The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

22 THE OLD PATAGONIAN EXPRESS

It was not necessary for Otto to wake me up; the dust did that. It filled my compartment, and as the Lakes of the South Express hurried across the plateau where it seldom rains (what good were leakproof shoes here?), the dust was raised, and our speed forced it through the rattling windows and the jiggling door. I woke feeling suffocated and made a face mask of my bed sheet in order to breathe. When I opened the door a cloud of dust blew against me. It was no ordinary dust storm, more like a disaster in a mine shaft: the noise of the train, the darkness, the dust, the cold. There was no danger of my sleeping through Ingeniero Jacobacci. I was fully awake just after midnight. I gritted my teeth and sand grains crunched in my molars.

I put my suitcase in order, stuffed my pockets with the apples I had bought in Carmen de Patagones and went to the vestibule to wait for Otto's signal. There I sat. The dust whirled out of the corridor and gusted around the light-bulbs and covered the mirrors and windows with hamster fur. I held a handkerchief against my face. It was no use washing; there was no soap, and the water was ice cold.

Otto appeared sometime later. He had put on his railwayman's uniform over his pyjamas and looked haggard. He tapped his wristwatch and in a groggy voice said, 'Jacobacci, twenty minutes.'

I wanted to go back to bed. The last thing I wanted was to leave the safety of this train for the uncertainty outside. The train was only dusty, and I had a nest here; out there was emptiness, and nothing was certain. Every person I had met had warned me against taking the train to Esquel. But what could I do? I had to go to Esquel to go home.

I had expected that I would be the only person to get out at Ingeniero Jacobacci. I was wrong. There was a pair of old men carrying large oil drums as part of their luggage, a woman with one child around her neck and another tagging along behind her, a couple whose suitcase was bound with string and belts, and others who were shadows. The station was small — there was just about room for all of us on the platform. The faces of the people in the second class coaches, who had been woken by the jolt of the stop, the station lights, were fatigued and bloodless. For half an hour the train hissed at the platform, and then it drew out very slowly. It left dust and dim light and silence. It seemed to take the world with it.

That express train — and how I yearned to be back on it — had blurred distance and altitude. The statistics were given at Jacobacci. We were over a thousand miles from Buenos Aires, and since Carmen de Patagones, which was at sea-level, we had climbed to over 3,000 feet, on a plateau that did not descend again until the Straits of Magellan. In this wind, at this altitude, at this time of night — two in the morning — it was very cold in Jacobacci. No one stops at Jacobacci, people had said. I could disprove that. Passengers had got off the train. I assumed that, like me, they would be waiting for the train to Esquel. I looked around for them. They were gone.

Where? Into that wind, that darkness, those huts in the desert. They were not changing trains — they lived in Jacobacci. Later I judged it to be a naive thought, but at the time I reflected on how strange it was that there were people — immigrants and the children of immigrants — who had chosen to live here, of all places. There was no water, no shade, the roads were terrible, and little paid employment was possible. However tough the people, they did not have the stamina and ingenuity of the Indians who, in any case, had never lived in this part of Patagonia. To the north-east were the fertile grasslands of Bahia Blanca, to the west the lakes — the Tyrolean paradise of Bariloche. For the sake of a few sheep and cattle, and a baffling stubbornness, people lived in this tiny Patagonian town, where the rail line divided, a railway junction in the desert. But it was a naive thought. Some people required space much more than they required grass or trees, and for them cities and forests were stews of confusion. You can be yourself here, a Welshman told me in Patagonia. Well, that much was true.

I left my suitcase on the platform, paced for a while and smoked my pipe. There would not be a train to Buenos Aires for three days. A Unesco poster nailed to the station wall told me about malnutrition in Latin America. As in Guatemala, a sign said Use The Train — It Is Cheaper! And another said, The Train Is Your Friend- Be A Friend of The Train! Hanging from a platform post was a bronze bell, like an old school bell. The station master had rung it just before the Lakes of the South Express had pulled out, but no one had boarded.

