The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

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.