the cool air of these shady ledges. Feeling wobbly, I sat down, and if the train had not been full I would have lain across the seat. After an hour I was perspiring and, although I had not stirred from my seat, I was short of breath. The evaporation of this sweat in the dry air gave me a sickening chill. The other passengers were limp, their heads bobbed, no one spoke, no one ate. I dug some aspirin out of my suitcase and chewed them, but only felt queasier; and my headache did not abate. The worst thing about feeling so ill in transit is that you know that if something goes wrong with the train - a derailment or a crash - you will be too weak to save yourself. I had a more horrible thought: we were perhaps a third of the way to Huancayo, but Huancayo was higher than this. I dreaded to think what I would feel like at that altitude.

I considered getting off the train at Matucana, but there was nothing at Matucana - a few goats and some Indians and tin-roofed shacks on the stony ground. None of the stops contained anything that looked like relief or refuge. But this altitude sickness had another punishing aspect: it ruined what could have been a trip of astonishing beauty. I had never seen cliffs like these or been on a railway quite so spectacular. Why was it, in this landscape of such unbelievable loveliness, that I felt as sick as a dog? If only I had had the strength to concentrate - I would have been dazzled; but, as it was, the beauty became an extraordinary annoyance.

The pale rose-coloured mountains had the dark stripes and mottled marks of the shells of the most delicate snails. To be ill among them, to be slumped in my seat watching the reddish gravel slides stilled in the crevasses, and the configuration of cliff-faces changing with each change in altitude, was torture so acute that I began to associate the very beautiful with the very painful. These pretty heights were the cause of my sickness. And now my teeth hurt, one molar in particular began to ache as if the nerve had caught fire. I did not know then how a cavity in a bad tooth becomes sore at a high altitude. The air in this blocked hole expands and creates pressure on the nerve, and it is agony. The dentist who told me this had been in the air force. Once, in a sharply descending plane, the cockpit became depressurized and an airman, the navigator, screamed in pain and then one of his teeth exploded.

Some train passengers had begun to vomit. They did it in the pitiful unembarrassed way that people do when they are helplessly ill. They puked on the floor, and they puked out of the windows and they made my own nausea greater. Some, I noticed, were staggering through the cars. I thought they were looking for a place to puke, but they returned with balloons. Balloons? Then they sat and held their noses and breathed the air from the balloon nozzle.

I stood unsteadily and made for the rear of the train, where I found a Peruvian in a smock filling balloons from a tank of oxygen. He handed these out to distressed-looking passengers who gratefully gulped from them. I took my place in the queue and discovered that a few whiffs of oxygen made my head clear and helped my breathing.

There was a boy in this oxygen car. He had an oxygen balloon, too, and wore a handsome cowboy hat decorated with a band of Inca pokerwork.

'If I had thought it was going to be anything like this,' he said, 'I would never have come.'

'You took the words out of my mouth.'

'This oxygen's an improvement. Boy, do I feel shitty.'

We sipped from our balloons.

'You from the States?'

'Massachusetts,' I said.

'I'm from Minnesota. Been in Lima long?'

'One day,'I said.

'It's not that bad,' he said. 'I was there a month. It's one of the cheapest places in South America. They say Cuzco's even cheaper. I figure I'll spend a month or so there, then go back to Lima - get a job on a ship.' He looked at me. 'You're smart to have those warm clothes. I wish I had a jacket like that. All I have is these Lima things. I'll buy a sweater when we get to Huancayo - they make them there. You can get alpaca ones for practically nothing. Jesus, do I feel shitty.'

We entered a tunnel. We had been through other tunnels, but this one was long, and it had a certain distinction: it was, at 15,848 feet, the highest railway tunnel in the world. The train was loud - deafening, in fact, and I don't think I had ever felt sicker in my life. I sprayed the last of my balloon gas into my mouth, swallowed, and got another one. 'I feel like throwing up,' said the fellow from Minnesota. In the weak yellow light, with his cowboy hat over his eyes, he looked limp and fatally stricken. I did not feel so v/ell myself, but when we emerged from the Galera Tunnel I knew we were past the highest point, and having survived that I was sure I would make it to Huancayo.

'This ship,' I said. 'The one you're going to get a job on. Where do you plan to go?'

'Home,' he said. Til get one to the States. If I'm lucky I'll be back the end of April. I really want to see Minneapolis in the spring.'

'Is it as pretty as this?'

'It's better than this.'

We were now high enough to be able to see across the Andes, the whole range of mountains which, on some curves, were visible for hundreds of miles. They are not solitary peaks, but rather closely packed summits which, surprisingly, grow lighter as the distance deepens. I asked the Minnesotan how he planned to get to Cuzco. He had been in Lima for a month; his information would be good, I thought. He said there was a bus and if I was interested we could take it together. It didn't cost much, but he had heard it sometimes took four or five days to reach Cuzco. It depended on the road. This was the rainy season: the road through Ayacucho would be bad.

At La Oroya, where the line branches - the other line goes north to the tin and copper mines of Cerro de Pasco - our train was delayed. La Oroya itself was desolate and cold. Children came to the platform to beg, and sacks were loaded. Walking made my throat burn, so I sat and wondered whether I should eat anything. There were Indians selling knitted goods - mufflers and ponchos - and also fried cakes and burned bits of meat. I drank a cup of sour tea and took some more aspirin. I was rather eager to get back on the train, so that I could get another balloon of oxygen.

When we boarded, an old Indian woman stumbled on the platform. She had three bundles - cloth, packets of greasy newspaper, a kerosene lamp. I helped her up. She thanked me and told me in Spanish that she was going to Huancavelica, some miles beyond Huancayo. 'And where are you going?'

I told her, and then I asked her if the people here spoke Quechua, the Inca language.

'Yes,' she said. 'That is my language. Everyone speaks Quechua here. You will see in Cuzco.'

We crawled the rest of the afternoon towards Huancayo, and the longer we went the more I marvelled at the achievement of this mountain railway. It is commonly thought that it was planned by the American Henry Meiggs, but it was actually a Peruvian, Ernesto Malinowski, who surveyed the route; Meiggs supervised and promoted it, from its beginning in 1870 until his death in 1877. But it was another twenty years before the railway reached Huancayo. A trans-Andean line, from Huancayo to Cuzco, although proposed and surveyed in 1907, had never been built. If it had been, my arrival at the muddy mountain town would have been more hopeful; as it was, I felt too sick to eat, too dazed to go on or do anything but lie shivering in bed, still wearing my leather jacket, reading the poems and devotions of John Donne. It was comfortless stuff for a cold night in the Andes: 'As sickness is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude; when the infectiousness of the disease deters them who should assist from coming; even the physician dares scarce come. Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.'

There was something about the damp walls of every room in this town, and the muddy roads leading out of it, that made its isolation palpable; its chill conveyed a physical feeling of remoteness. I did not have to look at the map to know I was at the back of beyond. But I woke the next day with an idea. Instead of inquiring about the way to Cuzco from the people who lived in the town, I would go to the bus station and talk to people who had just come by bus along the Andean roads from Cuzco. I was somewhat happier to be in a doubtful frame of mind; I had thought there was only one way to Cuzco and I had been determined to pursue this trans-Andean route; but, realizing that several choices were open to me, I could take the best one, the easiest, even if it meant my turning back. The trip to Huancayo had been bad, but what if the onward journey was worse?

I spent the better part of the morning chatting to passengers who had disembarked from the Ayacucho buses. Many were vague, rendered stuporous by the long trip, but the lucid ones told me that they had been delayed by rain and landslides; they had had to sleep on their buses, and only two people I talked to had actually been to Cuzco. They had come here by road because it was the only way for them -they lived in Huancayo.

There was a bar quite near to where the buses stopped. Peruvian bars are medieval. They have rough wooden tables and moist walls and dirt floors. You see dogs and chickens in Peruvian bars. Bottled beer is sold, but most drinkers in the Andes here prefer a fermented brew which is a soupy broth and very bitter. It is served in plastic beakers. It is almost identical to the sort of beer drunk in villages in East Africa, the maize beer that is ladled out of greasy pots; indeed, one mouthful of the Huancayo stuff brought me memories of dear old Bundibugyo.

'Want to know the best way to Cuzco?' said a man in this bar. He was a student, he said, from Lima, and was hoping there would be a general strike to do something about the rising prices. 'You say you just came from Lima, and you probably don't want to go back there - it seems far, right? But Lima is closer to Cuzco than Huancayo is.'

'But Cuzco is right through those mountains,' I said.

'That is the difficulty, eh?' He swigged his beer. I noticed he was not drinking the local brew, but like me had a bottle of lager. 'It is easier to go over them than through them. You take the morning train to Lima. You get a plane ticket and, bam, you are in Cuzco.'

'I thought only tourists took the plane.'

'But you are a tourist.'

'Not exactly.'

'Listen, even some Indians' - he whispered the word - 'even they take the plane.'

I took the train back to Lima the next day, leaving in the fog and cold, arriving at Desamparados in withering heat. This train-trip was shorter, and we arrived on time, but then, it was downhill all the way.

'Isn't Peru awful?' said a Peruvian to me one day in Lima. It was a very un-South American sentiment: no one so far had run down his own country in my presence. Even the most rebellious Colombians praised their coffee, and Ecuadorians said they had tasty bananas. I wondered whether this Peruvian was fishing for a compliment, so I expressed mild surprise and wary disagreement. He insisted that I was wrong: Peru was cruelly governed, hostile to its neighbours and falling completely to pieces. He was not fishing for compliments. I said, 'Yes, now that you mention it, it is rather awful.¹

'Peru is dying. Terrible things are going to happen here.' He was very cross.

I said that I saw his point entirely.

'I hope when you come to Peru again it will be different,' he said.

He was more critical than I was. I had begun to appreciate Lima; I had developed a toleration for its squalor. It was nothing like home: there were no reminders here of anything familiar. I only got homesick in places where people were buying vacuum cleaners or paying light bills. Like me, the people in Lima were all a bit lost; they took walks or lounged around the plazas because there was nothing else to do, and when they visited museums and churches their motive was the same as mine: sheer boredom. I knew I was an alien; but these people? They were poor, and the poor are always aliens in their own country. For quite different reasons we were placeless.

And life in Lima was obvious, because it was lived outdoors. There were wealthy suburbs, but the rich kept behind their walls; it was dangerous in such a poor city to expose yourself as strong or well off. In Lima, people in fancy cars were often shouted at by ragged passers-by. The rest of society had spilled into the street, and there they sat, amid the stink of sewers and the pervasive half-sweetish odour of human excrement. Some rain might have washed the city clean, but it does not rain much in Lima. The warmth allows the people to live outside, and so it is possible to walk through the city and assess the population as poor and idle and youthful. The poverty has prevented Lima from having a traffic problem (the avenues are wide: they were built for victory parades), but it also means that the buses are very old and always full. In the central part of the city there are seven large plazas and parks. They teem with people; most simply sit or sleep, but others sell oranges, sweets, sunglasses, or they carry contraptions that resemble a panjandrum's sedan chair onto the pavements and on these they shine shoes. More enterprising ones are box-camera men, pulling fairly good likenesses out of crates cobbled together to look like camera obscuras or Kodak Brownies. Here is another man operating a stand where, for ten cents, you can look at Viewmaster slides of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Singapore, New York, Rome, Bambi, or Wild Animals; there is an organ grinder with a parakeet and a crazed monkey; over here, five girls dressed like gypsies, telling fortunes with playing cards. 'You have come from very far away, Mister,' I was told. 'I see a woman - she is talking to you, she is not your wife.' (The woman proved to be Elvera Howie, from Chicago, who was in Cuzco with her husband Bert; she drank a great deal, but offered me nothing in the way of romance.) Families also lived in the parks, with all their cooking pots and their meagre bedding; mothers suckled infants, other children cried pitifully, urchins yelped, and I saw one skinny boy sleeping on the littered grass next to a skinny dog. And prostitutes, gangs of men, lovers, beggars - 'all the world,' as the Spanish describe crowds. They were people with nothing to do.

A Solution To The Crisis: Popular War! The paint on this splashed message near the Plaza de Armas was still fresh; but it looked as though the war had come and gone. The thousands of people in the parks and plazas could have been the dead and wounded left behind after a bitter conflict; most could accurately be described as refugees. And no buildings in South America looked more bombed and battle-scarred than those in Lima. But the pocked façades were not the result of bullets or cannon balls: this was wear and tear. Class warfare proceeds without bugle calls; it creates stinks and murmurs, not the noisy grandeur of armies heroically wrecking themselves on battlefields.

Peru is too poor to fix its cracked buildings; and it cannot afford to tear them down. They are faded and broken, but some with porticoes and balconies are still lovely, and those that have not been boarded up and left to rot are turned into dance halls and bars, and what looks like a bread-line is a mob of Peruvians waiting for the doors of a once-elegant mansion to open and admit them to a violent movie or (in the middle of the afternoon) a dance. But I had the impression that Peruvian disgust was so keen that if it were to be combined with wealth the city of Lima would be destroyed and rebuilt to match the misguided modernity of Bogotá.

I walked from the Cathedral (the mummy on view is not that of Francisco Pizarro: his skeleton has recently been found in a lead box in the crypt) to the University Park, and then made a circuit of the city, finally stopping at the Plaza Bolognesi where I sat and reflected on the melodrama of General Bolognesi's monument. It was the most bizarre statue I had seen so far. It was eighty feet high, and at its front was a copy of the Winged Victory; soldiers marched on its panels, and on one ledge was the statue of a man falling from a horse - the horse was there, life-sized, twisted onto its side. Another detachment of soldiers reconnoitred another ledge with drawn swords; eagles, wreaths and cannons in marble and bronze lifted the column higher, and still it rose, with a large grieving woman pressing her body against an upper pillar; more rifles, more flags, more troops - battles on all sides -defeat here, victory there - and higher up two marble nymphs with wings soared, their feet sticking into the air, their wings out, their arms held high and reaching towards the top where Bolognesi himself, in bronze, rushes forward, a pistol in one hand, a flag in the other, facing the wide avenue, the dance halls, the screaming children, the overloaded buses.

'Want to buy some pictures?'

It was a Peruvian, with an old photograph album: tin-miners, old cars, snow-drifts, churches, trains. They were eighty years old. I bought two old train photographs, a dollar apiece, and we talked.

'You will believe me, I hope, if I tell you I have spent some years in your country,' he said in Spanish. He was very ragged and wore a felt hat. 'I lived in Washington, D.C.'

'How did you like it?'

'I should never have left. Lima is no place to live.' He reached into his rags and took out a tattered piece of paper. It was a coupon stating that he had filed a tax-return in 1976. 'I am fully paid up,' he said. 'They will let me back if I choose to go.'

'Why don't you choose to go?'

'I got into trouble here not long ago. There was a man who was drinking too much. He wanted to fight me. So I fought him. I cannot go anywhere. I have to appear in court. But who knows when they will hear the case?'

'You will be all right,' I said. 'After the trial, you can go back to Washington.'

'No,' he said. He thought a moment, moved his lips as if practising a phrase and then said in English, 'I'm flat broke. Like my country.'