The train had gone in one direction, the Jacobacci passengers in another. So only I was left, like Ishmael: 'And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.' It was cold in this dismal place, but I had no choice but to wait four hours for the teeny-weeny steam train to Esquel. But I also thought: It's perfect. If one of the objects of travel was to give yourself the explorer's thrill that you were alone, that after fifteen or twenty thousand miles you had outrun everyone else and were embarked on a solitary mission of discovery in a remote place, then I had accomplished the traveller's dream. The train travels a thousand miles from Buenos Aires, stops in the middle of the desert and you get out. You look around; you're alone. It is like arriving. In itself it is like discovery — it has that singularity. The sky was full of stars in unfamiliar constellations, and even the moon was distorted, like an antipodean version of the one I was used to. This was all new. In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark. The conceit of this, the idea of being able to report it — for I had deliberately set out to write a book, hadn't I? — made up for the discomfort. Alone, alone: it was like proof of my success. I had had to travel very far to arrive at this solitary condition.

A voice, a frog-croak, said, 'Tea?'

It was the station master. He wore a winter coat and a scarf and cracked boots and had a silver General Roca Railways badge on his coat collar. The tiny gas stove in his office afforded some heat, and a small dented tea kettle rocked on an improvised wire grill.

I thought I had better explain. I said, 'I am waiting for the train to Esquel.'

' Esquel is a very nice place.'

This was the view from Jacobacci. He was the first person I had met to praise Esquel. But having seen a bit of Jacobacci I could understand why. People in Belchertown, Massachusetts, always have a good word for Holyoke.

He had packed maté leaves (they are from an evergreen tree, the Ilex) into a small cup and inserted a silver straw. The cup was bone, a cow's horn with crude ornamental writing on it.

He said, 'There is lots to do in Esquel. Hotels, restaurants. There are big farms. Go about fifty kilometres and you will find a lovely park — trees, grass, everything. Yes, Esquel is a nice place.'

He poured boiling water over the leaves and handed me the tea.

'You like it?'

'Very good. I like maté.' He had put too much sugar in it. It tasted disgusting.

'I mean, the cup.'

I looked at the cup.

'A cow's horn,' he said. 'It is from Paraguay.'

The scratches on the horn said as much. I told him I admired it.

'You have been to Paraguay?'

He shrugged. 'My wife. Her brother is there. She went there last year.' Hegrinned.'Inaplane.'

He was nodding, making another cup of tea. I asked him questions about Jacobacci, and the train, and Patagonia. His replies were not interesting. He wanted to talk about money. How much had my suitcase cost? How much was a house in the United States? What did I earn?

How much did a new car cost? By way of reply I told him how much a pound of steak cost in Massachusetts. That took his breath away. He stopped complaining and began to boast about the price of sirloin.

If only he had said, Want to hear something strange? He was old enough to know a good story. But he was half asleep, and it was cold, and nearly three in the morning. So I left him alone and went outside. I walked up the tracks, away from the lights of the station. The wind in the thorn bushes rasped like sand in a chute. The air smelled of dust. The moon on the bushes shone blue across the bumpy monotony of Patagonia.

I heard a growl. There was a low black hut about thirty yards away, andi suppose my footsteps on the gravel of the railway line had woken the dog. He began to bark. His bark woke one nearby and this nearer one yapped loudly. I have never managed to overcome my childhood fear of being bitten by a dog, and large barking dogs petrify me. There are Irish wolfhounds slavering in my worst nightmares. The most aggressive dogs are owned by old people and lovely women and ugly midget men and childless couples. He won't hurt you, say these people, enjoying my terror, and I want to say, Maybe not, but I might hurt him, In South America — the fact is well-known — many of the dogs are rabid. They are not the cowering pariahs I had seen in Ceylon and Burma, but sleeker, fangy, wolf-like creatures which were encouraged by the natives. There were always dogs in the Indian villages in Peru and Bolivia, looking much more alert than the Indians themselves. The silly things had chased the train. I was afraid of getting rabies. The cure is as bad as the disease.' It was not an irrational fear: I had seen notices warning people of the dangers of mad dogs.

