Flames Coming out of the Top (20 page)

“Do you mean to say that you're the guide?” he said in amazement.

The man came forward. “Captain Leach is the name, sir,” he said. “You can rely on me.” He appeared more than a little dazed as he stood there, and kept rocking backwards and forwards on his heels.

“But what do
you
know about up-country?” Dunnett asked.

The little clerk interrupted him before he could reply: he seemed proud of his friend.

“Very reliable man,” he said. “He accompanies expeditions.”

“Well, he doesn't accompany this one,” Dunnett told him.

“Please?”

“I said he doesn't accompany this one.”

Captain Leach turned to Dunnett. “I think I understand, sir,” he said. “I've had one or two. I didn't know then that any gentleman would be requiring me. I only take my drinks when I'm on holiday.”

“Well, this isn't a holiday. This is business.”

“I'll see you through, sir,” Captain Leach replied. “I'm steady.” He began to sway again as he spoke and placed his hand on the back of a chair to support himself.

The little clerk brightened up again.

“Please not to spend time talking,” he said. “The train goes away in fifty minutes.”

Dunnett's answer was interrupted by the landlord. He came over with a cable envelope in his hand. “With the compliments of the company,” he said, as proudly as though he had done something creditable himself. “It was the last
cable to be received before the disaster. It has been telephoned specially from Arica.”

Dunnett turned his back and read. The wording was terse and to the point. “ON NO ACCOUNT GO CHACO,” it ran. “RETURN NEXT BOAT STOP AM MAKING OTHER ARRANGEMENTS. GOVERN.”

Dunnett did not move for a minute after he had read it. He stood so still, in fact, that the little clerk plucked at his sleeve. “The train. Do not forget the train,” he pleaded. “It is your last chance to catch him. By next week he will have gone.”

Dunnett folded the cable and put it in his pocket. A wave of rebellion swept over him. If Mr. Govern had blundered Wasn't it up to him to put matters right? He was the man on the spot who alone knew how things really were. To go against Mr. Govern's wishes was something pretty serious. But it was the only way if anything was to be saved. He knew that, once Mr. Govern understood, it was exactly what he would have wished. It was, in fact, the Nelson touch.

“All right,” he said abruptly. “I'm coming.”

Captain Leach smiled delightedly, a toothless, expansive smile. He stooped down awkwardly to pick up the bag and the three of them tramped noisily through the deserted lounge and out towards the station. Captain Leach kept lifting his feet high as though stepping over invisible obstructions.

The Railway from Amricante to Sandar is not a trifling affair. Despite its narrow gauge there is nothing about it to provide cheap amusement for foreigners. Not that it is primarily a passenger line: it was laid for a richer and more stable kind of transport, namely coca. Thanks to its existence, wealth—solid, undeniable wealth—in the form of those tender, indispensable leaves flowed steadily seawards from the inexhaustible interior. .

Captain Leach was seen at his best at the railway station. He had insisted on their travelling first-class, and succeeded in commandeering a carriage. He held it, moreover, against all comers; and with Sandar halfway to the front there were plenty of these. Even the magnificent Bolivian officers were turned away at the door. He just hung there, his shoulders blocking the centre window, spitting copiously on to the platform. And he combined truculence with expectoration. He waved an imaginary pass under the noses of the railway officials and dared them to take his rightful property away from him. At intervals he would turn and wink a yellow, viscous eye in Dunnett's direction. It was obvious now to what extent the man had been drinking.

The journey to Sandar was not long but slow. Between Amricante and the distant goal there lay the immense ramparts of the Andes, and the train had somehow to get over them. Every stop that it made was higher than the last. And from the moment it reached the foothills the whole nature of the journey changed: it became civil engineering and not travelling. The train was no longer an elongated vehicle that trundled sedately along a set of rails, but something that took dizzy leaps across filigree bridges and ran along hillsides
which a goat would have avoided. Dunnett found himself gradually growing accustomed to seeing bare rock one side and bare sky on the other. At Carpos, where the train stopped for water, even the sensation of breathing had changed. And still the big work of the climb lay ahead. It was a divide eleven thousand feet up for which the train was making, It reached it by means of a series of crazy loops so that, looking down and seeing a strip of gleaming track halfway into the valley you could not say for certain in which direction the train had gone along it. The air, too, had grown thinner, so thin that Dunnett could feel waves of sick dizziness sweeping over him and could hear bells ringing in his ears.

