The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

14 THE EXPRESO CALIMA

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

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

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

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

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

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

They did not tell me that in Bogotá.'

'What do they know in Bogotá? Ha!'

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

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

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

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

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

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

'This is terrible,' I said.

The man next to me smiled.

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

'Where are you from, sir?'

I told him.

'Very far,' he said.

'And you are from?'

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

'Do you think we will get there?'

He smiled, he shrugged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Indian stood up.

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

About fifteen cents. The driver slowed down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'No school?'

'We used to go.'

'Where do you come from?'

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

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

I said, 'Is this your brother?'

The third boy giggled and began again to cough.

'That is my friend.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Where do you sleep?'

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

'Where do you eat?'

'People give us food.'

I said, 'You should go home.'

'That is worse,' said the second boy.

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

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

'We have to.'

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

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

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

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

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

But I was travelling alone, I said.

'It is very dangerous.'

I asked why.

'Thieves.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Really? I thought it was cool there.'

'Very hot. You will not like it.'

'You are from Cali?'

She smiled. 'Venezuela.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

This made my depression complete.

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

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

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

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

'How much do you earn in Cali?'

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

'A week? A day? A basket?'

'Eighty a day.'

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

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

Tsit hard work?'

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

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

'Sixty-four pesos.' Two dollars.

'And the year before that?'

'Fifty-six pesos.' A dollar fifty.

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

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

'You might get a hundred next year.'

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

'How many hours do you work?'

'All day.'

'You start early?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The old man turned away.

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

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

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

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

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.'