One dog, smaller than his bark suggested — about the size of a satchel — pushed through the thorn bushes and hurried onto the track. He crouched and snarled, summoning the other one. I put my hands into tny pockets and started walking backwards. I glanced back at the lighted station -1 was stupid to have strayed so far. The dogs were now together on the tracks and approaching me, but warily, rushing forward and barking loudly and keeping themselves low. I looked for a stick to beat them with (would a beating madden them and make them killers, or would it drive them away?), but this was the desert. Apart from the few poplars at the station there was not a tree for hundreds of miles. I wanted to run, but I knew they would understand this as a sign of cowardice and pounce on me. I continued to walk backwards, keeping my eye on them and fearing them too much to hate them. Nearer the station I was given hope by the poplars — at least I could climb one and be safe. But there was light here, too; the light seemed to worry the dogs. They kept in the shadows, darting between the railway cars, and when they saw I was safe on the platform they chased each other. They were small, stupid, pathetic and crippled; and from my position of safety I hated them.

The station master had heard the commotion. He said, 'Don't go out there very far. There are a lot of dogs around.'

I dragged my suitcase to a wooden bench. I had discarded every book but Boswell, and this I started to re-read. My hands were cold. I tucked the book away and put on another sweater, and with my hands in my pockets I lay on the bench, under the sign The Train Is Your Friend. I stared at the light-bulb and gave thanks for not having been bitten by a rabid dog.

Rational or not, it was my fear. There are many satisfactions in solitary travel, but there are just as many fears. The worst is the most constant: it is the fear of death. It is impossible to spend months travelling alone and arrive in Patagonia and not feel as if one has done something very foolish. In the cold hours before dawn in such a desolate place, the whole idea seems foolhardy, an unnecessary risk, and thoroughly pointless. I had arrived alone and had nearly reached my destination, but what was the point? I had intended to enjoy myself; I had no point to prove. And yet every day I know this fear. Passing a car crash, reading of a train wreck, seeing a hearse or a graveyard; in the back of a swerving bus or noticing a firedoor that was locked (the firedoors in most hotels I stayed in were kept padlocked at night to prevent thieves from entering), or scribbling a post card and seeing the ambiguity in my sentence This is my last trip — all of it started a solemn death-knell at the back of my brain.

I had left a safe place and had journeyed to a dangerous one. The risk was death and it seemed even more imminent because, so far, no bad thing had befallen me. It seemed that to travel here, in this way, was asking for trouble. Landslides, plane crashes, food poisoning, riots, blow-outs, sharks, cholera, floods, mad dogs: they were everyday events in this neck of the woods — you needed a charmed life to avoid them. And, lying there on the bench, I did not congratulate myself on how far I had come, that I was within an ace of my destination. Rather, I understood the people who had sniggered when I had told them where I was headed. They were right to mock; in their simple way, they had seen the futility of it. Mr Thornberry, in the Costa Rican jungle, had said, 'I know what I want to see. Parrots and monkeys! Where are they?' There were guanacos in Patagonia ('Guanacos spit at you!'). Bui really, was it worth risking your life to see a guanaco? Or, to put it another way, was it worth even one night half-frozen on a wooden bench in a Patagonian railway station, to hear the trill of the celebrated Flute-bird? I did not think so then. Later, it seemed such a diverting story I forgot my fear. But I was lucky. Usually, throughout this trip, I had looked out of a train window and thought: What a terrible place to die in.

I was also worried about losing my passport, my ticket home, or being robbed of all my money; of catching hepatitis and spending two months in a hospital in a desperate place like Guayaquil or Villazón. These were informed fears. 'We risk our lives every day, just crossing the street,' friendly people say, to reassure us. But there are greater risks in the Andes and in primitive countries, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.

And yet, on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people and dogs and electric lights, it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impression that I was a solitary explorer in a strange land. That illusion (which is also an illusion in the South Pole and at the headwaters of the Nile) was enough of a satisfaction to make me want to go forward.

I dozed, but when I did I woke up cold. I tried to stay awake and warm. I went for three more walks, giving the dogs a wide berth. There were cockcrows, but no signs of dawn; and the only sound was the wind, pushing against the station.