Outside, the night was magnificent. The moon was at its height and its rays fell on the lofty fields of everlasting snow with the all-revealing brightness of a frozen sun. The snow seemed to respond and glow as if the whole mountainside were alight. So far as the eye could see a regiment of snowy peaks marched away into space. The skyline was simply a procession of frigid, desperate summits set higher than the imagination could reach. They rested there like icebergs in some aetherial floe. Captain Leach, however, was not moved by scenery. He lay on his back on the seat with his eyes closed. At intervals, he would remove a small silver flask from his pocket and put it to his lips. The action had about it the beautiful precision that comes of a lifetime of practice: despite the motion of the train he spilt nothing.

They reached the divide and passed through it while everyone slept—the whole of the train, that is, with the exception of the three front carriages. These were filled with soldiers going up to the front. They were herded in, fifty men to a coach. They did not seem to sleep at all, and spent most of the night singing. There was something a little melancholy about it. Snatches of song reached Dunnett's ears, like that of men cheerfully intoning their own dirges.

Next morning when he woke, the train was running across the face of an endless plateau. It was still crossing the plateau when it was time to turn in again at night.

The following day was spent escaping from that bleak wilderness above the clouds. The soldiers continued to sing, a little wearily by now, and Captain Leach, his flask exhausted, was conscientiously sleeping oif a six-months' hang-over.

By the time evening came, they were in cultivated country again, with terraced crops and villages, and the air had lost its oxygenated tang. They had gone upstairs to the Arctic and come down on the other side into the Tropics again.

Forests appeared and began to close in on them, and the narrow gauge seemed to have been carved out of the landscape. There were rivers, too, tiny sections of that network he had seen on the map. One quite large one, a broad highroad of rolling nutbrown water, ran for several miles beside the train, and Dunnett saw two Indians armed with spears preposterously fishing. The sight of the dark bodies and their black, unkempt hair cut into a straight bang across their foreheads somehow shocked him; it was more primitive than he had bargained for. He wondered for a moment if perhaps Mr. Govern had not been right all the time. And he was uncomfortably aware again of faint, insinuating doubts. Perhaps Señor Muras would prove too spry for him after all; for all Dunnett knew he might already be on his way to Buenos Aires, or wherever it was, with his colossal riches. Perhaps Señor Olivares's confidential clerk was even now not entirely to be trusted. Perhaps, after all this, Dunnett would have to go back again, his tail between his legs, admitting that in this, too, he had failed.

Something disturbed him and he turned to find Captain Leach sharpening a knife with a twelve-inch blade on the sole of his foot: the Captain volunteered the information that no one but a fool travelled unarmed in the Sandar district, and dropped off to sleep again.

They reached Sandar at nightfall and the narrow gauge ended unceremoniously in a cluster of corrugated iron huts, beside the white-washed terminus. The town itself had that melancholy, unfinished appearance common to most subtropical towns. Nothing quite seemed to belong, and if
anything had been taken away it would not have been missed. A main street that contained two inns—the Gloria and the Hotel de los Extranjeros—faded ignominously into what was no more than a cart track at the far end, and the native residents sat dejectedly either singly or in groups, scratching and meditating on the unsatisfactoriness of life. The only local inhabitants who did not sit were the dogs: these wandered everywhere, raiding refuse dumps and eating everything they could find while still remaining miraculously thin. There were also the soldiers. They roamed the streets with the strangely predatory air of a soldier on leave, and helped to keep the red light of Sandar burning. Outside certain of the houses, orderlies patrolled up and down on sentry-go to indicate that these particular establishments were reserved for the officers.