17

THE TRAIN TO MACHU PICCHU

Peru is the poorest country in South America. Peru is also the country most visited by tourists. The two facts are related; even the dimmest tourist can count in Spanish - low numbers especially trip off his tongue- and he knows that Peru's gigantic ruins and threadbare currency are a bargain. The student I had met in Huancayo was right: there were some Quechua Indians on the plane to Cuzco, but the others were all tourists. They had arrived in Lima the day before and had been whisked around the city. In their hotel was a schedule: '4:00 am - Wake-Up Call! 4:45 am - Luggage in Corridor! 5:00 -Breakfast! 5:30- Meet in Lobby! . . .' At eight in the morning, some men with shaving cream still stuck to their earlobes, they arrived in Cuzco and fought their way past the Indians (who carried tin pots and greasy bundles of food and lanterns, much as they had on the train) to a waiting bus, congratulating themselves on the cheapness of the place. They are unaware that it is almost axiomatic that air travel has wished tourists on only the most moth-eaten countries in the world: tourism, never more energetically pursued than in static societies, is usually the mobile rich making a blind blundering visitation on the inert poor.

Let Observation with extensive view Survey Mankind, from China to Peru; Remark each anxious Toil, each eager Strife, And watch the busy scenes of crouded Life.

The result is frequently maddening to both parties.

The visitors wore badges, Samba South America; the badges also served as name-tags. At this early hour in the thin grey air and high altitude drizzle, the haggard faces did not match the tittupping names: Hildy Wicker, Bert and Elvera Howie, Charles P. Clapp, Morrie Upbraid, the Prells, the Goodchucks, Bernie Khoosh, the Avatarians, Jack Hammerman, Nick and Lurleen Poznan, Harold and Winnie Casey, the Lewgards, Wally demons, and little old Merry Mackworth. They were a certain age; they had humps and braces and wooden legs and two walked with crutches - amazing to see this performance in the high Andes - and none looked well. What with the heat in Lima and the cold here, the delays, the shuffling up and down stairs - and they had yet to climb the vertical Inca staircases ('I don't know which is worse, going up or going down') - they were suffering. You had to admire them, because in two days they would be on the same plane flying back to Lima, waking again at four in the morning, and that day arriving in another godawful place like Guayaquil or Cali.

The arrival in Cuzco made me feel wobbly and I felt much worse after lunch. But I decided not to give in to altitude sickness. Feeling slightly sea-sick, a combination of nausea and dizziness, I stumbled around town. The place had a dark brown look of isolation, and there were still signs of the earthquake that had hit it thirty years ago. Virtually the only buildings that did not fall down were the outlying Inca forts and temples, which are indestructible. Indians were selling alpaca sweaters, rugs, ponchos and knitted caps on every street corner. The Indians have a broadbased look, like chess pieces, particularly the women, who wear three skirts, one over the other, and heavy knee-socks; they are stocky and squat and you think, looking at them, that they would be impossible to tip over. They are warmly dressed because they are such expert knitters and get the raw material - the alpaca wool - from their own domestic animals. Only the hat is not woven; one seldom sees an Indian without a hat, usually of raw felt. For the past few weeks I had been asking people why the Indians were so fond of these hats; the explanations were neither ingenious nor interesting and none really explained why European hats were popular. I heard two tourists remarking on this subject in Cuzco.

'I still don't understand about those hats,' said the first man.

'It's like postage stamps, isn't it?'

'Is it?'

'Sure. Everybody licks postage stamps, but there has never been a study to determine if it's harmful to your health. It's the same thing with those hats.'

For the first time since leaving the United States on this aimless trip I saw other aimless travellers. I had been passing myself off as a teacher; they called themselves students. There were advantages in being a student: student fares, student rates, student hostels, student entry fees. Great hairy middle-aged buffoons complained at ticket counters and shouted, 'Look, I'm a student! Do me a favour! He doesn't believe I'm a fucking student. Hey -' They were cut-priced tourists, idlers, vagabonds, freebooters, who had gravitated to this impoverished place because they wanted to save money. Their conversation was predictable and was wholly concerned with prices, the exchange rate, the cheapest hotel, the cheapest bus, how someone ('Was he a gringo?') got a meal for fifteen cents, or an alpaca sweater for a dollar or bunked with some Aymara Indians in a benighted village. They were Americans, but they were also Dutch, German, French, British and Scandinavian; they spoke the same language, always money. Their boast was always how long they had managed to hang on here in the Peruvian Andes and beat the system.

To an Indian selling Chiclets (it was either sweaters or Chiclets) such travellers could be demoralizing. Unemployment was very high in Peru, jobs were scarce, streets were lined with beggars and homeless people. How, then, to account for these thousands of poncho-wearing foreigners who lounged around and lived well but had no visible means of support? The tourists were easy to understand; they came, they went, they made no fuss. But the rucksack brigade were the cause of alarm and despondency.

They had several effects in Peru. For one thing, they kept the crime rate down. They did not carry much money, but what they did have they protected ferociously. The Peruvian pickpockets or street thieves who made the mistake of trying to rob one of these travellers always came out worse in the fight that inevitably ensued. A number of times in and around Cuzco I heard a scream and saw an infuriated Dutchman or a maddened American with a Peruvian by the throat. The mistake the Peruvian made was in thinking that these people were solitary-travellers; in fact, they were like tribesmen - they had friends who came to the rescue. It was not hard to rob me, or to mug Merry Mack-worth; but the bearded lout with a poncho over his California Is For Lovers tee-shirt, and the knapsack and only his busfare back to Lima, was a different story altogether; he was tough, and he was not afraid to hit back.

They also kept the prices down. They did not tip or buy anything that was very expensive. They haggled in the market like the Peruvians themselves, buying tomatoes or fruit at the going rate and not paying a centavo more than they had to. Their very presence in a place indicated that there was cheap food and lodging to be had: they kept to one district in Lima, they stayed away from Huancayo, they were numerous in Cuzco. The tourist will pay any price, if forced to: he does not plan to stay long. These other travellers were unshakable skinflints; they had no marked effect on Peru, they certainly did not improve it, but perhaps this was better than a bungling attempt to colonize it with expensive hotels. The argument that five-star hotels benefit a country by producing employment is a silly and even subversive one - it turns nationals into waiters and scullery maids, and that is about all.

The rucksack brigade was very ruin-conscious. It was for many of them one of the justifications of Cuzco. I wondered what it was about the ruins that attracted them. They were not archaeologists and, despite their protestations to the contrary, they were not students either. From their conversations I concluded that they felt a spiritual affinity with the sun-worshipping Incas, and a kind of social affinity -this was almost pure fakery - with the Indians. The Indians made baskets and pots and wove cloth; these were the enthusiasms, either real or imagined, of their well-wishers. In one respect were they un-Indian: they did not go to church. Not only did they not go to mass - all the Indians did so - but also they did not tour the Catholic convents, the cloisters or chapels. The cloisters could be interesting. Apart from the paintings and statues there were instruments of flagellation, whips, iron lashes, the cat, bracelets of barbed wire and steel headbands that had been worn by Santa Catalina and Rose of Lima in painful and bloody mortification (the band was tightened until it drew blood). But the freebooters and tough, bearded students did not go to the cloisters. They preferred to walk six dizzying miles to see the Fortress of Sacsa-huaman - a fort designed to imitate the shape of a puma's jaws - or the Amphitheatre of Qengo with its dark interior altars ('Far out'), or the bubbling spring at the shrine of Tambo Machay farther up the road. The tourists went by bus; these other people used the Inca road, a precipitous path along the mountains north of Cuzco. They come not to reflect on the Spaniards but to live among the remnants of the Incas. It is to them still an Inca city. The Plaza de Armas is not the site of two magnificent churches, but the spot where during 'Corpse Carrying Month' the Incas displayed the mummies they hauled out of the Temple of the Sun. It is no use pointing out that there is no Temple of the Sun in the plaza, for the stones are there: they were incorporated into the Church of Santo Domingo. Every Spanish building wa.s once an Inca building, the roads Inca walkways, the grand houses Inca palaces.

I had neither a tourist badge nor a rucksack. I trod a narrow implausible line between the two and found myself in the company of Mexicans, who considered themselves tourists but who were taken for hippies or, even worse, for Peruvians. 'Take a good look, Paul,' a Mexican said to me one evening. 'Do I look like a Peruvian?'

'Absolutely not,' I said.

'What is wrong with these people? I am in Cuzco for two days and they stop me in the street and ask me directions! I will tell you one thing - two more days and I am back in Mexico. It may be dirty, but it is not dirty like this.'

The next day, just before nightfall, the Mexicans and I were taking a short cut through some back streets in Cuzco and found ourselves in a damp shadowy courtyard. There were no lights in the low buildings; some laundry hung on a rope. A limping puppy made its way to a puddle and drank, a large torn turkey chortled at us, and two Indian women sat on a bench, drinking maize beer out of plastic beakers.

'I hear music,' said one Mexican. His face lit up, and he went closer to the sound: a dark doorway at the side of the courtyard. He entered, but a moment later he hurried out. 'It is a typical bar.' 'Shall we go in?' I said.

There are no seats,' he said. He seemed anxious to leave. 'I will have my beer at the hotel.'

Off they went, the three Mexicans. I entered the bar, and I understood their hurry. The bar was almost underground; it had a low ceiling and was lighted by six sooty lanterns. In this lantern light I could see ragged Indians, grinning drunkenly and guzzling maize beer from dented tankards. The bar was shaped like a trough. At one end an old man and a very small boy were playing stringed instruments; the boy was singing sweetly in Quechua. At the other end of the trough, a fat Indian woman was frying meat over a log fire - the smoke circled in the room. She cooked with her hands, throwing the meat in, turning it with her hands, picking it up to examine it, then taking a cooked hunk in each hand and carrying it to a plate. An infant crawled near the fire; I had had my look, but before I could leave I noticed three men beckoning to me.

'Here is a seat,' said one in Spanish, and he made room on the bench. That man was drinking maize beer. He urged me to try some. I said I had had some in Huancayo. It was different here, he said. But it did not taste any different to me. It was the same sour taste of rancid porridge.

'It is like African beer,'I said.

'No!' he cried. 'This is good stuff.'

I ordered a regular beer and introduced myself, privately justifying the lie that I was a teacher by telling myself that it was easier to explain what a teacher teaches than what a writer writes. Writing is an impossible profession to describe. And even when the disclosure does not produce bewilderment, it causes exaggerated respect and tends to make conversations into interviews. A geography teacher has a harmless excuse for being practically anywhere.

They were, they said, from the Ministry of Works. Gustavo and Abelardo were architects, and the third, whose name was Napoleon Prentice ('It is a good English name, but I cannot speak English') was a civil engineer. The jobs sounded impressive, but the men were poorly dressed and looked rather gloomy.

'You may not speak English,' I said to Napoleon, 'but I am sure your Quechua is better than mine.'

'I cannot speak Quechua,' said Napoleon.

Gustavo said, 'I know a few words, but that is all. You will have no trouble learning it. It is just like English.'

'Quechua is like English?'

The grammar is exactly the same. For example, in Spanish we say "a book red", but in Quechua they say "a red book". Like English. Go ahead, say it.'

'Red book,' I said in English.

They smiled at the phrase, an English stutter in this sonorous Spanish conversation.

Gustavo said, 'You will have no trouble with Quechua.'

They were not from Cuzco. They were, all three, from Lima. They had been sent here by their ministry to design a housing scheme at Quillabamba, beyond Machu Picchu, on the Urubamba River. Abelardo had just arrived; the other two had been in Cuzco for some months.

'How long will you be here, Abelardo?' I asked.

'A year,' he said, and glanced at the others, shaking his head. Without much conviction he added, 'It is not too bad.'

Napoleon said, 'All the ruins ! Interesting !'

I said, 'Are you interested in ruins?'

'No,' said Napoleon. I could tell from their laughter that he spoke for all of them.

'What do your wives think of your being away for so long?' I asked. It was the question everyone asked me. I wondered whether they had a clever reply that I might use later on.

'We are not married,' said Gustavo. 'Do you think married people would go to places like Cuzco and Quillabamba?'

'I am married and I went to Huancayo.'

'That is your affair, my friend. If I was married I would stay home.'

I said, 'I do - more or less.'

'More or less!' screamed Gustavo. He was shaking with laughter. That is really funny.'

Abelardo said, 'It is only single fellows like us who get sent to the terrible places, like Iquitos and Puerto Maldonado.'

'Isn't Iquitos in Ecuador?' I asked.

'Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't,' said Gustavo, laughing. These days it is.'

'I was in Maldonado,' said Napoleon. 'It was awful - hotter than Brazil.'

Abelardo said, 'Lima is nice. Did you like Lima? Yes? There is always something to do in Lima.'

It was clearly going to be a long year for him in Quillabamba.

'But think of all the ruins in Cuzco,' said Napoleon.

Abelardo uttered an obscenity, something like, 'Oh, piss on God's balls!'

'What other countries do you know?' asked Gustavo. 'What about France? Look, how much would I need to live in Paris? How many dollars a day?'

I said, 'About forty.'

He looked discouraged. 'How about London?'

'Maybe thirty,' I said.

'Go to Lima,' said Abelardo. 'It will only cost four.'

'Go to Maldonado,' said Napoleon. 'It will only cost one.'

'And the girls in Lima,' said Abelardo, mournfully.

'There are plenty of girls here,' said Gustavo. 'American, German, Japanese. Pretty ones, too. Take your pick.'

'You will be all right,' I said.

'Certainly,' said Gustavo. 'We will be happy in Quillabamba. We will exchange ideas.'

The small boy and the old man had been playing sad twanging music. It seemed so melancholy, this barefoot boy singing in such a low-down place. The music stopped. The boy took off his cloth cap and went among the tables, collecting coins. We gave him some. He bowed, then returned to his songs.

'He is poor,'I said.

'Seventy percent of Peru is poor,' said Gustavo. 'Like that boy.'

We continued to drink, but at this altitude alcohol has a paralyzing effect. I felt leaden and stupid, and refused a third bottle of beer. The others began to eat plates of fried meat. I tasted some, but I saved my appetite for later; I had been in Cuzco long enough to know that I could get a good steak and a stuffed avocado for a dollar fifty. I left the men discussing Peru's chances in the World Cup. 'We are not very good,' said Napoleon. 'I think we will lose.' I did not argue with him; the only way to handle a Peruvian is to agree with his pessimism.

After dinner, I felt too ill to go for a walk. I went back to my hotel -which was not a hotel but only a few rooms above the plaza; and nosing around the dining room I found an old phonograph. It was literally a Victrola, a 1904 Victor, and near it was a stack of 78 rpm records. Most of them were cracked. I found one that was not cracked and read the label: Ben Bernie and the Lads, it said, Shanghai Lil (Warner Bros., 'Footlight Parade'). I turned the crank and set the disc in motion.

I've travelled every little highway,

I've climbed every little hill;

I've been looking high,

I've been looking low,

Looking for my Shanghai Lil.