I had arrived at Ingeniero Jacobacci in darkness. It was still dark when I boarded the train. The station master gave me more tea and said I could get into the coach. It was as small as I had been warned it would be, and it was filled with dust that had blown through the windows. But at least I had a seat. At five, people started to gather. Incredibly, at this hour, they were seeing friends and family off. I had noticed this custom all over Bolivia and Argentina, this send-off, lots of kisses^ hugs, and waves, and at the larger stations weeping men parting from their wives and children. I found it touching, and at odds with their ridiculously masculine self-appraisal.

There was a whistle, a steam-whistle — a shrill fluting pipe. The station bell was rung. Well-wishers scrambled from the train, passengers boarded; and, just before six, we were off.

The moon was bright in a blue sky. There was no sun, and the land around Jacobacci was blue-grey and pale brown. We were out of town before the eastern sky began to glow. I was gladdened by the hills. In the darkness of our arrival I had assumed it would be as flat as the land I had seen at twilight, that wasteland around the village of Ministero Ramos Mexia, where grape-selling boys hopped and chirped in the dust. But this was different, and there were no clouds in the sky, so I had some assurance that it would be a warm day. I ate an apple and took out Boswell, and when the sun came up I went quietly to sleep.

It was an old train, and although by this time I ought to have been inured to the strangeness of South American railways, I still found it strange. There was a boy across the aisle, watching me yawn.

'Does this train have a name?' I asked.

'I don't understand.'

'The train I took to Buenos Aires was called "The North Star", and the Bariloche express is called "The Lake's of the South". The one to Mendoza is called "The Liberator". That sort of name.'

He laughed. 'This train is too insignificant to have a name. The government is talking about getting rid of it.'

'Isn't it called "The Esquel Arrow" or something like that?'

He shook his head.

'Or "The Patagonian Express"?'

‘The Old Patagonian Express,' he said. 'But express trains are supposed to go very fast.'

They never do,' I said. 'I was on an express to Tucumán that arrived a day late. It took us six hours to leave one station, up in Humahuaca.'

'Floods,'said the boy.'Rain. It doesn't rain here, but it is still a slow train. It's these hills. See, we're going around and around.'

We were. The hills and dales of Patagonia which I had welcomed for their variation and their undeniable beauty were the cause of our slow progress. On a straight track this trip would not have taken more than three hours, but we were not due to arrive in Esquel until 8.30 — nearly a fourteen-hour ride. The hills were not so much hills as they were failed soufflés.

It was a steam train, and for the first time since leaving home I wished I had brought a camera, to take its picture. It was a kind of demented samovar on wheels, with iron patches on its boiler and leaking pipes on its underside and dribbling valves and metal elbows that shot jets of vapour sideways. It was fuelled by oil, so it did not belch black smoke, but it had bronchial trouble, respirating in chokes and gasps on grades and wheezing oddly down the slopes when it seemed out of control. It was narrow gauge, the small carnages were wooden. First was no cleaner than Second, though First had higher back-rests on the seats. The whole contraption creaked, and when it was travelling fast, which was seldom, it made such a racket of bumping couplings and rattling windows and groaning wood that I had the impression it was on the verge of bursting apart — just blowing into splinters and dropping there in one of the dry ravines.

The landscape had a prehistoric look, the sort that forms a painted backdrop for a dinosaur skeleton in a museum: simple terrible hills and gullies; thorn bushes and rocks; and everything smoothed by the wind and looking as if a great flood had denuded it, washed it of all its particular features. Still the wind worked on it, kept the trees from growing, blew the soil west, uncovered more rock and even uprooted those ugly bushes.

The people in the train did not look out of the window, except at the stations, and only then to buy grapes or bread. One of the virtues of train travel is that you know where you are by looking out of the window. No sign-boards are necessary. A hill, a river, a meadow — the landmarks tell you how far you have come. But this place had no landmarks, or rather, it was all landmarks, one indistinguishable from the other — thousands of hills and dry riverbeds, and a billion bushes, all the same. I dozed and woke; hours passed; the scenery at the window did not alter. And the stations were interchangeable — a shed, a concrete platform, staring men, boys with baskets, the dogs, the battered pick-up trucks.

