‘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.