This Thing Of Darkness (63 page)

‘No. But there are notched tree trunks, zigzagging up the inside. And I allow them to stop once for a rest, on the way up. They are fed upon boiled beans and bread twice a day - which is better than agricultural workers. They are also given two days off every three weeks.’

‘That is generous,’ agreed Darwin, comparing the arrangement favourably with conditions in his uncle’s factories.

‘I like to be generous. I was a miner myself, you see, back in Polzeath.’

‘Really?’

‘I came out here to make my fortune. I had heard that the Chilean mine-owners threw their copper pyrites away, thinking it useless. It was true. They knew nothing of the roasting process, which removes the sulphur prior to smelting. So for a few dollars I bought one of the richest veins in the country. And look about you now!’

Darwin looked about him. Mr Dawlish’s property certainly did not feel as if it were at the heart of a mining-district. There were no clanking wheels, no roaring furnaces, smoke or hissing steam-engines. Just a series of holes in the ground. The mine was so primitive, in fact, that it had to be drained by men hauling leather bags of water up the shaft. All the ore, it transpired, had to be shipped to Swansea to be smelted.

‘This mine is worth eight thousand pounds. I paid three pounds and eight shillings for it,’ said Mr Dawlish expansively. ‘As for London,’ he repeated, ‘what is London? We can do anything in my country.’

Idly, he picked a louse from his scalp, and flicked it away. Darwin felt relieved that he had brought his own bed.

‘London
is
where the King lives,’ he retorted, suddenly keen to ascribe at least one virtue to the British capital.

‘I heard that George Rex had died,’ said Mr Dawlish.

‘He did. But there is a new king now.’

‘Indeed? And how many more in the Rex family are yet alive?’

Darwin found himself lost for words.

 

They pressed ever upwards, past thundering mud-coloured torrents, to regions where the rocks lay freshly split and scattered by a thousand earthquakes. They hurried on past overhanging boulders that teetered implausibly above their heads, and precipices that fell away sheer to either side. The lush greenery of the lower slopes gave way to a matt-purple rock dotted with tiny alpine flowers, a landscape that was stark and majestic but never quite beautiful. They crossed rickety suspension bridges, mere bundles of sticks knotted together with thongs of animal hide, which swung precariously above rushing gorges. Led by their
madrina,
the mules never put a foot wrong. Only when they reached the snowline was Darwin’s confidence shaken: here the near-vertical strata had been eroded into wild, crumbling pinnacles interspersed with columns of weathered ice. Atop one of the ice-towers, the melting snow had revealed the perfectly preserved body of a pack-mule, entombed upside down, all four legs in the air, frozen stiff where it had tumbled to its death from the path above.

Finally, with pounding heads and panting chests, they breasted the Peuquenes Ridge, the continental divide, at a height of thirteen thousand feet. Here, amid frost-shattered stones bathed silver by the moonlight, they made camp. A million stiletto stars pricked the night sky. So dry and still was the air that sparks flew from the saddle straps, and static electricity lifted the wool of Darwin’s waistcoat. The guasos lit a fire, using little white flints that they gathered locally: Darwin was overjoyed to discover that these ‘flints’ were actually slivers of tropical sea-coral, baked rock-hard by volcanic action. But there was to be no hot food: the potatoes refused to cook, even though they sat boiling on the fire all evening.

‘This cursed pot does not choose to boil the potatoes,’ said Mariano, who had never made camp so high before.

‘I told you we should have brought the old pot,’ said Gonzales. ‘This pot is cursed.’ He, too, had never camped at such heights.

‘It is the altitude,’ Darwin tried to explain. ‘There is less oxygen up here, so the water boils at a lower temperature. That is also why it is so difficult to breathe - why we are suffering from
puna.’

‘Puna,
Don Carlos?
Puna
is caused by snow. Wherever there is snow, there is
puna.
Everybody knows that.’

The two guasos shook their heads at the Englishman’s ignorance. Covington, unsure who to believe, stared dumbly at the ground. Darwin did not care. He was in heaven. He was the first geologist in all history to pass between the summits of the Andes. His cold supper of dried beef and palm-treacle tasted like manna from heaven.