I looked for guanacos. I had nothing better to do. There were no guanacos. But there were other creatures — birds of all sorts, small twittering ones, swifts and sparrows, and dark falcons and hawks. Patagonia is, if nothing else, a bird sanctuary. There were owls here, too, and nearer the Andes great eagles; and, in the far south, albatrosses of enormous size. The ugliness of the landscape continued without let-up, and I had no wish to stir from this train. 'Here also we are grateful to the train, as to some god who conducts us swiftly through these shades and by so many hidden perils,' wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. 'So lightly do we skim these horrible lands; as the gull, who wings safely through the hurricane and past the shark.'

The fellow across the aisle was sleeping. I looked at him and the others, and I was struck by their resemblance to me. I had decided quite early in my trip that I was an implausible traveller — no credit cards, no rucksack. I was not well-dressed enough to be a tourist on a ten-day jaunt through ruins and cathedrals; nor was I dirty or frazzled enough to be a wanderer. People asked me what I did, and when I said \I was a geography teacher ('Easter vacation!') they doubted me. I mentioned my wife and children: but why was I here and they there? I had no ready answer to that one. Tourists regarded me as a backslider, wanderers seemed to think I was an intruder, and natives did not understand me. It was hard to convince anyone that I did not have an ulterior motive, that I wasn't on the run, a con-artist, a man with a scheme. I had a scheme — that was the worst of it — but I did not wish to disclose it. If I had told Thornberry, or Wolfgang, or the lady in Veracruz, or Bert and Elvera Howie, that I was a writer they would have either bolted or, as Bert Howie phrased it, 'put a couple of layers of shit in my ear'.

But on this train, the Old Patagonian Express, I looked like everyone else; slightly unshaven, fairly presentable, with a battered suitcase, vaguely European, moustache drooping, scuffed leakproof shoes. It was a relief. I was, at last, anonymous. But what a strange place to be anonymous in! I blended with the foreground. But what a background! Amazing: I belonged on this train.

The boy woke.

'How far to Norquinco?' he asked.

'I don't know,' I said. They all look the same to me.'

The man behind me said, 'About two hours.'

He did not gesture out of the window. He looked at his watch. The landscape was no help in determining where we were.

The boy's name was Renaldo. His surname was Davies — he was Welsh. This part of Patagonia was full of Joneses, Williamses, Powells and Pritchards, Welsh families who had migrated across the plateau from Rawson and Trelew and Puerto Madryn with the intention of founding a new Welsh colony. They are tough, independent and undemonstrative people, not the singers and dreamers one associates with Wales, but a different breed altogether, church-goers, sheep farmers, tenaciously Protestant, with a great sentiment for a homeland they have never seen and for a language few speak. (A classic of Welsh literature is called Dringo'r Andes — 'Climbing the Andes' — by the Welsh woman Eluned Morgan, who was born in the Bay of Biscay during the great migration.) Renaldo wanted to speak English, but his English was unintelligible to me, and so we spoke Spanish.

'I learned English on a cargo ship,' he said. 'That is not a good place to learn English.'

He had been on a ship for two years, and now he was on his way home.

'If you were on a ship,' I said, 'you must have been to Boston.'

'No,' he said. 'But I was all over America. The whole continent.'

'New York?'

'No.'

'New Orleans?'

'No.' And now he looked puzzled. 'America — not the United States.'

'South America?'

'That's right — all over it. All over America,' he said. 'And Asia — Singapore, Hong Kong. And Bombay. And Africa — Durban, Capetown, Port Elizabeth. I have been everywhere.'

The ship he had sailed in was Peruvian, but the crew was mainly Chinese and Indian — 'the other Indians, different from ours. I liked them, more or less. They talked, we played cards. But the Chinese! I hated them! They look at you — they don't say anything. If they want something, they just' — he snatched with his hand. 'Grab, grab, that's all they do.'

I asked him what his impression had been of South Africa. His reply surprised me.

'South Africa is a very bad place,' he said. 'Very pretty, but the society there is cruel. You won't believe me, but they have signs here and there that say "Only for Whites". Taxis, buses, shops — "Only for Whites". The white people go here, the black people go there. Strange, isn't it? And most of the people are black!' He reported this more in wonderment than in outrage, but he added that he did not approve.