There were lights on in the plaza. The leper I had seen that afternoon shuffling on bleeding feet, like the Pobble who had no toes, was curled up near the fountain. On the far side was the beautiful Jesuit church, and beyond that the Andes as black and high-crowned as the hats of the Indians who were also bunking down in the plaza.

I've been trying to forget her,

But what 's the use -1 never will.

I've been looking high,

I've been looking low-

It was cold. My leather coat was not enough, and I was indoors. But it was quiet: no honking horns, no cars, no radios, no screams; only the church bells and the Victrola.

Looking for my Shanghai Lil.

At four o'clock every weekday morning the Cuzco church bells ring. They ring again at 4:15 and 4:30. Because there are so many churches, and the valley is walled-in by mountains, the tolling of church bells, from four to five in the morning, has a celebratory sound. They summon all people to mass, but only Indians respond. They flock to five o'clock mass in the Cathedral, and just before six the great doors of the Cathedral open on the cold cloudy mountain dawn and hundreds of Indians pour into the plaza, so many of them in bright red ponchos that the visual effect is of a fiesta about to begin. They look happy; they have performed a sacrament. All Catholics leave mass feeling lighthearted, and though these Indians are habitually dour -their faces wrinkled into frowns - at this early hour after mass most of them are smiling.

The tourists wake with the Indians, but the tourists head for Santa Ana Station to catch the train to Machu Picchu. They carry packed lunches, umbrellas, raincoats and cameras. They are disgusted, and they have every right to be so. They were led to believe that if they got to the station at six, they would have a seat on the seven o'clock train. But now it was seven and the station doors had not opened. A light rain had started and the crowd of tourists numbered two hundred or more. There is no order at the station.

The tourists know this and they hate it. They were woken early yesterday for the Cuzco flight and found a mob at the airport. They were woken early for the Machu Picchu train, and this mob is worse. They do not jostle or push. They stand in the grey dawn, clutching their lunches and muttering. Most are on a twelve-day tour of South America; they have spent much of the time just like this, waiting for something to happen, and they don't like it one bit. They don't want to complain because they know Americans are famous for complaining. But they are disgusted. I stand in the mob and wait for a cháncete say I don't blame y ou.

'You'd think they'd at least open the doors and let us into the station,' says one of the Goodchucks.

'That's too simple for them. They'd rather keep us waiting,' says Charles P. Clapp.

'I'm awful sick of this,' says Hildy, who really does look ill. The poor woman is over seventy and here she is in the middle of the Andes, standing behind the filthy Cuzco market on the steps of the station. At her feet is an Indian woman with a crying child, selling Chiclets and cigarettes, and another pitifully dirty man with a pile of bruised peaches. Hildy is from -where? A neat suburb in the mid-West, where the trains run on time and polite people offer her their seat. She did not know how hard it would be here. She has my sympathy, even my admiration; at her age this counts as bravery. 'If they don't open the doors pretty quick I'm going straight back to the hotel.'

'I don't blame you.'

She says, 'I haven't been right since La Paz.'

'Marquette got beat,' says Morrie Upbraid, a stout man from Baton Rouge, who talks with his teeth locked together.

'Texas got a real good team this year,' says Jack Hammerman.

'What happened to Notre Dame?'

They talk about football: wins, losses, and the coloured fella who is over six foot eight. This is contentment of sorts and takes the curse off waiting in the drizzle in Cuzco. Men talk to men; the women stand and fret.

'I want to see LSU knock the stew out of them,' says Mr Hammerman.

'You'd think they'd at least open the doors,' says Mrs Goodchuck.

At last the station doors open. There is a general surge forward. The elderly tourists shuffle but do not push. A mob is awkward, and they feel they are being tested, as if too violent a response on their part will turn them into Peruvians. Shame and disapproval make them exercise some restraint, and it is only an Argentine honeymoon couple - a dark unapologetic man and his skinny clinging wife - who shove their way to the front. It is easy for them. They elbow past the gentler Americans and are probably surprised that they are through the door so quickly.

'Just sort of lean back,' cautions Charles P. Clapp. 'That way you won't get trampled.'

Hearing this, the Americans lean back.

There were seats for everyone except three Indian women with papooses and cloth bundles, and two freebooters dressed as Indians, in slouch hats and ponchos. Thè rest of us sat with our box lunches on our laps. An hour of this, and as it passed the timid speculation as to whether the train was going to leave at all became loud discouragement. There was a general sigh of relief as the train started out of the station. It was still cloudy, the mountainsides softened in greeny mist. The motor road is high, but the train stays low, circling the mountains through a series of gorges in which rushing water runs alongside the tracks. There were few vistas here: we were too deep in the mountains to see anything but overhanging cliffs. Where a gorge floor was flat there were mud huts built near the ingenious Inca walls, the careful stonework of neatly fitted boulders, Inca terraces which had become Indian villages. The mud-block huts were recent, the Inca walls were old, and yet the walls had been built without the use of wheels, the surfaces smoothed and joined with stone tools.

Seeing this stonework, Bert Howie chants, 'Inca! Inca! Inca! Everywhere you look - Inca!'

'Now this reminds me of Wyoming,' says Harold Casey. He directs our attention to the rocky bluffs, the falling water, the green hillsides.

It reminds the Lewgards of parts of Maine. The Prells say it is nothing like Indiana and raise a laugh. Someone else says it is similar to Ecuador. The rest are annoyed: Ecuador is their next stop.

Bert and Elvera Howie listen to these comparisons and then say it is like Africa. Parts of Africa are just like this. We look out of the window and see llamas and smaller fluffier alpacas and very hairy pigs and women in tall hats and shawls and kneesocks gathering firewood. Africa! Elvera insists that it is so. She is surprised, she says, because Bert was saying that morning that their hotel - out of the window of the cocktail lounge on the top floor - reminds them of Florence, Italy: all the orange-tiled roofs, all the churches, the light.

‘I’ve always wanted to go to Africa.' This is Hildy, who looks fresher, having sat down.

Bert says, 'We were the last people out of Uganda.'

'It must have been terrible.'

Those poor Hindus. Took their earrings off at the airport.'

Elvera says, 'It was scary. I liked it.'

'You saw mountains like this, and African women walking down them with things on their heads.'

'Bert went fishing.'

'In the Nile.' As he says it, and smiles, the Peruvian river running beside the train, the funny little Anta River, looks homely: what is this to the Nile? 'I caught huge things - Nile Perch they call them. The water was as black as that seat there.'

Mr Upbraid says, 'Look at the poverty.'

This is a village beyond the town of Anta: some mud huts, some pigs, an alpaca with matted fur, small girls carrying infants, and children with their hands out crying, 'Monis! Monis!'

'Haiti,' says Bert. 'Ever been to Haiti? That's poverty. That's squalor. This is nothing. These people have farms - everyone has an acre or two. Grow their own food. Roof over their heads. They're all right. But Haiti? They're just starving there. Or Jamaica? Even worse.'

No one can contradict him. We look out of the window. Bert has made it seem all rather prosperous.

Bert says, 'That's not poverty.'

It is no good my telling him that these are tenant farms and that these people own nothing but the clothes on their backs. The huts leak. The plots of vegetables are high on the hillsides, some on Inca terraces, others, like light green patches stitched against the cliffs at a sixty-degree angle. I am tempted to tell him this, that no one owns anything here, that these Indians themselves are owned. But information confuses these tourists: they like to guess at the meanings of things. 'Looks like a kind of cave -1 suppose they lived in places like that, years ago' and 'Sort of a stairway- must lead to a kind of look-out.'

'It's a sunny day, but it's real dark here.'

'That's because we're in the valley.'

The conversation, pure Thornberry, went its rackety way as we slid past the rumps of these squatting mountains.

'Look. More Indians.'

There were two, in red pie-plate hats and shawls; one tugging a llama out of a field, the other - perhaps for the benefit of the tourists -ostentatiously making yarn from a spindle of rough wool and twisting the stuff in her fingers.

'Did you get a picture ofthat, Bert?' asked Elvera.

'Just a minute.'

Bert took out his camera and snapped a picture of the two Indians. A man named Fountain was watching him. Bert saw Mr Fountain and said, That's the new Canon -just on the market.'

He did not say how much he paid for it, or stress that it was his. It was an oblique piece of bragging: That 's the new Canon.

Mr Fountain took the camera, weighed it in his hand, looked through the viewfinder and said, 'Handy.'

'Compact,' said Bert. 'I wish I'd had one of these when we were on our Christmas trip.'

There were a few murmurs, but not much interest.

Bert said, 'Know what a Force Twelve gale is?'

Ignorance often seems wrapped like a package. The murmurs were like the rustlings of the wrapper ofthat plain thing. No one knew.

'It was a cruise,' said Bert. 'We're one day out of Acapulco. Nice sunny day. Suddenly it clouds up. Pretty soon it's a Force Twelve. Everyone was sick. Lasted forty-eight hours. Elvera went over to the bar and sat there-just held on fortwo days.'

'It was my security blanket.'

'Couldn't sleep, couldn't eat. See, Dramamine only works if you take it before you start to puke. It was awful. I walked around for two days saying, "I just don't believe it. I just don't believe it.'' '

There was more. For ten minutes, Bert and Elvera Howie told their hurricane story, and even in their monotonous narration - they took turns, interrupting each other to add details - it was a terrifying report, like a page of Arthur Gordon Pym. It was a story of high waves and wild winds, sickness, cowardice and loss of sleep. The old people on the ship (and this alarmed the old people on this train) were thrown around so badly they suffered broken arms and fractured legs. 'And one old fellow - nice old guy - busted his hip. Some people were hurt so bad we didn't see them for the rest of the trip.' Bert said it was chaos; Elvera blamed the English captain: he hadn't given them any warning - 'He must have known something’ ^{Afterwards, the captain had said that in all his years at sea it was the worst storm he had ever known.}

Elvera had been glancing at me with a kind of sour mistrust. Finally, she said, 'You English people.'

'I'm not English, actually.'

'Actually,' she said, and made a face.

Bert was still talking about the hurricane, the wind, the broken bones. The effect of his tale was to make this light rain falling into a canyon in the Andes seem a spring shower, and this railway journey no more than a joyride. Bert and Elvera had known days of storm in the Pacific; this train ride was a Sunday outing and almost beneath notice.

'I want a drink,' said Elvera. 'Instead of telling these people about our other trip, why don't you concentrate on this one and find me a drink?'

'Funny thing,' said Bert. 'I don't speak a word of Spanish. I don't speak anything but English. But I can always make myself understood. Even in Nairobi. Even in Italy. Know how I do it? I sit there and say, "Me - want - a - drink." It always does the trick.'

He soon had a chance to prove that he could hurdle the language barrier. A conductor entered our car. Bert smiled and tapped him on the arm. He said, 'Me - want - a - drink.'

The conductor grunted and walked away.

'That's the first time I ever - '

'Look.'

Ahead, through a black gateway of pinnacles, was a wide flat valley-filled with sunlight; birds were slanted in the sky and on ledges like the diacritical marks on vowels, and there were green streaks, wind-flattened bushes, on the steep mountains beyond. In the centre of the valley, coursing beside fuchsias and white orchids, was a turbulent brown river. This was the Vilcanota River, running north to Machu Picchu, where it becomes the Urubamba and continues north-east to join a tributary of the Amazon. The river flowed from Sicuani, past the glaciers above the crumbling town of Pisaq, and here, where our train was tooting, had formed the Sacred Valley of the Incas. The shape of this valley - so flat and green and hidden - in such a towering place, had attracted the Incas. Many had been here before the Spaniards entered Cuzco, and here others fled, fighting a rear-guard action after Cuzco fell. The valley became an Inca stronghold, and long after the Spaniards believed they had wiped out or subdued this pious and highly civilized empire, the Incas continued to live on in the fastnesses of these canyons. In 1570, a pair of Augustinian missionaries - the friars Marcos and Diego-had the fanatical faith to take them over the mountains and through this valley. The friars led a motley band of Indian converts who carried torches and set fire to the shrines at which Incas were still worshipping. Their triumph was at Chuquipalta, near Vitcos, where for the greater glory of God (the Devil had made appearances here, so the Incas said) they put their torches to the House of the Sun. Some missions were established along the river (Marcos eventually suffered a horrendous martyrdom), but farther on, where the mountains and sky seemed scarcely distinguishable, the ruins were not re-entered. The valleys slept. They were not penetrated again until 1911, when the Yale man, Hiram Bingham, with the words of Kipling's 'Explorer' running through his head ('Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges - / Something lost behind the ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!') found the vast mountain-top city he named Machu Picchu. He believed he had found the lost city of the Incas, but John Hemming writes in The Conquest of the Incas that an even more remote place to the west, Espíritu Pampa, has the greater claim to the title.

It was part of the Inca genius to seal themselves into hidden valleys, past rockslides and at the far end of precipitous trails that were lost behind the ranges. Their grasp of advanced masonry allowed them to build secure fortresses and posting stations out of these natural battlements. A few miles after we entered the Vilcanota Valley we came to Ollantaytambo, and if I had not made a separate visit to this place I would not have known how perfectly it had been sited, how the terraces, and the temple walls, could not be seen until one was on top of them. They are all but hidden from the railway tracks and the river, and what you see and think are habitations are Inca watchtowers, hundreds of feet up, tall thick-walled cottages on cliffs which aided the besieged warriors in warning them of Spanish attacks. Ollantaytambo was a success of sorts; over four hundred years ago, a regiment of Spanish soldiers led by Hernando Pizarro attacked this town, and they were defeated. 'When we reached Tambo,' wrote one Spaniard, 'we found it so well fortified that it was a horrifying sight.' The battle was bloody, and the Spaniards were beaten off by Inca slingers, Amazonian bowmen and Incas armed with weapons and wearing helmets and bucklers they had captured from their enemy.

Inca symmetries have a graceful Biblical magnificence: behind these walls there are hanging gardens crowned by twenty-ton megaliths that were quarried several miles away and lifted to this summit. It was not specifically a fortress; it had first been a royal garden.

'They must be for landslides,' said Mr Fountain, going by.

Bert Howie said, 'Hey, what a terrific pair of shoes!'

He was marvelling at my feet.

'Leakproof,' I said.

'Hey, honey,' said Bert to Elvera, 'have a look at these terrific shoes.'

But Elvera was still looking at Oilantaytambo. She mistook the clock-tower in the village square for a church and said she was reminded of the churches in Cuzco. The others mentioned churches in Lima, in Quito, Caracas, La Paz and even further afield; and so, as we travelled through the Sacred Valley of the Incas, no one remarked on the fields of wheat and corn, or the staggering heights of these cliffsides which had been plumbed by glaciation, or our progress into the sun beside this loud brown river. The mention of churches produced a discussion about religion, and with it, a torrent of muddled opinion.

Those gold altars really get me, said one. I don't understand why they don't melt them down and feed some of these starving people. And the statues, said another: they're so exaggerated, always bloody and skinny. Everyone was shouting and argufying at once: the Christ statues were the worst, really gory; the Mary ones were chubby and dressed up like dolls in lace and velvet; Jesus on the cross looked horrible among the gold carvings, his ribs sticking out; you'd think they'd at least make them look human. It went on: blood, gold, suffering, and people on their knees. Why did they have to exaggerate, said one man, when it only ended up looking vulgar?