I am alone here,
he thought. In the electric silence of the mountaintops, he felt as if he could hear the chorus from Handel’s
Messiah,
in full orchestra, trumpeting all its glory inside his head.

 

The next day they followed the path of an old watercourse, down into the dip that separates the Peuquenes Ridge from the higher Portillo Ridge to the east. To Darwin’s astonishment and delight, the dry stream-bed levelled out, then began to wind its way uphill. This was incredible. Visible proof that the second ridge had uplifted since the first, that its rocks were younger. The Portillo Ridge appeared to be constructed of volcanic lava, which had solidified into porphyry, as if the lava had somehow been injected between the sandstone layers of the Andes. All along the
cordillera,
volcanic cones broke the jagged asymmetry of the mountain chain. What connection did these volcanoes have with the earthquakes that were jolting the Andes by stages into the air? Did the violence of the earth tremors release vents of lava that erupted at high pressure between the gasping rocks? Darwin’s brain whirled, trying to encompass it all.

There were more frozen mules by the wayside now, and clusters of wooden crosses alongside the track. Condors wheeled in and out of the icy clouds above. They were forced to stop every fifty yards for the mules to catch their breath. The lack of air produced the same sensation, Darwin noted, that he used to feel after a school run on a frosty day. The footprints of the mules crushed the snow crimson - not blood, as he first thought, but the tiny spores or eggs of some primitive organism, measuring less than a thousandth of an inch in diameter beneath the all-seeing scrutiny of his microscope. Finally the party arrived between the enclosing walls of the Portillo Pass, the ‘little door’ in the mountains, and gazed in awe upon the flat, featureless plains of the pampas below: a vast, sleeping expanse broken only by the rivers that ran away like silver threads in the rising sun, before losing themselves in the immensity of the distance. He had achieved his ambition.

They began their descent towards the border-post of the Republic of Mendoza. At their second halt Darwin laid animal-traps, and succeeded in catching another mouse.

‘This mouse is different from the mice on the Chilean side.’

‘Of course,’ said Mariano, taking a cursory look. ‘Chilean mice are different from Mendocino mice.’

‘All the animals on the Chilean side are different from all the animals on the Mendoza side,’ explained Gonzales, as if he were addressing an idiot.

‘All
of them? Are you sure?’ He had to be careful here. Mariano and Gonzales had already failed to distinguish themselves on the natural philosophy front.

‘Everybody knows this, Don Carlos. The condors, well, they can fly across from one side to the other. But the animals - they will not cross the passes. It is too cold. So the Chilean animals and the Mendocino animals, they are all quite different.’

Darwin reeled. This meant that the animals had come into being
after
the Andes had risen - and the Andes were still rising. So they could not, in fact, have been created by God on the sixth day. The two sets of animals were either new creatures, or — the terrifying enormity of the possibility raised the hairs aloft all the way down his spine - they had somehow transmuted, or metamorphosed, from original, common ancestors. At once, he felt puny and insignificant before the vast and scarcely comprehensible scale of such changes; one man alone, in the vastness of the
cordillera.
But at the same time he knew that the whole edifice of Christianity must heave and shake before the remorselessness of his logic, like an Andean pinnacle crumbling before the simple power of an earth tremor.
If I am right,
he thought,
if I am right - then my findings will be crucial to the theory of the formation of the world.

‘If you please sir - would you like me to kill and skin the mouse, sir?’ enquired Covington, politely and resentfully.

How Darwin burned for a FitzRoy or a Henslow to be present.

 

The Mendoza customs and border-post proved to be a grubby hovel, staffed by two unshaven soldiers and a pure-bred Indian tracker, who was retained as a kind of human bloodhound in case any smugglers should attempt to give the post a wide berth. The three men were jumpy, and utterly bewildered by the concept of a
naturalista.
In an attempt to ease the administrative deadlock, Darwin produced his passport signed by General Rosas. One of the soldiers, a lieutenant who could read, perused the document and shot Darwin a look of disgust.

‘If you are protected by the general, then you may proceed. The man who would deny passage to a servant of the general is not long for this world, as you are most probably aware.’