Why not? I asked.

'It's no good. "Only for Whites", "Only for Blacks",' he said. 'It's a stupid system. It shows they've got big problems.'

I was encouraged that a Patagonian with no education could show such discernment. I said, 'I agree.'

He said, 'I'd rather spend my life in Barranquilla than Durban. And Barranquilla is really awful.'

That's true,' I said. 'I was in Barranquilla. I hated it.'

'Isn't it a pig-pen? A really ugly place.'

They were having an election when I was there.'

They have elections? Ha!' he said. There is nothing there at all!'

He was chortling, thinking of Barranquilla. I looked past him, out of the window at the dune-like hills and the low bushes, the blinding sun, the puffs of dust thrown up by the train. There was a condor — condors didn't flap their wings — circling in the distance. The Patagonian's disgust with Barranquilla was a hatred of slow decay, of mildew and insects. Here nothing rotted. A dead thing was quickly a dry carcass — it shrivelled and was bones. There was no humidity, nothing stagnant. It was desert cleanliness, the rapid destruction by sun and arid air, a dehydrated wilderness, a fossil on the planet's flank. Few live things had survived here, but those that had were practically indestructible.

'So you have seen the world,' I said. 'But why are you going home?'

'Because I have seen the world,' he said. There is nowhere like this. I am going to get a job, maybe building houses or fixing engines. In Norquinco or Esquel.'

'I am going to Esquel,' I said.

'It is quicker to take the bus from Bariloche.'

'I wanted to take the Patagonian Express,' I said.

The old one!'

When we arrived at Norquinco and he pulled his suitcase to the door, he said, The Queen of England — you know who I mean?'

'Queen Elizabeth? What about her?'

'She owns a ranch just outside Esquel. Lots of cattle — very nice.'

I spent the afternoon on that train as I had spent afternoons on trains all the way through the Americas. I remembered people who had been cruel to me; I rehearsed cutting remarks that I should have uttered; I recalled embarrassments in my life; I re-ran small victories and large defeats; I imagined being married to someone else, having children, getting divorced; I elected myself president of a banana republic and tried to cope with a noisy Opposition; I went to medical school and set up in practice and carried out tricky operations; I told a long humorous story to a large gathering, but in the end the prize went to someone else. I died, and people talked very loudly about me. It was a fairly typical afternoon of travelling.

I had been using the hamlet of Leleque on my map as a landmark. But Leleque was still hours away. The train toiled, seldom running straight, occasionally stopping — a shout, the bell, the whistle, the bark, and then we were off again. I realized that my trip was ending, but I was not sad when I remembered that, in a few hours, at nightfall perhaps, the train would bring me to my destination and there would be nothing more. My mind raced ahead to the station at Esquel, the plane to Buenos Aires, to my arrival home. Yes, I would take a taxi at the airport — hang the expense. My destination was near; I was impatient.

But this landscape taught patience, caution, tenacity. It needed to be studied to be seen. A glimpse of it told nothing. Down the narrowness of the tracks beside the desert the labouring engine chugged, always seeming on the verge of spewing its guts out, exploding in a shower of metal and vapor, or else seizing up in a succession of glugs and stopping on a slope, rolling backwards into the dip, and going no more. It seemed a marvel that an old engine like this could keep going, and I came to see the gasps of the locomotive as energetic rather than feeble.

But there was not enough in the engine or the landscape to hold the attention. I concentrated on Boswell and ate grapes and dozed. The sun had dropped; the hills were higher to the west and the sun slid towards them. The wind was colder. I saw that there was no chance of our arriving at Esquel before dark. When darkness fell it did so in that sudden Patagonian way, as swiftly as a dropped curtain, filling the night with chill. In the desert silence was the sound of wind, and the fretting train. The train stopped at the smaller stations near Esquel; the locomotive trembled in the darkness, and beyond it the sky was an immense sieve of blue stars.

It was after eight o'clock when I saw the lights. I looked for more. There were no more. There was nothing to these places, I thought, until you were on top of them. I did not know at that moment that we were on top of Esquel. I had expected more — an oasis, perhaps taller poplars, the sight of a few friendly bars, a crowded restaurant, a floodlit church, anything to signify my arrival. Or less: like one of the tiny stations along the line; like Jacobacci, a few sheds, a few dogs, a bell. The train emptied quickly.