I had been hearing quite a lot of this. There was patronizing mockery in the pretense of bafflement and disgust. I just can't understand it, they said, but they used their incomprehension to amplify their ignorance. Ignorance licensed them to indulge in this jeering.

I felt my moment had come to speak. I had also seen those churches, and I had reached several conclusions. I cleared my throat.

'It looks exaggerated because it is exaggerated,' I said. 'It's possible that the churches here have bloodier Christs than those in Spain, and they're certainly a lot bloodier than anything you'd see in the United States. But life is bloodier here, isn't it? In order to believe that Christ suffered you have to know that he suffered more than you. In the United States the Christ statue looks a bit bruised, a few tear-drops, some mild abrasions. But here? How is it possible to suffer more than these Indians? They've seen all sorts of pain. Incas were peace-loving and pious, but if anyone broke the law he got unbelievable punishment - he might be buried alive, clubbed to death, staked out on the ground and ritually trampled, or tortured. High officials who committed an offence had heavy stones dropped on their backs from a high cliff, and virgins caught speaking to a man were hung by their hair. Pain wasn't brought here by the Spanish priests, but a crucified Christ was part of the liturgical scheme. The Indians were taught that Christ suffered, and they had to be persuaded that his suffering was worse than theirs. And by the same token that Mary, the world's mother, was healthier and better dressed than any woman in their society. So, yes, the statues are exaggerations of their lives, because these images represent God and the Holy Mother. Right?'

Convinced I was right, I warmed to my theme. Mary in the Church of San Francisco in Lima, in her spangled cape and brocade gown and holding a silver basket, had to outshine any Inca noble and, at last, any Spanish woman of fashion. These divine figures had to be seen to exceed the Spaniard or Peruvian in suffering or wealth - they had to seem braver, more tortured, richer or bloodier in order to seem blessed. Christ in any church was more battered than the very battered leper in the plaza: he had to be. The lesson of the Peruvian - perhaps Latin American - Church demonstrated the extraordinariness of the Saviour. In the same way, the statues of Buddha as a mendicant showed a man who was hungrier and skinnier than the skinniest Buddhist. In order for you to believe in God it was necessary to see that God had endured a greater torment than you. And Mary had to look more motherly, more fecund and rich, than any other mother. Religion demanded this intensity in order to produce piety. A believer could not venerate someone like himself- he had to be given a reason for the holiness of the God statue. And he responded by praising it in the most appropriate way, by enshrining it in gold.

After this, no one mentioned religion. They stared out of the window and said, 'More pigs' or 'Look, is that a rainbow?' And they went on talking in the off-hand Thornberry way that distracted them fromj what had become for them a dull and eventless train ride.

There was a rainbow poised across the Urubamba. The Incas were the only people on earth, as far as we know, who worshipped the rainbow. And now we were close to what Hiram Bingham called 'the last Inca capital'. The train stopped. Machu Picchu was above us, hidden behind cliffs and outcrops of rock. The tourists were still chattering. 1 had foolishly told Bert Howie about the Victrola in my hotel and how I had played 'Shanghai Lu' on it. Bert said that Ben Bernie had been a Chicago boy, and he began to reminisce as he laboured up the path. High above Bert's yakking head, the sun priests in beautiful robes had stood facing east every dawn on this steepest side, and when the sun. their god, began to blaze above the Andes, the priests extended their arms to it and (wrote Father Calancha in 1639) 'threw kisses to it... a ceremony of the most profound resignation and reverence.' But we had not gone far; we were still near the river, which is troubled and dark, because it reflects the spongy foliage of the overhanging rock, not the sky. 'The water looks black and forbidding,' said Bingham, 'even to unsuperstitious Yankees.'

We continued to climb the steepness. The tourists chattered, stopping only to gasp; the gasping turned to complaint. It was not until the last step, at the brow of the hill, that the whole city was revealed. It sprawled across the peak, like a vast broken skeleton picked clean by condors. For once, the tourists were silent.

18

EL PANAMERICANO

The Panamerican Express is one of South America's great trains, travelling over 1,000 miles from La Paz in Bolivia to the Argentine city of Tucuman. It crosses a national frontier - few in this hemisphere do -and railway travel is never more interesting than when it involves a border crossing. The frontier is nearly always a no-man's land in which fascinating pieces of fraudulent theatre are enacted - the passport stamping ceremony, the suspicious looks, the bullying at customs, the foolishly patriotic pique, and the unexplained delays. I had walked across the Rio Grande from Texas to Mexico, and hiked from Guatemala into El Salvador. I was looking forward to boarding a train in Bolivia and ending up, after three days on the Andean high-plains, in the heart of Argentina.

But first I had to find my way out of Peru. By now, the railway strike had taken hold. Only one line was in operation; the train to Machu Pic-chu was being manned by the Peruvian army. This was strictly for the tourists' benefit - too bad if you were an Indian who wanted to go home on any of the other routes. The miners were also on strike, and the municipal workers had occupied the city hall in Lima. The peaceful demonstrations had become angry mobs, and there were threats of sabotage on the Machu Picchu train. The workers' demand was for £ 1.50 more a month. In Peru, two pounds of meat costs £ 1.50, and two pounds is all the average Peruvian family can afford each month. I was warned that if I did not leave Peru soon the buses, too, would be strikebound; and though I had vowed in Colombia that I would not set foot on another South American bus - good heavens, I had a wife and children ! -1 had no choice but to take one to Puno.

By train the trip would have been simple and enjoyable; by bus, it was dusty and harrowing, over a corrugated road. I could not read on this bus, and that day I abandoned my diary. We reached Lake Titicaca at sundown and crossed it in the steamer M. V. Olíanla in the dead of night. People tell you that this is one of the most enchanting trips on the continent. But I saw nothing: it was night. The last leg, from Guaqui to La Paz, was too brief to be memorable. I recall a puzzled Indian standing among boulders with a llama watching us pass. The llama was a special reproach to me.

The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat,

With an indolent expression and an undulating throat,

Like an unsuccessful literary man.

Just above La Paz, as the train rises and travels across the ridge before descending into the city, there are coal-black peaks covered with snow. The snow has a dry ghostly permanent look to it, a far cry from the radiant slush you see in New England.

The bareness of Bolivia had been apparent as soon as we reached the south end of the lake. It was not the cookie crumb bareness of Mexico or the snail shell bareness of Peru or the withered aridity of Guatemala; Bolivia's bareness was the gritty undercrust of the earth, a topography of stony fossils: the topsoil had simply blown away, exposing the country to its old bones. The place could not have looked colder or fiercer. And yet, all the Bolivians on the Guaqui train were friendly, and the hat-style of the Indians - here a brown derby was favoured -gave them a jaunty look. 'You should stay here awhile,' said a Bolivian, and he pointed to the snowy peaks. 'You can go skiing over there.'

The clouds were grey and creased with black, and as we made our descent into La Paz - the city grew larger and uglier as we neared the valley floor - there was a blue-white crack of lightning from the collapsing clouds. Then a thunderclap; and it began to hail. The hailstones bobbled against the train windows; they were the size of marbles - it was a wonder they did not shatter the glass.

I did not feel well. I had slept badly in Cuzco, I had dozed on the bus to Puno; the furious boilers on the M. V. Olíanla had kept me awake crossing Lake Titicaca. I had stomach trouble, and for once my English cement, which was spiked with morphine, did no good. And of course there was the altitude: La Paz was over 12,000 feet, and the train had gone even higher in order to make its way into the city. I had a groggy half-awake feeling, dizzyness and shortness of breath. Altitude sickness had penetrated to my entrails, and though I kept swigging cement and chewing cloves - my teeth had begun to ache again - I knew I would not feel any better until I left La Paz on the Panamerican express.

I had another affliction, too, but this turned out to be an advantage. I cannot remember how I found a hotel in La Paz -1 think I just saw a likely one and walked in. In any case, I was taking some aspirin shortly after finding my room and dropped the water tumbler into the sink. My hand went to it, propelled by instinct, and then I saw that 1 was holding broken glass and blood. It was my scribbling hand, and now the blood was running down my arm. I stepped into the corridor, bandaging the wound with a towel, and called to the room lady who was sweeping the floor. She clucked: the blood had begun to leak through the towel. She took a rubber band out of her apron pocket.

'Put this around your wrist,' she said. 'That will stop the blood.'

I recalled that tourniquets had been discredited. I asked her the address of the nearest pharmacy.

'Maybe you should go to the doctor,' she said.

'No,' I said. 'I am sure it will stop.'

But I had not gone two blocks when the new towel I had wrapped around my hand was soaked with blood. It did not hurt, but it looked dreadful. I hid it under my arm so as not to alarm pedestrians. Then the blood dripped on the pavement and I thought: Goddamn. It was deeply embarrassing to be walking through this large grey city with a blood-soaked towel on my hand. I began to wish that I had tried the rubber band. I left spatters of blood on the crosswalk, and more spatters on the plaza. I asked directions to the pharmacy and saw, when I looked back, that there was a pool of blood where I had paused and a horrified Bolivian watching me. I tried not to run: running makes your heart beat faster and you bleed more.

The pharmacy was run by five Chinese girls, who spoke Spanish in the twanging gum-chewing way that they speak English. I held my dripping paw over a waste-paper basket and said, 'I have a problem here.' Before leaving the hotel, I had looked up the Spanish words for wound, antiseptic, bandage, tape and gauze.

'Is it still coming out, the blood?' asked one of the Chinese girls.

'I think so.'

'Take that bandage off.'

I unwound the soaked towel. Blood poured out of the slice in my palm: it was a neat cut in my flesh, slightly parted, and with a steady trickle of blood flowing out of it. Now I was bleeding on the counter. The girl moved briskly, got some cotton, dunked it in alcohol and pressed it painfully to the cut. Moments later the cotton was crimson.

She said, 'It is still coming out.'

The other Chinese girls and some customers came over to look.

'What a shame,' said one.

'It does not hurt,' I said. 'I am sorry for making a mess.'

Without saying a word, another Chinese girl twisted a rubber tube around my wrist and tightened it. More cotton was applied to the cut. This cotton stayed white.

The second Chinese girl said, 'Now it is not coming out.'

But my hand had gone numb and I saw that it was turning grey. This gave me a fright. I undid the rubber tube. The blood flowed again down my elbow.

'You should have left the rubber on.'

'I think that is dangerous,' I said.

They tried everything. They poured alcohol on it from the bottle, they squeezed it, they dyed it with Mercurochrome, they sprinkled white powder on it - and now my hand looked like a Bolivian pastry. But nothing worked; direct pressure seemed to make the blood flow faster.

'Put the rubber on again.'

'No,' I said. 'It is no good.'

'It is good. It will work.'

The other girl said in amazement, 'It is still coming!'

'You need stitches,' said a third girl.

'It is not that big,'I said.

'Yes. Go to the doctor. He is across the street.'

I went to the doctor's office, but it was shut: out for lunch. Back in the pharmacy and, still bleeding, I said, 'Forget the rubber tube. Just sell me a bandage and some antiseptic. I know it will stop - they always stop, sooner or later.'

A different Chinese girl broke open a bandage and helped me wrap my hand, then she gave me all the odds and ends of tape and bottles we had used and I went to the cash desk and paid for them.

It leaked some more - not too much, but enough to soak the gauze bandage and look quite horrible, like the joke shop bandage children wear to frighten their friends. The bandage was thick, the blood bright red. But I was fairly certain it had stopped. Buying a sugary coffee to restore my health, I held my bandaged hand in my lap.

'Yugh. How did that happen?' asked the waiter.

'An accident,' I said lightly.

And at the bank, changing some money, I rested my wounded hand on the counter. The teller was quick; she sorted the bills, asked no questions, averted her eyes from my hand, and off I went: it was the fastest bank transaction I had made in months.

I went to the railway agency. The clerk was elderly but full of beans. He kept saying in Spanish a word that means 'Ready!' or 'Check!' He told me to sit down. I did so, placing my right hand on his desk and pretending to ignore it.

'One ticket to Buenos Aires, via Tucuman, please.'

'Check!'

'A First Class sleeper, and I would like to go as soon as possible.'

'Check!'

He shuffled papers, and as he wrote out my ticket he said, 'The wound - is it big?'

'Very.'

'Check,' he said, giving me a wheeze of sympathy. No ticket had ever been easier for me to buy. I was so encouraged by the Bolivian response to my wounded hand that I did not change the bandage until the next day. I was treated with great promptness, I was asked questions about it- did it hurt? how had it happened? was it large? My hand became a wonderful conversation piece, and everyone who passed by me stared at my white mitten. In Lima I had tried to buy a painting, but the price was ridiculously high and I had given up in frustration. In La Paz, I saw a better painting, a pious portrait of Saint Dominic, done in Potosi in the mid-eighteenth century. I haggled for less than an hour, using my bandaged hand to gesture with, and walked out of the shop with the painting under my arm.

'Better keep that painting in your suitcase,' said the lady in the shop. 'It is illegal to take such works of art out of the country.'

The wounded hand turned out to be one of my most satisfying experiences in South America. But later I thought I might be pushing my luck. I began to worry that the cut would become infected and my hand would drop off.

It was a city that seemed suited to ghastliness of this kind; it suffered itself, from a sort of urban gangrene, and if any city looked blighted to the point of being wounded - it even had a scabrous cankered colour -it was La Paz. Its extreme ugliness was woeful enough to be endearing, and I found it on further inspection to be a likable place. It was a city of cement and stale bread, of ice storms that produced a Bulgarian aroma of wet tweeds, built above the timber-line in a high pass in the Andes. The people in La Paz had heavy dignified faces and none of the predatory watchfulness I had seen in Colombia and Peru. In the wood-panelled coffee shops in La Paz, with their white-jacketed waiters and espresso machines and gooey pastries and mirrors, scowling matrons at one table, thickset men in baggy ill-fitting suits at other tables, it was hard to believe I was not in eastern Europe; it was only when I went outside and saw a stocky Indian chewing coca leaves in the shelter of a cement mixer that I was reminded where I was.

It drizzled constantly: cold rain, ice slivers, hail. But most people were dressed for the weather. They wore thick overcoats and heavy sweaters, wool hats, and even mittens and gloves. The Indians had a bulky rounded look, and some wore earflaps under their derby hats. I saw the sun once. It appeared one morning between a break in the mist that hung over the canyon, and it was powerfully bright without being warm, simply a blinding flash that was soon eclipsed by more mist. The weather report in the daily paper was usually the same: Cloudy, fog, some rain, no change, like a certain season in northern Maine, except that here I was never able to elude my feeling of the bends or my nausea. I was tired but could not sleep; I had no appetite, one drink and I was staggering. And it is hard to be a stranger in a cold city: the people stay indoors, the streets are empty after the stores close, no one lounges in the parks, and the purposefulness - or what looks like it - in a cold climate is always a reproach to an idle traveller. I rolled up my painting, hid it in my suitcase and made preparations to leave.

