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'.