I found a man with an official-looking cap, and a railway badge pinned to his shirt. Was there a hotel nearby?

'Esquel is full of hotels,' he said. 'Some of them are good, too.'

I asked him to name one. He did. I took myself to it and had — but not out of choice- a cold bath. And then to the restaurant.

'What will you drink? Red wine?'

'Yes,'I said.

'And what will you eat? Steak?'

'Yes.'

The usual. But the atmosphere was different here, a kind of Wild West saloon feeling, people in town for the weekend, leathery faces, wearing their leather jackets indoors here, one man with his book propped on a chair-seat. Waiters hurried by with trays. I saw a clock, a calendar, a photograph of what was probably a local football team, a saint's portrait.

I had been planning to go for a walk, to look for a bar. My muscles ached from the ride and I wanted to stretch. But there, in that chair, I started to doze. I shook myself awake and called for the bill.

The sand and grit between the pages of Boswell tumbled onto my chest as I lay in bed. I read a sentence, watched the sand slide out and in the act of brushing it away fell asleep.

It had been my intention to arrive in Esquel on Holy Saturday and to wake on Easter Sunday and watch the sunrise. But Easter had passed. This was no special date, and I had overslept. I got up and went outside. It was a sunny breezy day — the sort of weather that occurs every day of the year in that part of Patagonia.

I walked to the station. The engine that had taken me to Esquel looked derelict on the siding, as if it would never run again. But it had a hundred more years in it, I was sure. I walked beyond it, past the one-story houses to the one-roomed huts, to where the road turned into a dusty track. There was a rocky slope, some sheep, the rest bushes and weeds. If you looked closely you could see small pink and yellow flowers on these bushes. The wind stirred them. I went closer. They shook. But they were pretty. Behind my head was a great desert.

The Patagonian paradox was this: to be here, it helped to be a miniaturist, or else interested in enormous empty spaces. There was no intermediate zone of study. Either the enormity of the desert space, or the sight of a tiny flower. You had to choose between the tiny or the vast.

The paradox diverted me. My arrival did not matter. It was the journey that counted. And I would follow Johnson's advice. Early in his career he had translated the book of a Portuguese traveller in Abyssinia. In his Preface, Johnson wrote, 'He has amused the reader with no romantick absurdity, or incredible fictions; whatever he relates, 'whether true or not, is at least probable, and he who tells nothing exceeding the bounds of probability, has a right to demand that they should believe him who cannot contradict him.'

The sheep saw me. The younger ones kicked their heels. When I looked again, they were gone, and I was an ant on a foreign anthill. It was impossible to verify the size of anything in this space. There was no path through the bushes, but I could look over them, over this ocean of thorns which looked so mild at a distance, so cruel nearby, so like misshapen nosegays close-up. It was perfectly quiet and odourless.

I knew I was nowhere, but the most surprising thing of all was that I was still in the world after all this time, on a dot at the lower part of the map. The landscape had a gaunt expression, but I could not deny that it had readable features and that I existed in it. This was a discovery — the look of it. I thought: Nowhere is a place.

Down there the Patagonian valley deepened to grey rock, wearing its eons' stripes and split by floods. Ahead, there was a succession of hills, whittled and fissured by the wind, which now sang in the bushes. The bushes shook with this song. They stiffened again and were silent. The sky was clear blue. A puff of cloud, white as a quinceflower, carried a small shadow from town, or from the South Pole. I saw it approach. It rippled across the bushes and passed over me, a brief chill, and then went rucking east. There were no voices here. There was this, what I saw; and, though beyond it were mountains and glaciers and albatrosses and Indians, there was nothing here to speak of, nothing to delay me further. Only the Patagonian paradox: the vast space, the very tiny blossoms of the sage-brush's cousin. The nothingness itself, a beginning for some intrepid traveller, was an ending for me. I had arrived in Patagonia, and I laughed when I remembered I had come here from Boston, on the subway train that people took to work.