Captain Leach, conscious of his new importance and of the role that he was expected to maintain, insisted on booking the best room at the Gloria: it was nearly twelve foot square and smelt powerfully of urine. The smell, Dunnett discovered, was no special fault of the Gloria's. It was merely that urine was the characteristic odour of Sandar, just as rottenness and decay was of Canagua; and the four walls of the bedchamber had isolated and preserved a rich specimen of the essential atmosphere. The truckle bed stood inside a large meat safe of muslin; a permanent notice requesting patrons not to spit or forget themselves in the bedroom hung over it like a lay blessing.

The river Calatete, a broad, slow-moving flood, bounded one entire side of Sandar; the town had just grown sloppily along the bank. From the pontoon landing stage, flat-bottomed boats ran down the turgid stream to Canagua. The journey was scheduled for five days, and sometimes the boat did it in time. More often, however, the entire load, the fifteen ton monitor, the passengers and crew and all, would find themselves for hours on end perched like an ornament on top of one of the perpetually moving sandbanks. Then there would be the arduous and precarious task of unshipping freight
and personnel in midstream and getting started again. The boats themselves, built like enormous punts, never came to any harm: they were designed for any kind of adventure except speed.

Captain Leach again showed himself at his most resourceful next morning when it became time to catch the boat. He insisted on their being there at five-thirty, despite the fact that the time-table reported seven. You could never be sure, he kept emphasising, what tricks they would be up to with the sailings unless you were actually there to see. He spoke as one with experience in such matters and kept slapping his chest with the rare exaltation of a lazy man up uncommonly early.

The walk to the jetty was its own reward, however. It was one of those fresh, pearly mornings that restore a white man's faith in the Tropics. Down by the river there were skeins and streamers of mist, but the main street was so sparklingly clear that it even looked clean. And the smell that later was to permeate the whole place like a plague was still lying dormant waiting for the sun to rouse it. Altogether it looked like a model village in a new and experimental world.

At a quarter to nine the boat, the
Santa Veronica
, came in sight. She wobbled along the surface of the water, throwing out a cascade of churned-up sediment from her single paddle wheel in the stern. Someone began ringing a bell on the bank, and the whole of Sandar turned out to welcome her. It was not, however, until the boat was actually berthed that Captain Leach discovered that he had forgotten their papers; in the dawn getaway he had somehow overlooked them. Pushing his way through the crowd that had assembled he set off back to the Gloria at the double. A quarter of an hour later he returned: he was panting and held his hand to his heart as he ran. It was obvious that if the distance had been a hundred yards more or if the time had been ten seconds less he would not have made it. He just stumbled up the gang plank and collapsed onto one of the deck seats. With eyes closed he lay there gasping. At ten forty-five prompt the Captain blew a whistle and the boat started.

The boat did not seem slow once it got moving. The single oscillating-cylinder shook the whole vessel from end to end and the awning flapped vivaciously. It was only in terms of objects on the river bank that it seemed something less than fast. A dead tree, or a piece of rock that caught the sun, would be a familiar object on the landscape before they passed it. Even stray objects in the river—broken branches or the white, distended corpse of some little animal—travelling down like themselves with the stream, seemed to be making as good time as they were. Dunnett tried to re-assure himself by saying that every throb of that loose, wheezing cylinder was bringing him nearer to his destination. But it seemed hard to credit. Men's destinations were not to be found in places such as this. The world into which they were passing was a world of mud and running water and loneliness. Even the reassuring presence of laid metals was absent. What they were travelling on was something that nature had quietly designed for her own purposes. Their puffing contraption was like an intrusion from another planet. It was a part of the invincible conquest of science against things primeval. Not that the
Santa Veronica
had it all her own way. There were hidden currents in the Calatete that swept her along just as they saw fit; in one place where the river was at its broadest, perhaps a quarter of a mile from shore to shore, the
Santa Veronica
turned completely round in her path before her dark and sweaty Captain got control of it again. He stood at the wheel, screaming reproaches down the hatch to the still sweatier engineer below for having left him in a moment of peril without sufficient steam, and tried to keep his vessel's blunt nose downstream. Captain Leach hazarded the opinion that the man at the wheel must have been drinking.