"A very, very big bath, and very deep," said Marie.
"No, a nice hot shower and a comfortable chair" said Sophie.
"Just a bed," said Jacquie, "a large feather bed."
"A bar that serves real ice with its drinks," I said dreamily.
Dicky was silent for a moment. Then he glanced down at his feet, thickly encrusted with rapidly drying mud.
"I must have a man to clean my feets," he said firmly.
"Well, I doubt whether we'll get any of that at Deseado," I said gloomily, "but we'd better press on."
When we drove into Deseado at ten o'clock the next morning, it became immediately obvious that we could not expect any such luxuries as feather beds, ice in the drinks, or even a man to clean our feets. It was the most extraordinarily dead-looking town I had ever been in. It resembled the set for a rather bad Hollywood cowboy film, and gave the impression that its inhabitants (two thousand, according to the guide-book) had suddenly packed up and left it alone to face the biting winds and scorching sun. The empty, rutted streets between the blank-faced houses were occasionally stirred by the wind, which produced half-hearted dust-devils,* that swirled up for a moment and then collapsed tiredly to the ground. As we drove slowly into what we imagined to be the centre of the town we saw only a dog, trotting briskly about his affairs, and a child crouched in the middle of the road, absorbed in some mysterious game of childhood. Then, swinging the Land-Rover round a corner, we were startled to see a man on horseback, clopping slowly along the road with the subdued aid of one who is the sole survivor of a catastrophe. He pulled up and greeted us politely, but without interest, when we stopped, and directed us to the only two hotels in the place. As these turned out to be opposite each other and both equally unprepossessing from the outside, we chose one by tossing a coin and made our way inside.
In the bar we found the proprietor, who, with the air of one who had just suffered a terrible bereavement, reluctantly admitted that he had accommodation, and led us through dim passages to three small, grubby rooms. Dicky, his deer-stalker on the back of his head, stood in the centre of his room, pulling off his white gloves, surveying the sagging bed and its grey linen with a catlike fastidiousness.
"You know what, Gerry?" he said with conviction. "This is the stinkiest hotel I ever dream."*
"I hope you never dream of a stinkier one," I assured him.
Presently we all repaired to the bar to have a drink and await the arrival of one Captain Giri, whom I had an introduction* to, a man who knew all about the penguin colonies of Puerto Deseado. We sat round a small table, sipping our drinks and watching the other inhabitants of the bar with interest. For the most part they seemed to consist of very old men, with long, sweeping moustaches, whose brown faces were seamed and stitched by the wind. They sat in small groups, crouched over their tiny tumblers of cognac or wine with a dead air, as though they were hibernating there in this dingy bar, staring hopelessly into the bottoms of their glasses, wondering when the wind would die down, and knowing it would not. Dicky, delicately smoking a cigarette, surveyed the smoke-blackened walls, the rows of dusty bottles, and the floor with its twenty-year-old layer of dirt well trodden into its surface.
"What a bar, eh?" he said to me.
"Not very convivial, is it?"
"It is so old… it has an air of old," he said staring about him. "You know, Gerry, I bet it is so old that even the flies have beards."
Then the door opened suddenly, a blast of cold air rushed into the bar, the old men looked up in a flat-eyed, reptilian manner,* and through the door strode Captain Giri. He was a tall, well-built man with blond hair, a handsome, rather ascetic face and the most vivid and candid blue eyes I bad ever seen. Having introduced himself he sat down at our table and looked around at us with such friendliness and good humour in his childlike eyes that the dead atmosphere of the bar dropped away, and we suddenly found ourselves becoming alive and enthusiastic. We had a drink, and then Captain Giri produced a large roll of charts and spread them on the table, while we pored over them.
"Penguins," said the Captain meditatively, running his forefinger over the chart. "Now, down here is the best colony… by far the best and biggest, but I think that this is too far for you, is it not?"
"Well, it is a bit," I admitted. "We didn't want to go that far south if we could avoid it. It's a question of time, really. I had hoped that there would be a reasonable colony within fairly easy reach of Deseado."
"There is, there is," said the Captain, shuffling the charts like a conjuror and producing another one from the pile. "Now, here, you see, at this spot… it's about four hours' drive from Deseado… all along this bay here."
"That's wonderful," I said enthusiastically, "just the right distance."
"There is only one thing that worries me," said the Captain, turning troubled blue eyes on to me. "Are there enough birds there for what you want… for your photography?"
"Well," I said doubtfully, "I want a fair number. How many are there in this colony?"
"At a rough estimate I should say a million," said Captain Giri. "Will that be enough?"
I gaped at him. The man was not joking. He was seriously concerned that a million penguins might prove to be too meagre a quantity for my purpose.
"I think I can make out with a million penguins,"* I said. "I should be able to find one or two photogenic ones among that lot. Tell me, are they all together, or scattered about?"
"Well, there are about half or three-quarters concentrated here" he said, stabbing at the chart. "And the rest are distributed all along the bay here"
"Well, that seems perfect to me. Now what about somewhere to camp?"
"Ah!" said Captain Giri. "That is the difficulty. Now just here is the estancia of a friend of mine, Señor Huichi. He is not on the estancia at the moment. But if we went to see him he might let you stay there. It is, you see, about two kilometres from the main colony, so it would be a good place for you to stay."
"That would be wonderful," I said enthusiastically. "When could we see Señor Huichi?"
The Captain consulted his watch and made a calculation.
"We can go and see him now, if you would like," he said.
"Right!" I said, finishing my drink. "Let's go."
Huichi's house was on the outskirts of Deseado, and Huichi himself, when Captain Giri introduced us, was a man I took an instant liking to. Short, squat, with a weather-browned face, he had very dark hair, heavy black eyebrows and moustache, and dark brown eyes that were kind and humorous, with crow's feet* at the corners. In his movements and his speech he had an air of quiet, unruffled confidence about him that was very reassuring. He stood silently while Giri explained our mission, occasionally glancing at me, as if summing me up.* Then he asked a couple of questions, and, finally, to my infinite relief, he held out his hand to me and smiled broadly.