Darwin decided to let the accusation that he was anyone’s ‘servant’ pass. ‘The general has influence in Mendoza?’

‘No, the general has no influence in our country. But it is only a matter of time. He has seized Buenos Ayres. He has taken control of most of the United Provinces. Many people have died. He is cleansing the country of Indians as far south as the Rio Negro. Now his armies are massing on the Mendoza border. We Mendocinos shall not be able to stop him. It is only a matter of time before we all become part of your general’s empire.’

The last few words dripped from the officer’s tongue like bad wine. Darwin remembered FitzRoy’s caustic assessment of the general’s motives, and reflected uneasily that perhaps his friend had been right, after all. He adopted his most soothing tones.

‘I am not a personal acquaintance of the general. This passport was given to me as a representative of His Majesty King William IV of Great Britain.’

At this the other soldier perked up.

‘Heh - Great Britain. That is near England, right?’

‘After a fashion,’ Darwin replied.

‘You are a
pirata?’

‘No ... no, I am not a pirate. As I told you, I am a
naturalista.
The two are really quite different.’

‘Naturalista
...
pirata
... Why do you
Ingleses
not keep to normal occupations?’ the soldier grumbled to himself.

By nightfall, relations had improved sufficiently for Darwin’s party to join the soldiers for supper around the rudimentary table of the border-post. His bed, which they had accepted without demur as part of a
naturalista’s
travelling accoutrements, had been installed in the back room. The border guards ate in silence, chewing slowly on hunks of boiled beef, while Mariano and Gonzales finally induced the recalcitrant potatoes to succumb to their fate. Halfway through the meal, a large black wingless bug fell from the thatched roof with a plop on to the table, where it sat, paralysed with confusion.

‘What is that?’ asked Darwin.

‘It is a
benchuca
bug,’ said the lieutenant. ‘A bloodsucker.’

Experimentally, Darwin extended a fingertip towards the bewildered beast. Instantly, it seemed to come to its senses, seizing the digit between its forelegs and sinking its sucker into his flesh. Over the next few minutes it grew slowly fatter as it gorged itself with blood, until eventually it resembled a huge distended purple grape clamped to the end of his finger. Finally sated, it fell off, whereupon Darwin whipped out a little jar of preserving-spirits and swept the creature into it.

‘Ha! You may have brought your own bed to avoid the lice, Don Carlos,’ guffawed Mariano, ‘but the
benchucas
live in the ceiling!’

That night, he discovered exactly what Mariano meant. As Covington, the soldiers, the muleteer and the two
guasos
slept swathed in blankets under the stars, he lay besieged between his crisp linen sheets. There seemed to be a whole army of benchucas. It was the most disgusting feeling to wake in the night, and sense their huge, soft, wingless bodies crawling all over him, sucking at his flesh. He lit a candle and burned several from his skin, but the supply seemed limitless.
A plague of benchucas,
he thought to himself.
How Biblical. Perhaps the Lord bas visited them upon me, on account of my presumption.

 

The next day they set off for the city of Mendoza, a two-day ride across baking, deserted plains. At one point a huge swarm of locusts flew overhead, heading northward in the direction of the city, a seeming harbinger of the destruction due to be unleashed by General Rosas. The swarm began as a ragged cloud of a dark reddish-brown colour, like smoke from some great plains fire, billowing several thousand feet into the air. Then a curious rushing noise made itself heard, like a strong breeze swishing through the rigging of a mighty ship-of-the-line, and countless millions of the insects whirred overhead. Occasionally, confused outriders crashed blindly into the slower-moving mule train below: more than one dazed locust hurtled into the yielding softness of Darwin’s feather pillows, then marched testily up and down the bedlinen in search of food.

Mendoza’s spires rose listlessly from the open plain ahead. They found the city forlorn and bereft of spirit, its inhabitants dazed like cattle, stupidly awaiting their fate. Robbed of all energy, one or two gauchos lounged drunkenly in the streets. Mariano and Gonzales tipped their hats politely to a fat negress astride a donkey, her face disfigured by a huge goitre. Darwin bought an entire wheelbarrowload of peaches for threepence. They did not stay. Mendoza could await General Rosas without them.