I went out into the high county east of the town the first day and came back almost empty-handed. Obviously I am not a person who finds deserts depressing, but this one weighed on my spirits as no other had ever done. It was stark and drab, just bare rock and sand in dull tones of brown and yellow, and dry beyond belief. The desiccated ground was virtually lifeless, no shrubs, no cacti, not even the tiny ground-hugging plants you find in nearly any desert—nothing. Nothing. I could have been on the moon. I wandered for hours in emptiness, growing more discouraged as the day waned. Even though the desert gained in beauty in late afternoon when the sun no longer bleached all color from it and the bare ravines turned dark and mysteriously rich, I sank into a somber, self-pitying mood. It was a mistake to come here, I told myself. I should be up by Iquique, perhaps, or inland on the slopes of the Andes where plant life is more abundant. But of course the whole point of this expedition was to explore this barren and virtually unknown coastal strip, which had not been properly studied by botanists since the pioneering work of Philippi almost a hundred years before.
The afternoon winds stirred up great black clouds of dust, which had the merit of providing me with a spectacular sunset as I trudged back to Pelpel. The rays of the late sun, filtering through the murk and haze, turned from brilliant yellow to a pale violet, and then through a stunningly complex series of ever deeper purples until, suddenly, there was gray and then black. Just before it became dark, I stumbled over what I thought was a rock, and for some reason looked back to discover that I had tripped on an isolated specimen of Copiapoa cinerea, a single unbranched plant with short sparse spines, growing, God alone knew why, just a couple of kilometers from town. It was the only plant of interest I had seen in the past six or seven hours. I collected it and went hurrying on into Pelpel as night fell.
Dinner was waiting for me at the hotel—everything out of cans, a watery vegetable soup and some kind of meat stew, washed down by thin, bitter red wine. I ate by myself, served in silence by the Indian woman who seemed to be the hotel’s only employee. From across the plaza came the raucous sound of music out of the Greek’s loudspeaker. When I was done eating, I walked outside and stood in front of the hotel a long while, watching the townsfolk promenade. Mostly they ignored me. Those that did stare at me stared without amiability and essentially without curiosity. I shrugged and went to my room, but that made things even worse—the bare walls, the fissure in the plaster, the single dim light-bulb, the sound of the dry ugly wind. The idea of trying to work or study or even to relax in such a room until it was time to sleep was a dismal one. And so, although I’m not what anyone would call a drinking man, I found myself going across the plaza to the beer-parlor, simply to have some sort of human contact and a bit of cheer on this cheerless evening in this cheerless town.
Some two dozen men were in the place, mostly gathered around the pool-table, a few slouched at the warped and discolored bar. The look I got from them as I appeared in the doorway was so frigid that I nearly turned and fled. But then Panagiotis boomed out, “Hello, Norteamericano! You come in! You have drink with us!” It was impossible to refuse.
The Greek was a big thickset man of about fifty, with gleaming buck teeth and a broad conspicuous nose. His black hair was all but gone, combed across his skull in sparse strands between which a freckled and deeply tanned scalp showed through. He spoke a little English and understood my Spanish, and we were able to communicate. First he tapped the bottles around him on the bar—Peruvian pisco and various local brandies and rums and some kind of Scotch that was labeled Hecho in Mexico, but I shook them off, not wanting anything so strong after having had wine with dinner, and said, “Hay cerveza?” Panagiotis laughed and groped under the bar and came up with a dusty bottle of tepid beer. Getting it down was a challenge, and after that I drank pisco.
He introduced me to the other men at the bar. The very tall, almost skeletal one with the sunken burning eyes and the knifelike cheekbones was his brother-in-law, Ramon Sotomayor. The fat one beyond him was Aguirre, the lawyer, and the one with faded red hair was Nuñez de Prado, the doctor, and that was Mendoza, the pharmacist, and so on. Each, when his name was mentioned, gave me a glum, surly glare and a brief reluctant nod of salutation, and that was all.
And then Panagiotis—who, like everyone else, knew from the moment of my arrival that I was here to collect plants—asked me what I was looking for. Cactus, I said, curving my fingers to pantomime their shapes. I had been out all day, I told him, but I had had mala suerte, bad luck, I had found nada. Panagiotis listened sympathetically. He conferred with Mendoza and Aguirre in Spanish that was too fast and idiomatic for me to understand, and then began drawing crude maps on bar napkins, accompanying his diagrams with a running commentary in broken English and a kind of pidgin Spanish. The maps were impossible to understand. I smiled and held up a hand and ran back to the hotel—a little tipsily—and got my own set of charts, and we spread them out on the bar. The others muttered and grumbled as though Panagiotis were giving me the location of secret gold mines, but he paid no attention to them and marked for me the places where I thought I would find what I was after. Then he slapped me on the back and filled my glass for the third or fourth time. He would take no payment. Eventually I got back to my room, head spinning, and not even the strident sounds of the loudspeaker music kept me awake for long.
The next day I started at dawn, going as far as I could in my battered jeep, covering the last few kilometers on foot. The Greek had guided me toward the rough ravines of the Quebrada Pelpel, ten kilometers east of town, where I already knew Philippi had collected in 1854. Sure enough, I found dense stands of Copiapoa cinerea there, several different populations including some plants with bizarre crested stems—the only such deformities ever observed in this species. That night I thanked Panagiotis warmly, and he filled me full of pisco until I begged him to stop and turned my glass bottomside up.
And over the days that followed I went south across that silent, ghostly desert into the Sierra Esmeralda, and north along the coastal road to Sabroso, the next town up, and inland along the low plateaus, and I found cinerea in a wide range of forms, some with brown spines, some with yellowish ones, some so old they were almost spineless. In the hills above Sabroso I discovered the practically unknown Copiapoa humilis, a small plant with roots like turnips, last seen by Philippi in 1860. It’s a difficult plant to find, because its dark color is much like that of the surrounding soil, and in times when even the fogs fail it protects itself against desiccation by pulling itself down into the earth until it almost vanishes. After looking in vain for it for hours, I discovered that I had sat right down on one clump of it—fortunately the spines are not very threatening—and thereafter I found plenty of them.
In this time I grew no closer to the people of Pelpel. The only one who as much as spoke to me was Panagiotis, and our conversations were limited by language barriers to the simplest themes. To the others I remained a total alien, unwanted, intrusive, resented. Their blank-eyed disdain was harder for me to take than solitude itself. I felt more comfortable by myself in the midst of a desert all but devoid of life than I did in that town. There was no reason for the locals to love me—they are a strange people, confined by the nature of their country to a narrow and rigid existence in their little oasis—but there wasn’t any need for them to treat me as if I had come to steal from them or spy on them. Unless, possibly, they suspected me of secretly being an anthropologist trying to pry into their private ways, for I knew that in these coastal towns some odd customs had evolved out of the mixing of Indian and Spanish blood, a religion in which primitive native rites had been somehow hybridized into the Christian worship, and no doubt they wanted no investigation of that. But I think I never gave them cause to suspect I was anything other than what I said I was.