The sun came out just as the Panamerican left the precincts of the railway station and began to travel in tight circles through the eucalyptus groves on the slopes north of the city. They were the only trees I was to see for several days. Ragged toothy boys'ran from behind the trees and hitched on the train, and after a few minutes jumped off and hurried, shouting, into the frail foliage. Then they were lost among the tall slender trees, the stringy bark. There were mud huts on the lower slopes, but as we climbed higher there were no more huts, only abandoned earthworks and an Indian or two. In spite of the steady rain of the previous days the steep creekbeds were dry and stony, cut deep in the waterless mountainside. Littered with rocks and sand, the soil could not have looked more infertile. But we were very high now, perhaps 13,000 feet and still climbing above the back of the city to the dry grey lip of the plateau that hangs over it. On this steep grade the train was tilted at a sharp angle; on the right a mountainside, on the left a deep ravine of clumsily made roofs.

After almost an hour we were still in sight of La Paz. It was there below us; we had gone back and forth on the mountainside, passing and repassing the city which had become large and spectacularly shabby. Behind the city were the Andes, snowy mountains with clouds smoking on their summits. We were up among the daisies and the weeds and the twittering birds; it was cold and bright, and clear enough to see for a hundred miles. There were plateaux and peaks on three sides of the city, and as we passed it for the last time - we had now reached an open plain - it looked strip-mined with roads and ditches, a reddened ledge rising to green slopes, black cliffs, white peaks.

Chased by rabid dogs, the train picked up speed and crossed the grey plain to the first station, Illimani, at 13,500 feet. There were sheep on the tracks and Indian women selling oranges for a penny each. I bought six oranges and boarded quickly as the train began to move. After the slow climb to this station it was surprising for the train to pick up speed and begin racing across the high plains.

It was a Bolivian train. Most of the coaches were wooden Second Class boxes crammed with Indians on their way south. These coaches, and the dining car and the one Bolivian sleeping car, would go no farther than the border at Villazon. My sleeping car belonged to Argentine Railways and was going all the way to Tucuman. This solid British-made pullman was about fifty years old, each compartment fitted with cupboards and a sink and a chamberpot. There were two berths in my compartment. Fernando, a journalism student, had the upper berth; I had the lower one and was privileged, because this gave me the window seat and the table.

'You are a teacher and all you do is write,' said Fernando. 'Me, I'm supposed to be the journalist and I haven't even got a pen! You should be a journalist!'

'A geography teacher,' I said, pausing in my note-taking. 'And, you see, this is rather unusual geography.'

'This?'

We stared out of the window.

That mountain, for example.'

'Ah, yes,' he said. 'That is a big mountain.'

It was Nevada de Illimani, four miles high, dark brutal bulk surmounted by wind-whipped snow. And it lay beyond the plain where grey grass had been trampled flat by storms.

Fernando smiled. He had not seen my point at all. He said, 'I am so glad you are happy in my country.' And he left the compartment.

The mountain was soon far behind us; we were sprinting towards an irregular wall of rainclouds and hills, past wheatfields and pepper patches. The eastern horizon was white and domed, like the skyline of an Arabian city idealized in a fable; it was the far edge of the high plains, this range of mosque-like peaks buried to their domes and squat minarets, and it was so thin and yet so marvellously shaped that at times it appeared as oddly beautiful as a mirage. Nearer the railway line - but very far apart - were small mud huts. They had mud-block courtyards and some had corrals, but none of them had any windows. They were shut; there were no lights; they were no more than hovels, and they looked forlorn. At Viacha, which was a village, we stopped to take on passengers. Now there was only standing room in Second Class, the battered green coaches were filled to overflowing, and on the curves I could see three or four faces at every window. I had tried to walk through the train to these coaches, but they were impassable - the Second Class corridors were jammed with people and their belongings. There was no greater contrast than this glow-worm stuffed with Bolivians and those empty plains.

It is equal to living in a tragic land

To live in a tragic time.

Regard now the sloping mountainous rocks

And the river that batters its way over stones,

Regard the hovels of those that live in this battered land.

There were no cars in the villages, no roads, no trees; only mud huts and cows, and Indians wrapped up against the cold. Except for the llamas which frisked when they saw the train, and the very shaggy mules which took no notice, travelling across the high plains was a bit like travelling through Texas. The hills were distant and slightly rounded - rain poured on one, the sun was setting on another - and the sky was enormous. The tracks from now on were perfectly straight, and just before the daylight was entirely gone the air became very cold. In this empty land an Indian pushed a bicycle along a path and then cut across a barren field, and later I saw a woman watching some still sheep. In the gathering dusk, some miles further on, an Indian woman and two small children laboured across the plain leading five mules which were carrying loads of farm tools, shovels and hoes. In a cloudy sunset, the village of Ayoayo - mud houses and a church - looked like a distant outpost from another age; it lay in the middle of the plain and it was so small the train did not stop.

The land became hillier, and a range of rugged bare mountains appeared - so high they were brightly lit by the setting sun, although we were travelling in near darkness. And the condors, too, flew so high they caught the light. The last Indian I saw that day was walking away from the train through a gulch. He wore sandals, but - in spite of the cold-no socks.

I saw what I thought at first was a Christ statue, but as we grew near it changed from the shape of a man to the shape of a bottle. It was a bottle, and it was twenty feet high and made of wood. It stood in utter emptiness and the large letters on its side said Inka-Cola.

By then, I had brought my diary up to date. I was pleased with myself: my work was done for the day, and I was well settled in this sleeping car and moving south towards the border. I went to the dining car, and there I found Fernando, who was drinking beer with his friend Victor and a third man - either drunk or naturally surly - whose name I did not catch. They invited me to join them and they asked me the usual South American questions: Where was I from? Where had I been? Was I a Catholic? What did I think of their country?

They hate to be criticized, the man in Ecuador had told me. Never criticize them. This advice had not worked in Peru, where praise only antagonized Peruvians and made them think that I sympathized with their rotten government. But Bolivians - if Fernando and his friends were anything to go by - clearly wanted to be praised.

'Bolivia's a wonderful country,' I said.

'It is, isn't it?' said Victor. He smiled coldly. The others agreed. Surely, we knew we were lying?

'Take Peru,' said Fernando.

The three Bolivians ran down Peru for a minute.

I said, 'Most Peruvians would agree with you.'

'Chile is the worst of all,' said Victor.

'What about Ecuador?' asked the surly man.

They have a military dictatorship,' said Fernando.

It was an uninspired remark. Every country that had been mentioned, including Bolivia, had a military dictatorship.

I said, 'Ecuador is going to hold an election.'

'So are we,' said Victor.

Four months later the Bolivian election was held. There were shootings all over the country, mysterious machine-gunnings, and stuffed ballot boxes. It was generally agreed that the election had been rigged, and then the head of state, General Banzer, 'annulled' the election. A state of siege was declared and a new government was formed in what was officially termed a 'bloodless coup'. Within five months there was a counter-coup and another promise to hold elections.

Peru was backward, said Fernando. Chile's black market was so bad you couldn't buy a tube of toothpaste, said Victor. The surly man said that they were massacring Indians in Brazil. Fernando said he knew a thing or two about newspapers: Bolivia's papers were the best in South America, but Argentina's seldom printed foreign news. The rest was hearsay: Paraguay was an unspeakable swamp, Colombia was full of thieves, and the Panamanians were so stupid and had such a tyrannical leader they didn't deserve the canal.

We went on drinking beer and the Bolivians went on belittling their neighbours. I suggested that they shared some national characteristics and recounted what the lady in Ecuador had told me about altitude being a factor in the South American consciousness. They said this was nonsense; they were insistent in exaggerating the differences. Oddest of all, they had not said much about Bolivia - and Bolivia could not have been nearer: it was this old-fashioned dining car and hurrying waiters; it was the Indians who were hunkered down in the doorway, and the cold downpour on the high plains out the window. Perhaps reading my mind, Victor said, 'We have one problem in Bolivia.'

'Only one?' I asked.

'One major problem,' he said. 'The sea. The Chileans ought to let us have a bit - or the Peruvians. We need a seaport of our own. It is because we don't have one that we have so many other problems. What can you do without a seaport?'

'He likes Bolivian beer,' said Fernando.

'Yes,' I said, 'it's very nice.'

'Lpok at that man,' said Victor.

At a side table a man was drinking beer. One look told me he was an American. He wore lumberjack shoes and the sort of woollen plaid forester's shirt that graduate students in state universities especially favour. His shirt-tails hung down, his beard was shaggy; he drank his beer straight from the bottle, tipping it up and then wiping his mouth with his forearm and belching.

‘That is ugly,' said Victor.

'He could have asked the waiter for a glass,' said Fernando.

The surly man had started to smile. 'Look at that! Glug-glug' - he mimicked with his thumb- 'right out of the bottle!'

'Very ugly,' said Victor.

'I think he is an American,' I said.

'He must be a German,' said Victor. 'Germans drink beer like that.'

We were speaking in Spanish - incautiously, it turned out, for a moment later the man stood up and said in fluent, American-accented Spanish, 'I am an American and this is the way Americans drink beer.' He drained his bottle, belched and walked towards Second Class.

While we were eating, I got a severe stomach cramp. I excused myself and went back to my compartment. The train had stopped. This was Oruro, a fairly large city, mostly Indian, near Lake Uru Uru. The rain had intensified; it beat against the window in a torrent made silver by the arc-lamps of the station. I got into bed and turned off the light and curled up to ease my cramp. I woke at about midnight. It was very cold in the compartment and so dusty - the dust seemed an effect of the train's rapid motion -1 could barely breathe. I tried the lights, but they didn't work. I struggled to open the door - it seemed locked from the outside. I was choking, freezing and doubled-up with stomach pains. I had no choice but to remain calm. I took four swigs of my stomach cement, and then buried my face in my blanket and waited for the morphine to work.

At dawn, I saw why I had not been able to get the door open: it had been bolted top and bottom by Fernando, who was still asleep in the upper berth. And I still felt terrible. I had imagined that after fifteen hours we would be off the high plains and perhaps rumbling through a valley nearer sea-level. I had been mistaken. We were still at 12,000 feet and travelling across a gaunt moonscape of dry rocks and empty craters. Alcohol worsens the symptoms of altitude sickness; and a hangover at a high altitude makes orle feel close to death. The landscape was cheerless and full of hard sharp rocks, a plain of tormented flint. There were not even Indians here in the cold Cordillera de Chichas. The few pools of water I saw looked gelid, and then I noticed that these were crusts of dusty ice, and further on dirt-speckled swatches of snow, like hanks and rags of torn underwear. Snow!

Over a breakfast of dry toast and tea, I talked with Victor. It seemed that he and Fernando (the surly man had disappeared) had decided to get away from it all. They had chosen a town in Southern Bolivia; the train would stop there later in the day. What did they plan to do there?

'Nothing,' said Victor.

I said I knew exactly what he meant.

'And maybe read,' said Victor. 'I love to read American novels.'

'Who are your favourite authors?'

'E. Bing Walla,' he said without hesitation. 'Also Artur Ailie and TylaCowdway.'

'Never heard of them,' I said.

The paperbacks were in his briefcase, Spanish translations of Irving Wallace, Arthur Hailey and Taylor Caldwell. 'This,' he said, picking up the Taylor Caldwell novel, 'is about Cicero. But I am sure you have read these authors.'

'I have never read a single word of any of them.'

'What is your book?'

It was a Jack London novel, The Assassination Bureau. I had not been enjoying it. 'It has a bad smell. In English we say, "It stinks".'

'Eet sdeenks,' he repeated.

'I feel terrible,' I said. 'It's this altitude. I think I should go back to bed.'

I went and lay down on my bunk, propped by a pillow, and watched our progress through creased mountains the colour of gunpowder. I guessed that we must by now be descending from the high plains. What settlements I could see were derelict, with ruined churches and collapsed fences, but otherwise there was nothing for miles but scrub and rock and small brown creeks. Fernando and Victor came into the compartment from time to time. Are you all right? they asked. I said I was fine, but I still felt crummy, and I was growing worried: I had drunk the last of my cement, and still my stomach cramps had not gone away.

The hours passed and the train rocked enraging the porcupine which now lived in my abdomen. Then we came to Tupiza, and Fernando and Victor said goodbye. Even in sunshine Tupiza, a heap of brown houses on a hillside, looked as forlorn as Dogpatch. There were condors circling it and some curious Indians squinting at the two new arrivals, who would be spending several weeks with them. Just the thought of standing on the platform in such a place, and watching the train depart as silence sifted down on the village, was enough to make me shudder.

We moved off at the speed of a jogger and for the next few hours followed the west bank of a wide muddy river, the Camblaya. There were bushes here, and cactus growing like cudgels, and even some cornfields between the dry hills. I thought then that we had descended to a lower altitude, but really it had not changed much. I was deceived by the disappearance of my cramps; feeling slightly better I believed we had left the high plains. But only this river valley was fertile - the rest was dry and mountainous desert, the maddeningly unfriendly landscape of a nightmare. It was an immense and empty country. There were brambles and small willows near the diminished river, but the rest was dusty blue- the hills, the gorges, the twisted knots of cactus.

The hills grew flatter, the river was lost from view, and for miles ahead there was only this wasteland. The train did not vary its speed. It crept slowly along, under a clear sky, across this repeating aridity. The only interesting landscape was elsewhere: to the west, where there were canyons; to the east, a mountain range of snowcapped peaks, with the same elusive sparkle of a mirage that I had detected the day before outside La Paz. The Andes, people call them; but the name means nothing. It seemed remarkable to me that mountains so huge and snowy should have such a simple general name and not be known by individual names. But this variegated desert, a thousand miles of plateau and strange shapes, was known by no other name than the high plains. And even the map is notoriously without names or descriptions. The train rolled through cloud-land; there were a half a dozen stops, but the rest was unknown. Now everyone on this train was travelling to the frontier town, which had a name.

Nearer Villazon the train had speeded up and sent grazing burros scampering away. We came to the station: the altitude was given - we were as high here as we had been at La Paz. The Argentine sleeping car was shunted onto a siding, and the rest of the train rolled down a hill and out of sight. There were five of us in this sleeping car, but no one knew when we would be taken across the border. I found the conductor, who was swatting flies in the corridor; and I asked him.

'We will be here a long time,' he said. He made it sound like years.

The town was not a town. It was a few buildings necessitated by the frontier post. It was one street, unpaved, of low hut-like stores. They were all shut. Near the small railway station, about twenty women had set up square home-made umbrellas and were selling fruit and bread and shoelaces. On arriving at the station, the mob of Indians had descended from the train, and there had been something like excitement; but the people were now gone, the train was gone. The market women had no customers and nothing moved but the flies above the mud puddles. It made me gasp to walk the length of the platform, but perhaps I had walked too fast - at the far end an old crazy Indian woman was screaming and crying beside a tree stump. No one took any notice of her. I bought half a pound of peanuts and sat on a station bench, shelling them. 'Are you in that sleeping car?' asked a man hurrying towards me. He was shabbily dressed and indignant.

I told him I was.

'What time is it leaving?'

I said, 'I wish I knew.'

He said, 'I am going to get some answers.'

He went into the station and rapped on a door. From within the building a voice roared, 'Go away!'

The man came out of the station. He said, These people are all whores.' He walked through the puddles back to the sleeping car.

The Indian woman was still screaming, but after an hour or two I grew accustomed to it, and the screams were like part of the silence of Villazon. The sleeping car looked very silly, stranded on the track. And there was no train in sight, no other coach or railway car. We were on a bluff. A mile south, across a bridge and up another hill was the Argentine town of La Quiaca. It too was nowhere, but it was there that we were headed, somehow, sometime.

A pig came over and sucked at the puddle near my feet and sniffed at the peanut shells. The clouds built up, massing over Villazon, and a heavy truck rattled by, blowing its horn for no reason, raising dust, and heading into Bolivia. Still the Indian woman screamed. The market women packed their boxes and left. It was dusk, and the place seemed deader than ever.

Night fell. I went to the sleeping car. It lay in darkness: no electricity, no lights. The corridor was thick with flies. The conductor beat a towel at them.

'What time are we going?¹

'I do not know,' he said.

I wanted to go home.

But it was pointless to be impatient. I had to admit that this was unavoidable emptiness, a hollow zone which lay between the more graspable experience of travel. What good would it do to lose my temper or seek to shorten this time? I would have to stick it out. But time passes slowly in the darkness. The Indian woman screamed; the conductor cursed the flies.

I left the sleeping car and walked towards a low lighted building which I guessed might be a bar. There were no trees here, and little moonlight: the distances were deceptive. It took me half an hour to reach the building. And I was right: it was a coffee shop. I ordered a coffee and sat in the empty room waiting for it to come. Then I heard a train whistle.

A frail barefoot Indian girl put the coffee cup down.

'What train is that?'

'It is the train to La Quiaca.'

'Shit!' I put some money down and without touching the coffee ran all the way back to the sleeping car. When I arrived, the engine was being coupled to the coach, and my throat burned from the effort of running at such a high altitude. My heart was pounding. I threw myself onto my bed and panted.

Outside, a signalman was speaking to one of the passengers.

The tracks up to Tucuman are in bad shape,' he said. 'You might not get there for days.'

Damn this trip, I thought.

We were taken across the border to the Argentine station over the hill. Then the sleeping car was detached and we were again left on a siding. Three hours passed. There was no food at the station, but I found an Indian woman who was watching a teapot boil over a fire. She was surprised that I should ask her to sell me a cup, and she took the money with elaborate grace. It was past midnight, and at the station there were people huddled in blankets and sitting on their luggage and holding children in their arms. Now it started to rain, but just as I began to be exasperated I remembered that these people were the Second Class passengers, and it was their cruel fate to have to sit at the dead centre of this continent waiting for the train to arrive. I was much luckier than they. I had a berth and a First Class ticket. And there was nothing to be done about the delay.

So I did what any sensible person would do, stuck on the Bolivia-Argentine frontier on a rainy night. I went to my compartment and washed my face; I put on my pyjamas and went to bed.

There was a knock on the compartment door: the conductor.

'Tickets please.'

'Where are we?'

'LaQuiaca.'

Still on the border.

'When are we leaving?'

'In a few minutes.'

Sure, I thought, and went back to sleep. Despair and impatience had a soporific effect. But I was woken some time later by a train whistle and a grunting of metal, then the anvil noises of the coupling. At last we were on our way.

I slept for twelve hours. I woke again at six in the morning, and saw that we had come to a station. There were three poplars outside the window. In the early afternoon I woke again. The three poplars were still outside the window. We had not moved.

This was Humahuaca, a small town in northern Argentina. We had travelled no more than 100 miles since leaving La Quiaca, and had dropped about 1,000 feet. The day was cool and sunny, with a crackle of insects and a joyful sound of church bells. It was Sunday, and the place looked serene. I was unused to seeing flower gardens - rows of chrysanthemums - and a kind of dogged prosperity. It was the first railway station I had seen for weeks that did not have at least one pig snuffling near the tracks or chickens clucking in the station master's office. I was encouraged by this appearance of order: this was obviously a different country, and the filthy train with its fly-blown coaches looked out of place here.

A glamorous woman of about forty was showing a pretty girl around the station. She said in Spanish, 'This is the train to Tucuman -it came all the way from Bolivia. Aren't you glad we came by car?'

The girl winced at the Panamerican.

I wanted to see the town, but I was afraid of being duffilled. Huma-huaca was a nice place, but it was miles from anywhere; and there would not be another train for three days.

I asked the sleeping car attendant what was up.

The tracks, he said. Somewhere down the line there was a break in the tracks, either flooding or a landslide. It could not be fixed earlier because the men could not work at night. It was serious: something to do with a volcano.

'We cannot leave for hours,' he said.

I went for a stroll in the town and saw Indians returning from church with wilted flowers. Then I remembered that it was Palm Sunday. There was great contentment on the faces of these people, a kind of after-church radiance, the pure joy that goes under the name of holiness. There were hundreds of them, and each one carried a flower.

But the rest of the town was shut, the restaurants closed, the bus depot deserted. I made a circuit of the town park and then returned to the railway station.

In the hours that had elapsed since the Panamerican had arrived at the station the atmosphere had changed. The train had brought squalor to the station and transformed it into a muck-heap. There were orange peels and banana skins under every window - the station was too respectable to have pigs nearby to eat them; and water poured from beneath the coaches, and there were heaps of shit under each toilet pipe. The sun had grown stronger, and flies collected around the coaches. This express train, so dramatic when it was on the move, became foul when it was stationary.

I thought that I was the only foreigner on the train. I should have known better. Experience had shown me that there was always a German in Second Class, slumbering on his pack-frame and spitting orange pips out of the window. At Humahuaca, it was Wolfgang. He had boarded the Bolivian segment of the train in the cold downpour at Oruro and he had suffered in Second Class ever since. I had not seen himi though he said he had seen me, buying tea from the Indian woman in La Quiaca. He had been travelling for months through Central and South America, and had only the vaguest idea of where he was going. He was certain of one thing: if he did not have the luck to find a job in Buenos Aires he would be in Argentina for the rest of his life. Frankly, he was eager to go home, he said.

Sometimes, in the presence of such a person-I had met many-I felt rather ashamed that I had travelled so swiftly from Boston. Two months before, I had boarded the Lake Shore Limited in South Station and after a few snowy days I had been rattling under clear skies to Mexico. I had not been robbed or fallen seriously ill; I had seen pretty places and met pleasant people. I had filled hundreds of pages of my diary and now I felt certain that I would make it to Esquel in Patagonia, the small town I had seen on my map which had become an arbitrary destination. I had breezed through most of the countries, and I was always brought up short when I met another traveller who said he was planning to spend a month in, say, Barranquilla or Cuzco. 'I didn't like Ecuador,' an American told me in Peru. 'Maybe I didn't give it enough time.' He had been there two months, which seemed an eternity tome.

Wolfgang's story was the same - a month here, a month there, two months somewhere else. He had been practically resident in these places; he was like a man looking for a new life. I knew I was merely skimming south, a bird of passage generalizing on the immediate. But because I had no camera, and had written so much, my impressions of what I had seen were vivid. I could call up Mexico or Costa Rica by glancing at- the conversations I had written, and from the particularities of the railway journey from Santa Marta to Bogotá I felt I could reinvent Colombia. Travel was, above all, a test of memory.

So, partly to kill time - the train was still stalled at Humahuaca -and partly to relieve myself of the guilt I felt with someone who regarded me as no more than a tourist, I asked Wolfgang what he remembered of the places he had been.

'This is a quiz,' I said. 'I'll say the name of a place and you tell me what you remember best about it. Pretend I'm someone who has never travelled anywhere -1 want to know what these places are like. Okay?'

'It's a good game,' he said.

'Ready? Here goes. Mexico.'

'Americans have a lot of trouble there,' said Wolfgang.

'Guatemala.'

'I missed the bus to San Salvador, but my pack was still on it, so my passport too. I spent three dollars on phone calls. It was terrible.'

'Nicaragua.'

'I should not have gone there.'

'Costa Rica.'

'Dull.'

'Colombia.'

'Lots of nice food in the markets, but I got sick there.'

'Maybe it was the food,' I said. 'What about Ecuador?'

'One month I am there, trying to take the buses.'

'Peru.'

'Nice and cheap.'

'Bolivia.'

'All the people in Bolivia are stupid.'

'Argentina.'

'I will be here for some weeks or months,' he said. 'So? I have passed the test?'

'You flunked, Wolfgang.'

He only became concrete when the conversation turned to the exchange rate. Here it was 670 pesos to the dollar, but there were towns where you could get 680. The difference was much less than a cent, but Wolfgang was the embodiment of the maxim I had devised earlier in this trip: It is the raggedest traveller who has the most precise notion of the exchange rate. Wolfgang wasn't looking for another life. Travel for him, as for many others, was just another way of saving money.

Without any warning, the train began to move. We ran from where we were standing on the platform and jumped on to the train, Wolfgang to Second, I to First. I did not see him again until two days later, inTucuman.

The Panamerican travelled along a flat green valley, beside a nearly dry but very wide river - the Rio Grande de Jujuy. Mountains rose swiftly out of the valley. They were old and cracked and extremely high, a whole range of them without a single tree. The cliffs, where they had been exposed to wind, were pink, smeared with maroon and orange - these were the high cliffs and peaks; the hills nearer the river were like mounds of mud. These hillocks, and the fact that the mountains were without any foliage, gave the mountain range a look of brutal authority: the contours were exposed, the flanks were pitted with rock-slides and clawed white by erosion, and the rounded peaks of the lower slopes looked like collapsed tents, or the blankets - with the same folds - that the Indians used to cover their belongings. A brown stream ran through the centre of the sluiced-out trough of river - this was all that was left of the Rio Grande; and on each bank there were poplars and willows and cactuses and mud-block houses at the periphery of ploughed fields. It was a strange sight, the bare mountains above the green valley, the wide river bed that had so little water in it, and the only human figure an old man, like the stereotype of the grizzled prospector, stumbling from bank to bank.

There were cornfields, tomato gardens and sunflowers, and fields of blue cabbage that looked much grander than the colourless huts. We were moving slowly through Argentina, but this was a more agreeable altitude. I could feel the change in myself, and I had slept well. I liked the look of Argentina. The landscape was wide-open and fertile. It seemed underpopulated, awaiting settlement, and it was easy to understand why Welshmen and Germans and Italians had come here and disappeared, carting their culture into a mountain valley and ignoring the rest of the world.

Dust flew through the window of my compartment. My worry was my wounded hand. I washed it and changed the bandage. I was sure that if dust got into my unhealed cut it would become infected. The dust storm ceased at Tilcara, which lay under poplars on the side of a mountain. There were people picnicking here, and it looked like a remote part of Italy. The people were almost certainly Italian settlers, the old women in black, the pot-bellied men standing in the shade of apple trees. But Tilcara was an oasis. A hundred yards outside town, after a notice Do Not Destroy the Trees (perversely enough, it was like a sign of civilization), the dust began to fly, and the naked mountains were streaked with yellow sandstone.

We crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. The line was actual, a fissure that ran over the mountains which were themselves marked with stratified stripes as on a topographical map, pink, orange, green; indeed, the landscape was as simple and clearly coloured as a map, accurately reproduced on the paper square before me - black railway line running through brown valley edged in green, pink and orange contours in their proper places. This was near Maimara. There were only a few houses to be seen, but the yellow chapel had been built in the mid-seventeenth century. The people in these Argentine towns looked as if they were there to stay, while in Bolivia the towns had the look of imminent desertion.

A lame dog in Maimara reminded me that, since leaving the United States, I had not seen a dog that wasn't lame, or a woman who wasn't carrying something, or an Indian without a hat, or - anywhere - a cat.

We were supposed to have been in Maimara for three minutes, no more, but after an hour we were still there, in the late afternoon sunshine. I sat on the steps of the platform and smoked my pipe. Seeing me, a man on a path by the railway tracks came over and asked me where I was going. He was short, and very dark, with slits for eyes, a broad face and chubby hands. I assumed he was Indian, or half Indian - the Incas had come this far, and even beyond, as far as Jujuy.

I told him I was going to Tucuman on this train.

There was a volcano farther south, he said; it had caused a mudslide and ripped the tracks apart. It seemed that they were trying to firt it, but in any case it was four hours to Jujuy, and I certainly would not be in Tucuman until tomorrow.

'What's the point of travelling?' said this swarthy provincial. Tve been around the country-Jujuy, LaQuiaca, all the places. But none of them is as good as Maimara. We've got apples, corn, pears - everything you need. It's easy to grow things here, and it's a pretty town. I saw Villazon once- it was really ugly. I would hate to live there. Here, I have everything I need.'

'Good for you.'

'You should stay here,' he said.

The train doesn't seem to be going, so I guess I am staying here.'

'It is the volcano - it wrecked the tracks. Where are you headed after Tucuman?'

'Buenos Aires, and then Patagonia.'

'Patagonia! That's so far away they speak differently there.' He grinned at me. 'So you were at La Quiaca and you're going to Patagonia. They are at opposite ends of Argentina. I would never go to those places. I would rather stay home.'

'After Patagonia, I will go home.'

'That's the idea!' he said. 'It must be terrible to be so far away from home on a nice Sunday afternoon like this.'

'It is sunny here,' I said. 'I am sure it is rainy at home.'

That's interesting,' he said, and thanked me. He disappeared beyond the rattling poplars.

Just south of Purmamarca, in a dry river bed - the wide valley was surrounded by clouded mountains-1 saw a Palm Sunday procession. I guessed it was that, but it might have been anything. There were easily 2,000 people making their way down the river bed. Many were on horseback, some waved banners and flags, and there was a smartly dressed band, the source of a lugubrious braying. Near the front of the procession some people carried a white box, a coffin, either emblematic or real. And what made this group especially strange was the sky lowering upon them. They were a multitude of tiny figures in a gigantic mural, in which the important feature was the granite muscle in this toppling cloud.

The train moved on, and the cloud continued to drop. It slid down the mountains and into the valley and down the river bed. It hovered at the tree-tops and the afternoon darkened. In fifteen minutes the landscape had changed from an overpowering vista of Argentina, to a weeping late-afternoon in New England. The visibility was about fifty yards; it was warm and dimly white, a world of sudden ghostliness.

It began to drizzle and beside the track there were cleared mudslides. The damage was obvious: wrecked walls and tipped-over culverts, and water rushing at sand-bags. I hung out of the door to look at the land-slip and behind me the sleeping car attendant said, This is the volcano.'

'I didn't realize there were volcanoes here.'

'No, the town is called Volcano.'

I had got it wrong: what I had taken to be a volcano - the descriptions I had heard up the line- was just the name of the town.

'How are we doing?' I asked.

'We will be a day and a half late in arriving in Buenos Aires.'

I spent the rest of the daylight hours reading Friedrich Dürrenmatt's End of the Game. Its original title, a better one, was The Judge and His Hangman. After Jack London's feeble and preposterous plot, Dürrenmatt's struck me as brilliant; and necessary, too, since he had little insight. Such order made him seem like a sage. For railway reading, the best book is the plottiest, a way of endowing the haphaz-ardness of thejourney with order.

At Jujuy I saw that the river which had been dry some miles north was in full flood. Here the Rio Grande deserved its name. Along its banks were leafy trees and flowers, and an evening mist hung over the water. Jujuy looked peaceful and damp; it was just high enough to be pleasant without giving one a case of the bends. The rain on the blossoms perfumed the dark air and a fresh breeze blew from the river. It seemed idyllic, and yet later I heard that Jujuy was so badly flooded that thousands of people had to be evacuated from their homes. It is not possible to see everything from a train.

The station was full of Indians, who had come to welcome the Indians on this train from the border. This was the last place in Argentina where I saw so many Indians, and there were people in Argentina who denied that they existed in this country in any great number. So Jujuy seemed a frontier of sorts, the end of the old Inca trail. It was green, a town buried - so it seemed - in lush depthless spinach.

I would gladly have stayed here, and nearly did, but as I stood on the platform I saw twenty new coaches being hitched to our train and, with them, an attractive dining car. I felt wonderful now: no cramps, no altitude sickness; my appetite had returned (and only the day before I had been sitting in Villazon, eating peanuts), and with it a thirst. I went to the dining car and ordered a carafe of wine. The waiter, dressed in a black uniform, set all the tables - tablecloths, silver, vases of flowers. But his exertions were premature. I was the only customer that night.

Dinner - now we were proceeding via the town of General Miguel Martin de Quemes to Tucuman - was five courses: home-made noodle soup, sausage and polenta, veal cutlets, ham salad and dessert. Although the waiter stood nearby, supplying me with a new carafe of wine every so often, after I finished and lit my pipe he sat down with me, clinked glasses and we talked.

He spoke Spanish with a strong Italian accent - many people did in Argentina. But his Italian was poor. 'I'm an Italian,' he said, but he said it in the way Americans say they are Polish or Armenian: it is the immigrant's claim, or excuse, in an undefined country.

'We are lucky to get through on this train,' he said. This is the first train in two weeks that's made it past Volcan. Did you see the landslide?'

I had: the hill of mud had moved sideways across the track.

'Several trains tried to get through it when it was only half cleared and, tweet, off the tracks they came- derailed. So they stopped taking chances. I've been sitting for two weeks waiting for the train to arrive.'

What a fate: this steward waits two weeks in Jujuy for the Panameri-can, and then it comes, they hitch up his dining car and all he gets is one customer- me. Yet he did not seem especially downhearted.

'What countries have you seen?'

I told him.

'And, of all of them, which one do you like most?'

They hate criticism.

'Argentina,' I said.

'The rest of them are so poor,' he said. 'Know how much the best steak costs here? Take a guess.'

I guessed too low; I gave him the peso equivalent of fifty cents. He said - and he was slightly annoyed - that a pound of filet mignon cost seventy-five cents.

It seemed a specious argument for prosperity in a country where the annual inflation rate was between 300 and 400%. Every day, the peso was worth less, and everything but steak rose in price. Most Argentines had steak twice a day, and even the lowliest clerk ordered a great shoe of it, with french fries, at lunch time. And it reminded me that the most violently critical pieces I had read about Argentina were by V. S. Naipaul. His articles appeared in The New York Review of Books, and they aroused a certain amount of controversy. No one had made the obvious point about Naipaul's loathing of Argentina, but then perhaps it was not commonly known that he was a vegetarian.

'What do you think of this train?'

Whatever you do, don't criticize them.

'It is one of the best trains I've ever seen in my life.'

'It should be the best. It's got good equipment - reclining chairs, lots of space and comfort. But look at the people! They're in First Class and they spit on the floor, hang their clothes on the light fixtures, stick their feet up on the nice chairs.' He made mocking Italian gestures and mimicked the slobs he was describing; the cooks, who had also come over to sit with us, found this very funny. 'You see them? What can we do? They don't know how to ride on a train, that's all.'

Hisì)lame was general. He did not single out a group, and what was more interesting, he did not mention Indians. I found this a relief. One of the pleasures of Argentina -it had also been one in Costa Rica-was that one could be wholly anonymous. The faces on the Panamerican at this point were the faces one might see on any train in the United States, or Europe for that matter. It was possible to enter a crowd in Argentina and vanish. It was very restful for anonymity to be available to me; it simplified travel and allowed me to stare at people for long periods without being detected.

I slept well that night, but woke to hear the attendant pounding on my compartment door.

'Wake up,' he cried. 'We're at Tucuman! You have to get up!'

I opened the door.

'Hurry, sir. All the other passengers have left.'

'How do I get to Buenos Aires?'

'You missed the train. You'll have to catch the North Star tonight. See,' he said, pulling my suitcase out of the door, 'we should have been here last night. All the other passengers have the same problem.'

He helped me out into the grey dawn of Belgrano Station in Tucuman. The morning coolness was already condensing into humidity. There was fog giving an eerieness to the palm trees in the station garden. I checked my suitcase in at the Left Luggage window and went to have breakfast.

19

LA ESTRELLA DEL NORTE

( 'THE NORTH STAR' )

TO BUENOS AIRES

Necessity kissed me with luck. There was no better way to leave the high plains - that world of kitty litter - than to slip across Argentina's simple frontier at night, make the acquaintance of its empty quarter the next day and, the following morning, arrive at a large provincial capital and to walk its streets while the city slept. It was only seven-thirty; not even the coffee shops were open. The royal palms and the dark green araucarias dripped in the mist. The day was mine; if nothing in the city of Tucuman persuaded me to stay, I could board the North Star that evening on a sleeper and wake up in Buenos Aires. There was a risk on this route. In my notebook, I had a clipping which I had cut out of a Bogotá newspaper. Railway Catastrophe in Argentina: 50 Dead, ran the Spanish headline. 'The train "The North Star", said the police, was leaving the province of Tucuman when it charged a heavy truck at a level crossing.' The incident, which was reported with all the enthusiasm Latin Americans have for disasters, had happened only a month before. 'You will have no difficulty getting a berth on that train,' a station porter told me in Tucuman. 'Ever since it crashed, people have been frightened to take it.'

Tucuman was older, flatter, cleaner and a great deal duller than I had expected. It was the ultimate provincial town, self-contained and remote, and being an Argentine town it was thoroughly European in a rather old-fashioned way, from the pin-striped suits and black moustaches of the old men idling in the cafés or having their shoes shined in the plaza, to the baggy, shapeless school uniforms of the girls stopping on their way to the convent school to squeeze - it was an expression of piety - the knee of Christ on the cathedral crucifix. Old Europe was evident in the façades of the houses in the centre of the city, in all the paperwork at the bank (every transaction recorded in triplicate), in the contrived glamour of the women shopping and in the vain posturing and hair-combing of the young men. The houses were French, the official buildings Italian baroque, the monuments and statues pure South American - they seemed to get more outlandish as one moved south, the goddesses and sprites got nakeder, the heroes sterner and more truculently posed.

After the barrel-chested Indians living among wind-haunted rocks in the high plains, and the farmers in the tumbledown villages near the border, and the yawning cracked-open river valleys of the north, I was prepared for anything but Tucuman. It was gloomy, but gloom was part of the Argentine temper; it was not a dramatic blackness, but rather a dampness of soul, the hang-dog melancholy immigrants feel on rainy afternoons far from home. There was no desolation, and if there were barbarities they remained dark secrets and were enacted in the torture chambers of the police stations or in the cramped workers' quarters of the sugar plantations. It was four in the afternoon before I found a bar - Tucuman was that proper.

I spent the day walking. It was cloudy and humid, and the light was so poor, the box-camera man in the Plaza Independencia (Argentina's independence was declared in Tucuman in 1816) could not get a likeness of me until he had made two tries. And what was it- perhaps the sombre tones of a Bunuel movie?-that made me think of Tucuman as the sort of place a sad innocent child would be sent to spend a terrifying week with his maiden aunt, among her dusty heirlooms. I imagined pretty, persecuted servant girls in the narrow houses, and the steady tick of ormolu clocks in high-ceilinged parlours. But this was fantasy, a stroller's embroidery. I found a tourist office. The lady gave me three brochures, each urging me to leave Tucuman: to go to the mountains, to the woods outside town, or - and this amused me - to visit Jujuy. One of the attractions of Tucuman, it appeared, was that it was a day's drive from Jujuy.

The curios in Tucuman were versions of gaucho kitsch - sets of bolas, toy horse-whips, overpriced daggers; and there were also salt shakers, aprons, calendars and little boxes made out of cactus fibre, all stamped Tucuman. The bookshelves were vastly more impressive than any I had seen on this trip, or was this a stubborn bias I had formed after seeing three of my own titles on display in Spanish translation? I made a note of the publisher's address in Buenos Aires: I would look him up when I arrived.

I did little else in Tucuman but buy a pizza - a thick Neapolitan-style pizza, garnished with anchovies. This reminded me of a sad remark I had heard in Peru. Times are so bad in Peru,' a man said, 'even the anchovy has left our waters and swum away.' As the day wore on I became firmer in my resolve to leave Tucuman on the North Star. I ran into Wolfgang later in the day and we walked together to the railway station. He was happy. In twenty-four hours the dollar had risen five pesos, 'and tomorrow it will be more.' He was delighted with the way things were going, and I saw him in Buenos Aires, waking each morning to examine the rise in the inflation rate. For Wolfgang, inflation was a great dividend.

The North Star was waiting at the platform.

Wolfgang sighed. 'After this,' he said, 'I take no more trains.'

'Want something to read?' I took out the Dürrenmatt novel and handed it to him.

'I have read it before, in German,' he said, after examining it. But he kept it all the same: 'I can practise my English language.'

Oswaldo, who had the lower berth in my compartment on the North Star, was a jumpy, fast-talking salesman on his way to Rosario to sell some meat. He had wanted to take a plane, but his company said it was too expensive. 'This same train crashed about a month ago. Lots of people got killed - the coaches were burning, it was terrible.' He looked out of the window, jerking the curtains apart. 'I hope it doesn't happen to us. I don't want to be in a train crash. But I have a very bad feeling about this train.'

His conversation was so depressing that I took myself to the dining car and sat at a table with the Tucuman newspaper and a bottle of beer. There was a gloating report in the paper about the right-wing parties having won in the French elections and about kidnappings in Italy. ('Our terrorists have all gone to Europe,' an Argentine man said to me in Buenos Aires. There was something vindictive in his commiseration. 'Now you will have a taste of what we've been through.') The press in Argentina made political capital out of reporting other countries' news.

'With your permission,' said Oswaldo, seating himself at my table. He carried a comic book. It was a Spanish one, about an inch thick, and its title was D 'A rtagnan - the name of the goonish swashbuckler in the cover story. It seemed fairly unambitious reading, even for a meat salesman.

I ignored him and looked out of the window. We left Tucuman, the city, then the province, and entered the adjacent province of Santiago de Estero. In the misty dusk, the cane fields and orange groves were richly green, like Ireland at twilight. There were fires in some of the farmyards, and enough light for me to make out the cane-cutters' brick sheds in a terrace row, and far-off the roofs and pillars of the owner's mansion, and the beautiful horses standing by the fence. Then night fell on the cane fields and the only sign of life was the yellow headlamps of cars wobbling down the country roads.

'This is where it happened,' said Oswaldo. He had put down his comicbook. 'Thecrash.'

He braced himself against the table, as if he expected to be thrown off his chair. But the train continued to rock through Argentina and a man was singing in the kitchen.

Dinner was served at ten o'clock - four courses, including a fat steak, for two dollars. It was the sort of dining car where the waiters and stewards were dressed more formally than the people eating. All the tables were full, a well-fed noisy crowd of mock-Europeans. Two men had joined Oswaldo and me, and after a decent pause and some wine, one of them began talking about his reason for going to Buenos Aires: his father had just had a heart attack.

He spoke in slushy Argentine Spanish, turning every double-L into a Russian zha sound. 'My father's eighty-five years old,' said the man, stuffing his mouth with bread. 'Never got sick a day in his life. He smokes all the time, practically eats cigarettes. He's very strong and healthy. I was surprised when they called me up and told me he'd had a heart attack. I said, "That man's never been sick a day in his life." '

'My father was the same,' said the second man. 'Very tough, a real old-timer. He didn't die of a heart attack. With him it was his liver.'

Oswaldo said, 'Well, my father-'

The first man was smoking and eating compulsively; smoke trickled out of his nostrils as he chewed bread. Every so often he'd call out, 'Boss!'

'Boss!' he yelled. 'Bring me an ashtray. I need an ashtray when I eat.'

He ate all the bread in the basket.

'Boss! More bread - I'm hungry. And, while you're at it, another beer-I'm thirsty.'

They had a lot of swagger, these men; they were full of talk and rather deficient in humour. They were not idle; in fact, they struck me as being hard-working. But, of all the people I met in South America, the Argentines were the least interested in the outside world or in any subject that did not directly concern Argentina. They shared this quality with white South Africans; they seemed to imply that they were stuck at the bottom of the world and surrounded by savages. They had a bluff bullying tone, even when they spoke to one another, and they were philistines to the core. This was my assessment on the North Star. It was not until after I arrived in Buenos Aires that I met sweeter-natured people, and even intellectuals, and had to revise my opinion.

For the next half-hour Oswaldo and the other two talked about football. Argentina had just beaten Peru, and they were confident about Argentina's chances in the World Cup in July.

'Do you speak Spanish?' It was the first man, whose father had had the heart attack. He held a segment of bread near his mouth.

'Yes,' I said. 'I think it's adequate.'

'You don't say very much. That's why I'm asking.'

'I'm not interested in football.'

He smirked at the others. 'I mean, you don't join the conversation.'

'What conversation?'

'This one,' he said, growing impatient.

'About football.'

'No, about everything. We talk - you don't. You just sit there.'

'So what?' I said.

'Maybe something is wrong.'

So that was it: suspicion, fear, the sense that my silence meant disapproval; the old South American insecurity.

I said, 'Nothing is wrong. I am very happy to be here. Argentina is a wonderful country.'

'He is happy,' said the man. He still held the segment of bread in his hand. He moved his wine glass closer and said, 'Want to know what they do in Spain? Watch. This is what they do. Ready? They dunk their piece of bread in like this.' He dunked his piece of bread in the wine. Then they eat it. Like this.' He ate the soggy bread and, still chewing, he said, 'See? They put bread into wine. In Spain.'

I said, 'If you think that's strange, listen to this.'

They smiled: I had joined the conversation.

'The Italians put fruit into wine,' I went on. They chop up pears, peaches, bananas, and put them into a wine glass. They stir it, eat the fruit, and then drink the wine. Imagine doing that to a glass of wine!'

This did not go down well. They stared at me.

Finally, Oswaldo said, 'We do that, too.'

The meal ended with coffee and creme caramel, and then the second man launched into a boring description of what bread was called in different parts of Argentina. 'Now this, in Tucuman, we call a bun. But if you go to Cordoba they'll call it a roll. Over in Salta they call it a cake. But loaf- that's what they call it in -'

He went on and on, and the others chipped in with their regional differences. I felt I could add nothing to this. I said good night and walked through the speeding train and went to bed.

A dream claimed me. I was with a lovely sly woman in an Edwardian house. The house shook, the floor dipped and bobbed like a raft, and cracks made their way up the walls. The woman pleaded with me to explain this shaking. I looked out of the shattered front window, and then walked into the yard. There was such a wobble in the yard I could barely stand up; but it had to be felt - it could not be seen. The woman was at the window, and all the bricks around her were split.

'You are over a magnetic field,' I said. There is a wire down there loaded with electricity.' I was balancing unsteadily as I spoke. This magnetism is causing the house to shake -'

I woke up. The train was shaking like the yard in my dream, and I no longer remembered the woman's name.

It was a sunny day, and moments later we stopped at San Lorenzo on the Parana River. Across the river was the province of Entre Rios, and beyond that Uruguay. The land was flat, the fences entwined with morning glories, and horses cropped grass in the open pastures.

Oswaldo was packing. Those fellows we were having dinner with last night,' he said. 'They got interesting after you left. You should not have gone to bed so soon.'

'1 didn't have anything to say.'

'You could have listened,' said Oswaldo. 'It was interesting. One of them is in the meat business. He knew me! Well, not personally, but he had heard of me.'

Oswaldo was very pleased with this. He finished packing. His comic book still lay on the seat.

'Want my book?'

I picked it up and glanced through it. D'Artagnan was a Spanish comic, luridly illustrated. Super Album, it said. Ten Complete Stories in Full Colour. I looked at the stories: 'Goodbye California,' 'We, The Legion,' 'Or-Grund, Viking Killer.' It was cowboys, detectives, cave men, soldiers, and ads for learning how to fix televisions in your spare time.

'I've got a book,' I said.

T'm offering it to you for nothing,' said Oswaldo.

'I don't read comics.'

'This one is beautiful.'

Comics are for kids and illiterates, I wanted to say, but one was not supposed to criticize these people.

Thank you,' I said. 'Do you ever read Argentine authors?'

This,' he said, tapping the comic book in my hand, 'is an Argentine book. It is from Buenos Aires.'

'I was thinking of the other kind of books. Without pictures.'

'Stories?'

'Yes. Borges, for example.'

'Which Borges?'

'Jorge Luis.'

'I don't know him.'

He was bored by this and rather annoyed that I hadn't enthused when he had given me his comic book. He said goodbye a bit curtly and got off the train when we drew into Rosario. Rosario was industrial, suburban, and also on the Parana. These smells were mingled: factory smoke, flowering trees, the hot river. It was in one of these solid middle-class villas, in 1928, that Che Guevara was born. But it was not Rosario that made him a revolutionary, it was his experience in Guatemala - when the C.I.A. gave Arbenz the push in 1954 - that provoked in him the conviction that South America was badly in need of another liberator. My peregrinations through these countries had led me to the same conclusions. In a way, Guevara's fate was worse than Bolivar's. Guevara's collapse was complete; his intentions were forgotten, but his style was taken up by boutique owners (one of the fanciest clothes boutiques in London is called Che Guevara). There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable. That Guevara succeeded in influencing dress-designers was part of his tragedy.

There was a look of September in the fields beyond Rosario, the depleted furrows, the litter of corn husks, the harvesters fuddling with hay bales. Farther on, the farming ceased and the grazing land took over, cattle stilled on green grass, windbreaks of gum trees. It could not have looked quieter or more orderly.

Here was an army camp, a suburb, a factory. Elsewhere in South America army camps could look as menacing as prisons, but this one was unfortified, and the soldiers on manoeuvres - they were attacking a tank in a field near the tracks - looked like boy scouts. The suburb did not look stifling, nor was the factory a blot on the landscape. It was easy to be fooled by appearances, but after what I had seen I needed the reassurance of this order, the lightness of this air, the glimpse of this hawk steadying itself in the sky.

There were many small stations here on the line, but the North Star did not stop at them. The land grew swampier - rivers, tributaries of the Parana, were brimming their banks and flooding the dirt roads. The flooding showed in the greenery it had produced: very tall blue-gums and thick woods. The ranch houses had elegance and space, but there were small square bungalows, too, each on its own fenced-in plot, the tiny house, tiny garden, tiny swimming pool.

Then the houses began to pile up - sheds at the marsh's edge, bigger houses and buildings farther on, water towers and church steeples. It was lunch time. Schoolgirls in white uniforms skipped on the pavements, and at the station called J.L. Suarez there were suburbanites waiting for the local train, and beyond them, beyond the graffiti (Give Perón the Power), were stern little houses in tight streets, and hedges, and, purely for decoration, banana trees. The cooks and waiters from the dining car got off at San Martin, where nearly all the houses were one-story affairs; and, at Miguelete, more people got off and walked past the golf club - here a player waited for the train to pull out before making his putt.

The city itself, I knew, could not be far away. The houses became more splendid and with this splendour was a haunted look, like the ghostly houses in Borges' stories. They were built in the French style and had gothic grille-work and balconies and bolted shutters. They were the colour of a cob-web and just as fragile-seeming and half hidden by trees. The next open space was a park in a burst of sunlight, then a boulevard, and a glimpse of Europe and the hurry and fine clothes of people on a busy pavement. It was as if I had been travelling in a tunnel for months and had just popped out of the other end, at the far side of the earth, in a place that was maddeningly familiar, as venerable as Boston but much bigger.

Retiro Station was English-made and built to an English design, with a high, curved roof supported by girders forged in a Liverpool ironworks, and marble pillars and floors, ornately carved canopies, shafts of sunlight emphasizing its height and, indeed, everything of a cathedral but altars and pews. The stations and railways in Argentina are British in appearance for a very good reason: most of them were built and run by the British until, in 1947, in what was surely one of the worst business deals ever, Juan Perón bought them. If he had waited a few years, the British railway companies - which were losing money -would have given them to him for nothing. The Argentine Railways have been losing money ever since. But the equipment remains, and it was a relief to me, after such a long trip, to arrive at this station, in the heart of a complex and beautiful city. It reminded me that I had travelled a great distance, and this kind of arrival mattered more than the unearthly sights of the Andes and the high plains. It was not enough for me to know that I was in uninhabited altitudes; I needed to be reassured that I had reached a hospitable culture that was explainable and worth the trouble.

Buenos Aires is at first glance, and for days afterwards, a most civilized ant-hill. It has all the elegance of the old world in its buildings and streets, and in its people all the vulgarity and frank good health of the new world. All the news-stands and bookshops - what a literate place, one thinks; what wealth, what good looks. The women in Buenos Aires were well-dressed, studiously chic, in a way that has been abandoned in Europe. I had expected a fairly prosperous place, cattle and gauchos, and a merciless dictatorship; I had not counted on its being charming, on the seductions of its architecture, or the vigour of its appeal. It was a wonderful city for walking, and walking I decided it would be a pleasant city to live in. I had been prepared for Panama and Cuzco, but Buenos Aires was not what I had expected. In the story 'Eveline' in James Joyce's Dubliners, the eponymous heroine reflects on her tedious life and her chance to leave Dublin with Frank: 'He had fallen on his feet in Buenos Ayres, he said, and had come over to the old country just for a holiday.' Frank is an adventurer in the new world and is full of stories ('he told her stories of the terrible Patagonians'); soon, he proposes marriage, and he urges her to make her escape from Dublin. She is determined to leave, but at the last moment - 'All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart' - her nerve fails her. Frank boards the boat-train and she remains in Dublin, 'like a helpless animal'.

The stories in Dubliners are sad - there are few sadder in literature -but 'Eveline' did not seem to me such a chronicle of thwarted opportunity until I saw the city she missed. There had seemed to me to be no great tragedy in failing to get to Buenos Aires; I assumed that Joyce used the city for its name, to leave the stinks of Dublin for the 'good airs' of South America. But the first girl I met in Buenos Aires was Irish, a rancher, and she spoke Spanish with a brogue. She had come in from Mendoza to compete in the World Hockey Championships and she asked me - though I would have thought the answer obvious -whether I too was a hockey player. In America, the Irish became priests, politicians, policemen - they looked for conventional status and took jobs that would guarantee them a degree of respect. In Argentina, the Irish became farmers and left the Italians to direct traffic. Clearly, Eveline had missed the boat.

In the immigrant free-for-all in Buenos Aires, in which a full third of Argentina's population lives, I looked in vain for what I considered to be seizable South American characteristics. I had become used to the burial-ground features of ruined cities, the beggars' culture, the hacienda economy, the complacent and well-heeled families squatting on Indians, government by nepotism, the pig on the railway platform. The primary colours of such crudities had made my eye unsubtle and spoiled my sense of discrimination. After the starving children of Colombia and the decrepitude of Peru, which were observable facts, it was hard to betome exercised about press censorship in Argentina, which was ambiguous and arguable and mainly an idea. I had been dealing with enlarged visual simplicities; I found theory rarified and, here, in a city that seemed to work, was less certain of my ground. And yet, taking the measure of it by walking its streets, restoring my circulation -1 had not really walked much since I had left Cuzco - it did not seem so very strange to me that this place had produced a dozen world-class concert violinists, and Fanny Foxe, the stripper; Che Guevara, Jorge Luis Borges, and Adolf Eichmann had all felt equally at home here.

There was a hint of this cultural overlay in the composition of the city. The pink-flowered 'drunken branch' trees of the pampas grew in the parks, but the parks were English and Italian, and this told in their names, Britannia Park, Palermo Park. The downtown section was architecturally French, the industrial parts German, the harbour Italian. Only the scale of the city was American; its dimensions, its sense of space, gave it a familiarity. It was a clean city. No one slept in its doorways or parks - this, in a South American context, is almost shocking to behold. I found the city safe to walk in at all hours, and at three o'clock in the morning there were still crowds in the streets. Because of the day-time humidity, groups of boys played football in the floodlit parks until well after midnight. It was a city without a significant Indian population - few, it seemed, -strayed south of Tucuman, and what Indians existed came from Paraguay, or just across the Rio de la Plata in Uruguay. They worked as domestics, they lived in outlying slums, they were given little encouragement to stay.

It was a divided culture, but it was also a divided country. The Argentines I met said it was two countries - the uplands of the north, full of folklore and mountains and semi-barbarous settlers; and the 'humid pampas' of the south, with its cattle ranches and its emptiness, a great deal of it still virgin territory (pampas derives from an Aymara word meaning space). You have to travel a thousand miles for this division to be apparent, and Argentines - in spite of what they claim is their adventurous spirit- only travel along selected routes. They know Chile. Some know Brazil. They spend weekends in the fleshpots of Montevideo. The richer ones own second homes in the Patagonian oasis of Bariloche. But they do not travel much in the north of Argentina, and they don't know, or even care, very much about the rest of South America. Mention Quito and they will tell you it is hellish, small, poor and primitive. A trip to Bolivia is unthinkable. Their connections tend to be with Europe. They fancy themselves Frenchified and have been told so often that their capital is like Paris they feel no need to verify it with a visit to France. They prefer to maintain their ancestral links with Europe; many go to Spain, but almost a quarter of a million visit Italy every year. The more enterprising are Anglophile. They are unsure of the United States, and their uncertainty makes them scorn it.

'But what do you know about Argentina?' they asked me, and by way of forestalling their lectures - they seemed deeply embarrassed about their political record - I said things like, 'Well, when I was in Jujuy -' or 'Now, Humahuaca's awfully nice -' or 'What struck me about La Quiaca -.' No one I met had been to La Quiaca or taken the train across the border. The person in Buenos Aires who wishes to speak of the squalor of the distant provinces tells you about the size of the cockroaches in nearby Rosario.

I had arrived in Buenos Aires exhausted at the beginning of a heatwave which people said was the Argentine autumn. Five days and nights on the train from La Paz had left me limp. I had a bad cold, my wounded hand throbbed, and for several days I did nothing but convalesce; I read, I drank wine, and I played billiards until I was completely myself again.

At last, I felt well enough to see my Argentine publisher. But I had no luck with the telephone. The receiver honked and buzzed, but no human voice could be heard on it. I decided to see the hall porter at my hotel aboutit.

'I am having difficulty calling this number,' I said.'

'Buenos Aires?'

'Yes. A company on Carlos Pellegrini.'

'But Carlos Pellegrini is only four blocks from here!'

'I wanted to call them.'

He said, 'You will find it much quicker to walk.'

I walked to the office and introduced myself as the author of the three titles I had seen in the bookstores in Tucuman.

'We were expecting someone much older,' said Mr Naveiro, the managing director of the firm.

'After what I've been through, I feel eighty years old,' I said.

Hearing that I had arrived, a lady entered Mr Naveiro's office and said, 'There is a certain general in the government who has read your books. He is Minister of Transportation, and he would like you to take the train to Salta.'

I said that I had already been to Salta, or at least a few miles away.

'He would like you to take the train from Salta to Antafagosta in Chile.'

I said that I would prefer not to.

'The general was also wondering where else you would like to go.'

I said south, to Patagonia.

'He will give you tickets. When do you wish to go?'

Like that, the arrangements were made.

'We hope you will enjoy your stay in Argentina,' said Mr Naveiro. 'We have passed through terrible times, but things are better now.'

It seemed so. There had not been a political kidnapping for two years. My friend Bruce Chatwin, who had recently returned from Patagonia, said that the urban guerillas were on holiday in Uruguay or skiing in Switzerland. Isabel Perón had been overthrown; disarmed, she lived under house arrest in a remote valley with her pet canaries and her maid. I was more sceptical about the official reports of political prisoners. There are no political prisoners in all of the Argentine Republic,' said Colonel Dotti, Director of the National Prison System. They are subversive delinquents, not political prisoners,! Shortly after I arrived, sixty 'subversive delinquents' died in a prison riot in Buenos Aires; some had been shot, others had been asphyxiated.

I could not draw Mr Naveiro on this issue, and it seemed rude to insist. He was anxious to please. Did I want to send anyone a telex? Did I wish to dictate some letters to his lovely secretary? Was my hotel comfortable? Was there anyone in Argentina I wished to meet? Did I want someone to fly to Patagonia to make arrangements for me there?

'My idea,' he said, 'is to get someone to take a plane to Patagonia. You take the train. When you get there, you will have someone on hand, if any problem arises. All you have to do is say yes and it will be done.'

I explained that this might have been helpful in the mountains of Colombia, but that I did not anticipate any difficulties in Patagonia.

'Well, then,' he said, 'I suppose you know that this is the country of meat. You must have a big piece of meat to celebrate your arrival in Buenos Aires.'

It was the biggest steak I had ever seen, the shape of a size twelve football boot and tender as a boiled turnip. In this particular restaurant it was necessary to specify the cut as well as the steer. You said rump, then long-horn; or tenderloin and short-horn.